(spoiler warning for most of the game’s mainline content)
Much like Braid before it, everyone seems to agree that The Witness is beautiful to look at and remarkably well-constructed as a puzzle game.
But also much like Braid, opinions become sharp and polarized once you try to discuss the text of the game. This is both literal and figurative: nearly all the content of each game beyond the mechanics and puzzles are comprised only of literal text—written in the case of Braid, and read in The Witness. Both games are clearly aiming at Topics of Import, trying to address important ideas around life and humanity, and neither is subtle about these lofty ambitions. But creator Jonathan Blow declines, both within the games themselves and in conversation about them, to make plain exactly what each is saying. And because neither Braid nor The Witness have some big twist or moment of clarity that ties it all together, both games have been dismissed as classically pretentious: pretending to be something they’re not.
Other people take umbrage with what they regard as a cold, calculating viewpoint devoid of humanity. I can see how this interpretation can come about from the game’s pieces. But I also think that’s not treating the work fairly—it’s not engaging with the work on its own terms and merits. If you import popular (and perhaps at least partially accurate) perception of Blow himself onto the work and see the game only through that lens, you can certainly come to this conclusion. But I think it’s important to engage with art and media deeply and on their own terms, and to do otherwise is a disservice.
On the other hand, I can only make this argument if I have an alternative interpretation. Said interpretation was tricky for me with Braid; there was the text of the game, and the puzzle mechanics, then there was the secret ending and the additional story revealed therein, and it was all a bit abstract. I understood that it was roughly about individual perspective and how our decisions are shaped by that perspective, as painted through the metaphor of the time mechanics in the game, but it never fully connected for me.
The clue
The Witness did something a bit different—it gave a clue. There are bits and pieces all over the game that are all clues in their own right, but there’s one clue that I think is the most important: the alternative ending in the meditation house. In our post-LOST culture, where everything is about complex conspiracy theory-style forward plotting, everyone naturally started trying to pick apart how the universe in the game and the meditation house were related to each other. Was the entire game an elaborate Inception-like meditation experience by the person in the FMV video at the end? Did the civilization that built the island depart into meditation? Or value it? What’s the nature of reality in the game?
I took the meditation house to be far more on-the-nose than any of this: the game itself is a meditation. Yes, it’s a game first and foremost, but as a collection of ideas beyond that, it’s not a complicated plot to be pieced together, nor is it an elaborately constructed vehicle for some specific deeper message. It is more of a rumination on a topic, a set of ideas and questions and concepts, presented to the player in various different media within the game, for us to think on and consider, and come to our own conclusions on. But neither is it a vague gesture at a broad topic and a plaintive plea to ponder it—the game sits somewhere in between, not telling us exactly what to think, nor lacking specific opinions and pointed questions. In a way, it’s a bit Socratic.
But about what?
Much like Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, I think The Witness is a bit of an attempt to address some of the same ideas as Braid, but with a different approach to try to land its ideas more cleanly. Hofstadter had earlier written Gödel, Escher, Bach, a mammoth work of herculean intellect tying together mathematics, art, and intelligence in a rich tapestry. Few computer scientists don’t have this book sitting on their shelf, almost entirely unread. Those that did work their way through it were dazzled by its tricks and observations. But later, Hofstadter would lament that “the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme,” (that complaint should sound familiar) and wrote Strange Loop as a sort of more-explicit attempt to explain that central theme, which happens to be about consciousness and the idea of self. But where Hofstadter’s second take took a more succinct, direct approach to his topic, Blow seems to have gone the other way, providing more material and a greater breadth of clues, but if anything going about it even more abstractly.
Foundations
So let’s start somewhere really concrete: let’s start with what is pretty universally acknowledged as the very best part of the game. It comes at different moments for different folks, but after several hours of solving little puzzles on panels tracing lines from a circle to an end, almost everyone eventually discovers that the puzzles don’t stop there, that they’re surrounded by these circle-and-line shapes, and indeed that they’ve been surrounded by them this entire time, and that they’re solvable.
For me, it started slowly: I saw a few shapes here and there, but at first I figured it was just an artistic motif of whomever had created this place. Eventually, I saw a few more that seemed more like they’d be traceable puzzles, but didn’t yet understand the rules of when they go from inert decoration to active puzzle. When I finally solved one explicitly (and the game acknowledged that solution), it opened up my mind, and they were instantly everywhere. I’d been walking through and around and over and under them the entire time, and now simply because my brain realized it was an actual phenomenon, I’d spot them where I’d never noticed anything before.
Moreover, I’d spot them in real life. I’m not the only one—nearly everyone talks about suddenly seeing The Witness puzzles all over the place outside the game all of a sudden.
But this is more than a really cool, surreal moment; it’s our first pointer at what the game is gesturing at.
Fundamentally, the core design thesis of the game is about communicating ideas nonverbally, and having those ideas land and grow in an organic way. In fact, on this point Blow is quite explicit and has been for a long time. Becoming fluent in the game’s language is itself an experience worth having and thinking about: one of the joys of the game is to return to panels that were almost nightmarishly inscrutable, armed with knowledge, and see them in a completely new light—a tractable light. To be able to assemble a whole collection of unrelated, unexplained information into a coherent picture. The game is able to construct an entire mechanism in your head to interpret fluently a system of communication and cognition you’d never seen before and never will again.
And it’s the presence and the fresh clarity of that freshly burned set of neurons that opens the door to finding your first environmental puzzle. We are pattern-finding machines, after all, and the more we try to recognize a pattern the more evident it becomes to us. There are entire cultures that can’t see the color blue, simply because they lack a name for it to distinguish it from green, and so their brains never learn to tell them apart. Conversely, some of those same cultures have a multitude of names for different greens, and can instantly recognize the slightest variations. So by building your brain matter in recognizing line puzzles, The Witness pushes you to the point where you’ll inevitably have The Moment.
This is already a remarkable, unique achievement. This game literally changes how you perceive the (real!) world, in an incredibly specific way, with surgical precision and complete predictability.
But it goes further than that—it has the presence of mind to the question this power that it’s exercised over you, to look inward and ask what it means that our cognition is so malleable and to look outward and worry about how it could all go wrong.
Introspection
What the game has done here is taken a plainly explicable phenomenon and produced a simple example of it for you to experience and think about: the idea that we are the sum of our experiences, and that what we have seen and felt and thought in the past influence not just how we act in the moment, but how we will continue to think and learn in the future—both consciously and involuntarily. But rather than the big, abstract, messy inputs and thought frameworks that we form in real life—our values, our political beliefs, our problem-solving approaches—here we have the plainest illustrative example. You see, and see repeatedly, and suddenly at the end of a vicious or virtuous cycle of observation and cognition this idea, this pattern has invaded your thoughts and you think them unwittingly. We’re all familiar with Pavlov and his dog, but what if through mere observation it’s not just simple biological reactions that can be shaped, but our complex, higher-level thoughts as well?
It is at this point that I remind you that this game is named “The Witness.”
Most of us stopped playing the game once we finished it, and gradually the immediacy of puzzle recognition fades. But what if you found the idea fascinating, and those you knew were into it too? What if you continued to look for them in the real world and every time you found one you’d point it out, document it, share it with your friends, put it on Tumblr? That cycle continues, and it grows. You keep spotting the pattern because it’s an entirely involuntary part of your cognition, and every time you see it that pattern-finding machine is strengthened and you see it yet more. I’ll leave the broader social metaphor here unspoken.
The game pushes this point rather hard with its emphasis on perspective. Much of the in-game art has some perspective-related trick to it or another, as do many of the puzzles. You have to stand in a particular spot, have a particular perspective on the puzzle, in order for it to be solvable.
I’m not entirely sure the game has a specific opinion on precisely how perspective fits into its ethos, other than to present it as a core concept to think about and to emphasize its importance. But I think there are ideas we can plainly draw from the theme. Certainly, we witness different things when we take different perspectives, even when observing the same objects—our thoughts are shaped by what we see, and what we see is in turn shaped by our perspective, and maybe in the end our cognition is more influenced by circumstance and stochasticity than by objective rationality. Notable, also, is the idea that certain thoughts and opinions only make sense from certain perspectives. These thoughts, of course, may be positive or negative, right or wrong—they may be incredible breakthroughs for human knowledge, or closed-minded beliefs about the world.
One of my favourite environmental puzzles in the game involves a piece of machinery sitting out in a field. Its side is painted in an obvious reprise of the dot-and-line motif: short, bold, and utterly unmistakable. But it’s painted with a checkerboard pattern that precludes it from immediate solution. The only way to solve the puzzle is to back off so far that the intricate detail disappears and you can only make out the yellow. Only by losing the true essence of this object, by reducing it into something lesser than its full self, can you force it into the mental pattern you’re looking to complete.
And why are we so intent on completing these patterns, anyway?
Extrapolation
“Now, after reaching what passes for an ending, it’s somewhat clearer. The Witness is a sterile, lifeless videogame. It revels in the idea of knowledge, fascinated by how it’s earned and what it signifies. But it seems uninterested in players and their accomplishments, and with that lack of interest comes a lack of the human touch necessary to make sense of the knowledge it offers.”
That’s a writer for Wired, lamenting the fact that The Witness doesn’t reward the player for their efforts. “All games are dependent upon players to exist, but rarely have I encountered one so indifferent to my performance,” she goes on to say.
And as a point of dry fact, she’s totally right: completing the game’s standard ending gets you just a slow flyover of the island you’ve just spent hours upon, unlocking the game’s easter egg ending earns you naught more than the meditation house clue and credits, and finishing every single puzzle and environmental puzzle in the game gets you… exactly nothing.
But the game gives you a framework to lend this treatment significance.
That same Wired article mentions the existence of a movie theater in the game, within which lengthy films may be unlocked and watched. They all contribute to the thematic musings found elsewhere, and I find meaning in their juxtaposition.
Surely you’re joking
One of them is actually a pair of clips glued together: it opens with an excerpt of Richard Feynman in his prime, delivering his famous Feynman Lectures, and closes with a much older Feynman, musing on some of the same topics. In fact, by laying these two clips side-by-side, The Witness offers a potent juxtaposition in microcosm with just this one film:
Younger Feynman has just finished showing how given the laws and fundamental constants of the universe, the natural presence of carbon and heavier elements through nuclear fusion in stars actually is extraordinarily unlikely—the heavy elements are simply too unstable in that environment—unless one construes an electron level for carbon-12 at 7.82 million volts, in which case it “lives” for just long enough to then fuse into yet heavier but more stable elements. And experiments indeed confirm this to be true.
But even this prediction and verification are built upon abstracted understandings of many complex mechanisms working together, and though we were able to predict what happened, we couldn’t yet see the interconnections between these more-fundamental pieces that could help us explain why it happened. He goes on to deliver an eloquent, impassioned speech to close the lecture (which you should really watch, or at least read) that it is indeed these interconnections that are the most meaningful and important areas of study, that to understand our universe we need to be able to spot the patterns that let us meticulously draw a line from concepts like atoms and molecules through neurons and synapses and biochemistry up through psychology, and love, and war. And implicitly, that the truest essence of these messy phenomena lie in their rational, inductive relationship with the knowable elemental building blocks of the universe.
Older Feynman, then, seems to have undertaken this journey and discovered only frustration. If we single-mindedly pursue only the questions we are interested in, he advises, we’ll never discover anything of note. Nature will reveal herself to us the way she is, how she is, and all we can do is accept and cherish what we can discover. If we try to contemplate everything at once, he continues, we can only go mad, relying on mystic theories to try to make sense of it all.
Different perspectives
As an aside, that Wired article (which I keep referring back to as its many points appear to be representative of the field of opinion) makes a big deal out of another theater clip, this one from James Burke’s excellent Connections series, which hews much closer to younger Feynman’s views than older. Burke emphasizes the objectivity of science and scientific thinking, enshrining them as far truer interpretations of our universe than any artistic or philosophic approach ever could. That article takes this one clip as The Witness’s sum point of view, and takes umbrage with such a cold, inhuman philosophy.
But it’s important to note that all six of these clips exist in the game for a reason, and they test and counterbalance and enrich each other. Spiritual teacher Gangaji shows up, for instance, in yet another of the game’s film clips, emphasizing the importance of letting go, in a way, of your ambitions, and that only when you cease striving for the goals you perceive as important will you discover your true self, the self that is already there. That the goals and self we imagine for ourselves and commit ourselves to achieving and obsess over are the very thing that blind us from actually discovering and becoming our best, innate self. I don’t necessarily agree completely with this standpoint, but I find wisdom in her words, and I find significance in incorporating this information into the framework of ideas presented by The Witness.
(I am editing now in 2020, to amend my words here. I have slowly found the truth in Gangaji’s words, and they have become some of the most important words I have ever heard. They grow within me with each passing year.)
Working backwards
In fact, the films are really what led me down this entire path of interpretation. The contradictions feel deliberately laid, and careful consideration reveals their point of confluence, which in turn highlights an answer to our Wired writer’s consternation. None of the films sit as perfectly or as literally at that intersection point, though, quite like The Secret of Psalm 46, which is worth listening to in its entirety:
Here, then, is a lengthy treatise about something The Witness spends a lot of its thematic capital wondering about: is it actually healthy that we spend so much time obsessing over patterns, about painting complete pictures about our world, about filling in every gap in our worldview, when the patterns might be stochasticity, the pictures will never be complete, and our worldviews are profoundly influenced by how we happen to have looked at the world? When our cognitive processes, the core of what we assume to be our rational, calculating selves are so easily manipulated, hijacked, redirected?
In light of this central question, it becomes utterly deliberate that The Witness doesn’t provide any reward for finding and completing every little pattern in the game. It’s asking: why did you go do this? Why was it so important to you to hunt down all these patterns, to force the things you see around you into a particular perspective and to deny their other possible truths? Is it really productive to run around obsessing over these patterns in life when at the end of it we find ourselves hollow and unrewarded? Why do we expect to find meaning in such a rigid approach to life?
One final juxtaposition
I find artistic beauty in how these themes are presented. The Witness is a game in which a wide variety of information is presented to the player, and in which it is up to the player to piece together increasingly complex clues to learn how to solve its puzzles. They are often unrelated but sometimes come together to intersect in interesting ways. While there are certainly wrong answers, there is more than one way to solve many, if not most, of its panel puzzles. On the other hand, its environmental puzzles, a sort of intellectual virus the game inserts into your head, can only be solved with precise, predetermined positioning, sometimes in not just space but also time.
And if we step back and look at the game’s themes and their presentation, we find the same treatment. Many different pieces of information are passively presented, they intersect and contradict in interesting ways, and it is up to the player to actually do the work of putting them together into a satisfying answer. I don’t doubt that there is more than one intended interpretation of the game, and I think the game is deliberately flexible about the lessons you draw. Indeed, remaining flexible in the face of the surface content is necessary to find any deeper meaning. This symmetry between the game’s explicit mechanics and implicit themes is the kind of coherency reflective of a well-considered, deeply thought artistic experience.
I find beauty, as well, in the critical reception of the game’s themes. It is ironic that two deeply conflicting worldviews can be extracted from its contents. And indeed, it is exactly those that went into the game trying to fit its message into a preconceived pattern, coming at it from a fixed perspective and filtering out other perspectives, viewpoints, and information that emerge with exactly what the game posits they might—a hollow success: a validated opinion accompanied with a feeling of detachment and dissatisfaction.
Tautologically, to understand The Witness is to understand The Witness. In the interpretation I have laid out here, to look past the patterns and the surface ideology and the aesthetic veneer and assemble a less certain, more nuanced, and wiser core message out of the game’s component pieces is exactly an embodiment of its thematic ruminations.
I believe it is utterly, wholly intentional that The Witness is devoid of any explicit humanity. How you interact with the game, how you approach its puzzles, how you interpret it, and how it follows you outside the bounds of the game are all carefully constructed aspects that point the mirror back on the player. You are the focus, and nobody else. You are, after all, the witness.
