The Witness Brain Washed My Friend Group and I liked it

Juliann F
8 min readMar 7, 2019

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Every once in a while, you come across a game or piece of media that simply and totally consumes you. In some of those cases, the media consumes you and a friend. Out of those occurrences, there is a chance of finding a gem that will dominate your entire group of friends and drive you all joyfully insane.

I started playing The Witness alone back in the first week of April 2018. I originally approached it as a beautiful and relaxing puzzle game I could fit into breaks between study sessions. The game is a 3D puzzle game released in 2016 by Thekla, Inc. Later, after my subconscious had been mastered by this game, I found out that the designer of the game was Jonathan Blow, the designer behind Braid, another game I loved. By the end of the day, two of my friends and I were completely obsessed with the game. I want to look at how the game managed this feat by discussing how it caters to different player motivations. I will be using the listing of motivations from Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model.

Social

When I first started playing, my friends wandered over, interested in the vibrant colors and scenery of the game I was playing. Three puzzles later, we found ourselves glued to the tv in the lounge of my apartment, arguing over the best way to solve a puzzle. By the end of the month, we solved 105 puzzles, cleared two sections of the map, made progress on a number of others, and had solved 14 of the bonus puzzles.

After a short break for finals and summer, we took up the helm once more at the beginning of fall semester, racking up a count of 369 puzzles solved and 50 bonus puzzles solved by the end of September. Play sessions lasted late into the night until we were all loopy, surrounded by notes and practice puzzles, and pontificating about what are we witnessing. All the puzzles were solved together in some way. For many of them, one person would stand by the TV and point out possible paths.

Solving a puzzle became a hallowed moment in these times. A few times, one of us would quietly and calmly ask for the controller, and slowly solve the puzzle in one go as if possessed by the puzzle solving gods or a sphinx. We created a dedicated group chat separate from our other friends dedicated solely to discuss revelations and ideas about the game.

Creativity

While playing The Witness, my friends and I would often try to walk anywhere our character could fit to see if there was anything hidden that might give us some other hint of what was happening on this island. The way in which The Witness caters to creativity-based player motivations is through exploration.

Players are free to choose their own path through the game and tackle the series of puzzles in any order they would like. Some of the puzzles are impossible to solve without learning a new rule from a puzzle series in another area, though. If a player is able to figure out that rule through, experimentation, though, there is nothing keeping them from moving forward in whatever fashion they wish to.

This happened to my friends and I a few times. We enjoyed wandering around the island until we came across a new series of puzzles. If the rule used in those puzzles was non-obvious or the first puzzle was too difficult, we would simply backtrack a bit to find if there was another series meant to precede it. Even after technically finishing the game, we wanted to continue exploring until we had uncovered everything the game had to offer us.

Immersion

The way in which The Witness catered to immersion based motivations is interesting. This may be considered a bit of a stretch, but I believe the lack of an obvious narrative or story draws the player in. In my experience playing the game, my friends and I would waste immeasurable amounts of time re-listening to the hidden audio recordings and hunting down the stone statues littered around the island.

Even now we are currently analyzing the transcripts of the videos included in the game during a particular section of it. Our current discussions, other than attempting to understand the world, are aimed at finding a way to reach 100% completion of the game before graduation.

We began seeing puzzles everywhere. One of the most notable occurrences in the ‘Revelations’ group chat was the discovery of The Witness puzzle style structures found in the world. The included image is of the edge of the driveway of Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.

Other common occurrences in the chat were of puzzle solutions we figured out during the day. We would keep sketches of puzzles we were stuck on to play with during our free time.

Mastery

Within The Witness, is a total of 600 puzzles. Many of these are well hidden within the environment or on small panels left lying in obscure and out-of-the-way areas on the island. The longer my friends and I played this game, the more obsessed we became with reaching 100% completion. Recently, we reached what we believe to be the end of the game but refuse to move forward until we complete all of the environmental puzzles and fill all of the area obelisks.

This deep obsession and want to master the game is egged on constantly by the environmental puzzles. The game teases you with the presence of lines and circles (the basis of every puzzle) in locations that may or may not be that start of or a piece of a hidden puzzle. On any path taken traveling from one area to another, a player is liable to stumble across at least one puzzle or piece of hidden content.

The recently mastered focus of my playgroup was a hidden puzzle in the clouds. It teased us for months, just above our heads. Every time we looked up there it was, just taunting us. The day we finally looked up at the right place and found the perfect angle of looking up, we stopped playing immediately after. At that moment, nothing could top the feeling of figuring it out.

Achievement

That last anecdote leads perfectly into the last element of player motivation that played into my playgroups hellish drive to continue playing the game. The Witness offers a plethora of puzzles providing gradually increasing levels of challenge to the player that keeps them feeling like an utter genius. With no words or directions, we learned the rules and patterns of the world and its puzzles and internalized them. As we moved forward, carving our own path, we hit many blockades. At each of these blockades, we continued onward, trying different strategies and possibilities until at last, the blockage gave way. At each success, we were greeted with a reward: the whirr of the next puzzle powering up, the hiss and click of an unlocking door, the satisfaction of your work not fading and sitting permanently memorialized in the puzzles panel.

The quantifiability of progress and the unlockable achievements counted by Xbox also fed into this. With each section we completed we became more aware and focused on the rarity of these achievements.

The missing motivation

Action

While there is excitement to be had while playing The Witness, it does not cater to action based player motivations. There are no high-intensity moments in the game. The game moves forward with a machine-like purposeful slowness and calmness that helps facilitate extended play. Even in the most frustrating moments of puzzle solving the calming sounds of the environment, music, and overall slow pace makes it much less stressful. Even when you run in the game, it is not much faster than your walk. When you ride a board with variable speeds, the fastest speed setting is about as fast as a beginner on a canoe (the second highest speed is pictured above in a gif).

Being a puzzle game, this lack of action-oriented play is okay. The game stands strongly without it and would possibly suffer if action-oriented elements were introduced. Another game with action-packed puzzles would be really cool, but The Witness works well keeping to its slow, methodical pacing with a focus on introspection, perspective, and mindfulness.

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