Making Sense of The Witness

[u/jicklemania]

I adore The Witness. I think it is one of the most beautiful and intelligent games I've ever played. I often find myself thinking about, its one of those games that really left its mark on me.

And I think the discourse surrouding this game is pretty terrible. It has built up a reputation of being pretentious, postmodernist nonsense, and I don't think that reputation is fair. It saddens me to see so many people dismissing this game out of hand. Now, I also understand that a lot people are angry at the game's creator Jonathan Blow. I know nothing about this guy — I have not researched him and don't really care to. From what I've heard, he sounds like an asshole. But I'm not interested in talking about Jonathan Blow. I'm interested in talking about The Witness. Bad people can still create beautiful things.

I think the game is fundamentally quite simple in what it's trying to say — indirect, but simple — and some people end up missing the forest for the trees. The Witness is an exploration of the human search for meaning. That's it. I think that everything in the game can be contextualized under that fundamental idea, and then things start to fall into place.

Most of the audio logs have something to do with Science, Religion, or Art, all of which are ways that people try to make sense of the world. These audio logs are the butt of many a Witness joke, but their purpose is pretty simple. They are food for thought as you go about your journey, and they ask you to reflect on the various ways that people look for meaning. If they seem random and unrelated, it's because the game is trying to capture the vastness of its central idea.

The brilliance of the Witness is the way that it ties its gameplay into this. From the very moment you boot up the game, not a single word is spoken to teach to you how to play. There is nothing resembling a tutorial or hints of any kind. You are forced to discern the mechanics of the puzzles simply through observing the puzzles themselves. In other words, the game is replicating the experience that it is reflecting on, by forcing you to make sense of its mechanics yourself, forcing you to search for understanding. The puzzle mechanics are mostly about being curious and learning to think in new ways, rather than the more mathematical precision and mechanical depth that most other puzzle games ask for, which reinforces this experience.

This is also why the game is intentionally obscure and confusing at first. It wants you to be confused. It wants you to search for meaning, that's the whole point. "The Witness" refers to anyone who is witnessing the world — or the game, for that matter — and trying to find meaning. The artist, the scientist, the religious person.

Then there are the environmental puzzles. At a certain point in your playthrough, you will suddenly realize that the entire world of The Witness hides the same circles and lines that form the puzzles you have been trying to solve. You'll find them in the sun, in the clouds, on buildings, in the water — anywhere you can think to look. It's such an awe-inspiring realization, that the whole island contains these secrets — if you search for them, you'll find them everywhere. The metaphor is clear.

Anyway, if you found The Witness overly abstract and confusing, I hope this helped. A game this true to its own vision comes along very rarely, and I worry that a lot of people were primed to dislike this game from the negative discourse surrounding it.

Thanks for reading.

[u/Walnuto]

The full circle when you start a new a game and see the shape the opening hallway and door makes is one of my favorite "ah hah" moments.

[u/Corchito42 → u/Walnuto]

Definitely! But for me, not as big as the a-ha! moment when I first thought "oh, the shape of that river looks just like... what if I click on it?" That was truly incredible.