What is The Witness

Reviews predictably spilled out after audiences were released to The Witness. They varied in praise — many good, some great, and some bad — but not in the certainty of their opinions. They all sounded so sure. Is The Witness is a good game? The truth is I don’t even know if The Witness is a game. But nearly three years after release, I still think about it. It sure looks, sounds, and smells like a game, but it’s more complicated than that. The Witness is many things, and it is of many things. This is an attempt to understand what it is.

Does the author of The Witness know what it is? When asked before its release, Jonathan Blow would shrug off comparisons of his island to Myst. Blow would be wrong and right to dismiss such comparisons. It may be unkind to expect more from a stranger but it isn’t unfair. We all react the same to knee-jerk questions like, “Is this Myst?”, as when you having studied computers are asked, “So, can you fix my computer?”, or your psychology degree solicits, “So, can you read my mind?” (For the record, the correct answers to these questions are, “Yes, but I won’t,” and “No, but now I don’t have to.”)

Then did its author answer what The Witness is after its release? In his press tour and talks, Blow supplied lengthy overviews, themes, history, motivations, and processes surrounding his project. These were kind in how willing he was to discuss things concrete in lieu of sentiments more abstract and vague. But in the end, there wasn’t much space made for him to publicly explore his most personal thoughts about his baby, and he didn’t forcefully make himself that space, either. There are good reasons for this. Such discussions can sound pretentious and alienate, taking a blanketing feeling, easy and agreeable, and focus it into an annoying pinprick, difficult to forget. So in a helpless sense, understanding is up to the audience equipped with the benefit of not being the author.

Here’s something The Witness is not: that which should exist. How did someone make this thing? And how was it made in just seven years? For reference, Blow said the final mountain sequence took his team about a year. This seems reasonable on sheer puzzle count alone. But recall the overarching intent was still implied throughout, and recall that several of these puzzles climactically express their own, singular grammatical variation atop the rules learned outside the mountain. This game shouldn’t exist because no one does this kind of thing. No studio with the requisite resources would risk it. No person who might risk it has the resources. Even someone who had, say, won the Braid lottery, could not rationally invest those proceeds to start from scratch: a 3-D game undefined in scope, about 2-D puzzles, but secretly not even about those puzzles because that would be too concrete. We have no choice but to conclude that the author felt this had to be made. There isn’t material ballast enough for this ambitious a freighter through this unforgiving a journey, only obsession.

Is The Witness a puzzle game? Well, yes. It has lots of puzzles and was marketed as a puzzle game. But this is like comparing The Witness to Myst, framing it in its most limited scope. The point of The Witness is not puzzles in how the movies are not about moving pictures and Shakespeare isn’t about actors on stage.

Is the Witness is an art game? This is a poorly formulated question, since we don’t yet know what an art game is. The question of video games as art was birthed prematurely into the public, characteristically fraught with uninformed offenses and insecure defenses. It is easier to say video games in part occupy the domain of art, but it is harder to determine whether a single game resides in its glorified dominion. A part of a game, illegitimately excised from the whole, may easily be classified as art, but it is harder to determine the status of the whole.

Moreover, I still haven’t answered whether The Witness is a game. Likely, it is a game. But it wants to be more, and it might live up to its intent. What can be said for certain is that The Witness is about art, or more precisely about experiences intended most traditionally through art. And in trying to understand The Witness, we first have to establish these two things: 1) its main objective and 2) the subjective experiences we call aesthetic.

1) What is the main objective in The Witness? It may seem surprising that this question has a definite answer. It is what remains after you subtract everything that’s not new and defends its medium: the environmental puzzles.

Consider their design:

· They require the 3-D world. No other purpose can justify a 3-D canvas stretched out to support hundreds of 2-D puzzles.

· They are the most voluntary. They are the least constrained and the least mandatory as objectives in a game of already few objectives.

· They are the least voluntary. Try ignoring one when one confronts you. They are the least expected and the least verbal in an already nonverbal game.

· They have the greatest potential for epiphany, discovery, and aesthetic pleasure.

Understanding the environmental puzzles as The Witness’s main objective provides clarity into the design of the whole that serves it. It is why The Witness lacks narrative. It is why it had its music subtracted out. It justifies the art direction, of a world painstakingly made worthy of drawing one’s attention out of the apparent objective of 2-D puzzles. Even in discussion of The Witness, Blow’s limited discussion of environmental puzzles and their design choices was itself a design choice. They are designed with the risk of never being found against maximizing one’s experience upon their discovery. That experience is aesthetic.

2) Aesthetic experience (AE) ranges widely, from mundane symmetry, pleasing orderliness, wondrous beauty, to profound epiphany. AEs are difficult to talk about, but to understand The Witness’s design some of these difficulties have to be demystified.

How does one competently describe the experience of beauty? All qualia are hard to describe, but more difficult are our feelings to which we cannot assign a reliable external reference point, like this is cold or that is high-pitched. For now, the best we might do for these AEs is to provide an internal reference point for contrast. Specifically, a useful contrast to AE is reward experience (RE) as one receives from goal pursuit (or goal attainment).

People will have their own descriptors for the differences between AE and RE. Personally, the word that often comes to mind for AE is clean, against which RE is blunt. When I frame the two along epistemological experiences, AE feels true whereas RE feels right, where the former is and the latter insists. AE is associated with explore and RE with exploit. AE is to perceive as RE is to pursue. As vehicles, AE would be a distance glider, where RE is a motive force. The point is that even within the domain of pleasant affect, AE can be introspected as qualitatively distinct from RE. In the extremes, RE is the engine by which the animal world moves whereas AE can feel profound, religious, or cosmic, by which a subject’s life can change course. It is not surprising why this AE signal is so often misappropriated reverence and elusiveness, with accompanying aspersions like pretentious and artsy. But short of the extreme, and much like RE, AE is everywhere if attended for. Rhyme is AE of a lesser degree, as are resonance, consonance, and analogies.

A helpful example for understanding AE is Aldous Huxley’s aesthetic illusion. He presents two sentences, “black ladders lack bladders” and “black fire-escapes have no bladders,” noticing that “formulated by art the most insipid statements become enormously significant.” (Crome Yellow, 1921) Huxley’s illusion can clarify two key points of cause and effect in AE. The cause of the significance attached to the first statement is not a difference in meaning but a difference in form. It is the implicit form of the first statement, specifically its rhyme and consonant meter that produces the AE, not the banality of its explicit content. Yet our apparent experience is that the statement possesses the significance, rather than the underlying processes that appraised its value.

This is an important phenomenon in our value experiences, where the thing that appears to possess the value tends to be an object readily available in consciousness and not its actual causes. At a higher level, it is also why we punish the messenger, value actors above directors, and treat the symptom while ignoring the underlying disease. This tendency for misattribution accounts for a large portion of why AEs are so misunderstood and misinterpreted. Form is the domain of what produces AE. But form by nature is implicit and nonverbal, compared to the explicit or conceptualized object that’s available at the forefront of our conscious experience. As a result, comprehending the causal form takes additional work of introspection to extricate for awareness. But the problem for AE doesn’t end there because the thing that has been extricated and conceptualized only references the original form and does not itself exhibit that form (e.g., in Huxley’s illusion: “two rhyming antibacchius feet”), and so it can’t produce the same AE. A deconstructed joke is a different thing than the joke itself, with a punishing disparity in consequence. Analysis of art isn’t art, it’s analysis.

This is to say that tackling the problem of AE poses a challenge for everyone involved. The person who experiences the profound doesn’t get to understand why by virtue of the experience, the person who understands why doesn’t get to experience it by virtue of understanding, and neither party can transmit the subjective experience to another person. So how do you make a game for AE?

Design

Nearly all games are designed for RE. The reasons are simple. It is far easier to provide defined goals for the player to pursue, and it is far easier to motivate a player by targeting the signals nature selected for motivation (the reward in the “rat lever” studies, of Skinner boxes and intracranial stimulation, is understood approximately as work pleasure, or the reward from pursuit). This marriage between video games have to RE is central to the argument that they can’t be art, and it’s only recently that it’s being tested as either a marriage of necessity or convenience.

To be fair, even much of what we casually call art doesn’t genuinely tackle the AE problem. Plus, video games are hard enough to make as it is. It’s all the more reason to wonder why anyone would set up hurdles just for himself in a 100 m dash, for seven years. Because The Witness is designed toward AE, it self-imposes a different frame to evaluate it than traditional games. It doesn’t mean you can’t judge The Witness by traditional gaming expectations. It would just be a losing battle to judge Tarkovsky by the metrics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or to judge the design of an art gallery by the number of pieces it packed in per square foot.

The first half of the design of The Witness is subtractive, making space for its intent. This is because RE, in its insistence, tends to impede AE. The dearth of goals in The Witness is a deliberate stripping down of the RE arc. For the environmental puzzles to have the mere possibility of their potency, they cannot be gates or obstacle achievements. Discovering one cannot be the means to a slot machine reward or a sharper tool that eases the final boss. While beauty is AE, pursuit of beauty is RE. So treating the environmental puzzles as the main objectives would impair their intended experience. Can you really see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre if you’re really there to accomplish seeing the Mona Lisa?

The Witness lacks a narrative because being carried through a story is pursuit. Being carried to a story’s conclusive shore is reward that would overshadow AE. And while music by itself is a familiar medium for aesthetic appreciation, when set as background for mood or tension, it becomes a device that serves narrative, in video games as in movies. The more The Witness would have been implemented to insist and manipulate, the narrower its window for AE would have become.

The second half of the design is the positive task of creating the form necessary for AE. This requires more than just the environmental puzzles. Like Huxley’s illusion, the environmental puzzles may be the salient recipients of aesthetic value but are not sufficient without the necessary acquaintance with the 2-D puzzles. If the same island contained only environmental puzzles, they would not arouse the same experience. This is no different than how an idea alone is not sufficient for its appreciation. If one has not accrued the necessary experiences captured by the idea, it has little meaning. It’s why an account of the ordered world evoked no experience of beauty to us as children. We could recite the rules but the significance of what they organized could only be felt after constructing a scaffolding of relevant experiences. How do you value unconditional love without knowing betrayal, or appreciate a justice system without understanding the proclivity for violations of justice? The food chain, mitosis, and the theory of gravity are test questions until you come to terms with the scope of what these ideas describe.

Conversely, when we encounter an idea that organizes a clutter of mental objects, we have a starkly different experience. Comprehending evolution as an explanatory rule for every species we know is utterly beautiful, and a sense of wonder accompanies the realization that a small set of instructions is responsible for all life on Earth. A freeing epiphany may be the result of unearthing a single event that has rippled through your life as a chain of personal adaptations and re-adaptations, each reaction producing a cadre of unintended consequences. Similarly, the notion of a God perceived to account for every cause and every effect might produce the greatest day of a person’s life. In each case, although the idea is attributed significance, it is not the idea alone that accomplishes it, rather the apparent role of key it plays over its many locks.

Analogously, the environmental puzzles serve as ideals of the built up experiences of 2-D puzzles across the island. These ideals are consonant in the essential circle-and-line form while exhibiting attributes grander in scope, unconstrained and unexpected. The player learns a variety of 2-D puzzles like regional dialects, until something appears similar but unbounded by such customs. Each 2-D puzzle is leashed inside an LCD panel, until an ideal manifests itself unleashed in the physical world, bridging perspectives, objects, and time. The puzzles hidden in the environment have been there the whole time, eliciting surprise like nature’s secrets awaiting human discovery and unlike manmade tasks on screens. In effect, the 2-D puzzles serve as a medium of both form and restraint upon which the environmental puzzles act as free catalysts.

The difficulty in some of the 2-D puzzles, while taxing, similarly serves the intended design. It may be that mere exposure to so many puzzles would have been sufficient for AE. But struggling with the puzzles, some to the point of abandonment and later return, increases the likelihood of inseminating their forms into automaticity and muscle memory. Further, the effort required to overcome difficult puzzles serves as background contrast to the environmental puzzles that can relieve you from volition, as the line effortlessly tracks across its landscape down to the thunderclap, compelling the player to stand back and witness.

A conclusion

One answer to the question put forth is that The Witness is its own thing, spread across its layers and compartments throughout the island. The island is physically small but enormous in scope of consistency and reinforcing plausibility for its objective. The 2-D puzzles are also not mere medium for the environmental puzzles’ aesthetic perception. Some are preludes, of symmetry and consonance, shifts in perspective, light, and the physical world that invoke insight and keep the player’s attention liquid across problem economies.

Then is The Witness art? Not quite. When viewed through its singular objective, its commitment and risk is more authentic than most attempts in art. But judging by that same courage, it also hovers over so many categories, flouting their boundaries as one who is unsure of its own identity. A self-imposed mandate to explore all puzzle variations is occasionally expressed as indulgent, safe, or tedious. For example, the endurance test puzzle feels like work, even as it matches the theme of its essay, or doubles as an homage to video game satire (e.g., Takeshi’s Challenge, Desert Bus), or triples as the author’s signature (as a cloud in Braid). And a timed challenge is anything but aesthetically pleasing.

No doubt the balance is difficult, and The Witness may tell us more about what games are ready for than its design. Etched upon obelisks, the environmental puzzles are tempted toward pursued collectibles. But in the counterfactual world without the obelisks, today’s gaming culture would have turned them into Easter eggs, in other words secrets that engage even greater pursuit resulting in greater aesthetic interference. The author also can’t help but stack the deck a little, given how much he’s committed into the pot. Several overt gestures announce environmental puzzles. These risk pandering against the possibility that an even greater portion of the audience won’t notice them at all.

Considered as a study, we can underscore what The Witness accomplishes new across creative endeavors, precisely because of its execution in this nascent medium. Perhaps ironically, electronic games have a tangible feel. They feel causal because we understand them as repeatable instructions. They feel tractable because they’re contained: contained in your device, in an application, within the island, each puzzle kind within each region, each 2-D puzzle within its grid, and each line within its track. The environmental puzzles perform by breaking some of these boundaries across rules and perspectives while still being contained in The Witness. This apparent limitation, in a study of aesthetic experiences, turns out something distinctly novel.

The Witness is not special because it can elicit aesthetic experiences or epiphanies. That’s available through other media. But because The Witness is conducted in a medium we feel is contained, the mechanism to the epiphanies feels accessible. The puzzles, their grammar, and the world are contained, and yet it is able to access this experience we call profound. And so it provides for profundity without pretense, where the self-contained nature of the game grants it a certain immunity from the misattributions we find in profundity had elsewhere, uncontained. The Witness cannot put on religious garbs, reach cosmic stars, or sell a copy for millions because everybody knows that everybody knows it’s a video game. As a result, we have no choice but to reflect that these experiences, to whatever degree of profundity, can be attained by designed computer code running on our material psychology.

The intent and execution of The Witness is nothing short of original. But perhaps its greatest accomplishment is the experiences it purveys in a handful of encounters that are evidently improbable yet appear as if never designed. Although only a few times, and perhaps only for a split second, the experience can be providential. In a so-called video game.

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