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The Witness by Jonathan Blow

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Man, I wish I had the same experience that you guys had.

 

I got the game on launch week expecting a Myst-like (Which was a fair assumption given the information that we had pre-release). The visual treatment, the vague promise of a puzzle island, all of it pointed towards Myst in my head.

 

As I progressed, the game itself most definitely pointed towards a story. The statues of people, the philosophical audio logs, and the man-made structures all hinted at something lying underneath.

 

Spoiler

Then, the end of the game happens. It basically says, "Hey it's just a game, there never was any story here, but that's fine cause it's a game. Those audio logs that you thought were contributing to a narrative? Those were actually telling you that there was none." This was crushing to me. All of my expectation wasn't just left unfulfilled, I felt like I was being actively mocked for wanting a story to be in the game.

 

If the game had set my expectations properly, I would've been fine with playing a simple game about puzzles. Instead, I felt like I was set up by the marketing and the in-game promise of there being more story, then shot down by this sudden theme that only appears in audio logs and the "good ending".

 

After my experience, hearing Blow's thoughts about not wanting to waste player's time feels especially tone-deaf.

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It's fascinating to me that pretty much every single critical take on The Witness (other than "some of the puzzles are too hard/tedious/unfair") is some form of, "I thought X meant Y, but it didn't, and that disappointed me."  And frequently stated something like this: "Jonathan Blow tricked me into thinking X meant Y, but it didn't, and that makes him a pretentious jerk who was making fun of me the whole time."

 

The Witness is "just" a very beautiful, exquisitely-designed puzzle box with no real story or narrative.  The way the whole thing is constructed, from the wordless sequences of the puzzles to the nifty stuff hidden in the environment is all so clever that the cleverness itself seems beautiful to me.

 

But for a lot of people a beautiful first-person environment can't just be something pleasing to look at.  It has to be telling a specific, explicit story.  This is not just an expectation, but an active perception.  People don't just expect a story, they see that there clearly is one--until Jonathan Blow cheats them by "revealing" that there actually isn't any story.

 

But why is this?  We don't demand that every statue and painting in a museum tell an explicit story.  We don't feel cheated that DaVinci never reveals (and probably didn't know) what the Mona Lisa is thinking or smiling about.  Why is this beautiful puzzle box disappointing because it doesn't have a story inside it?  Why is it impossible for some people to even see the puzzle box without assuming the existence of a story?

 

On the one hand, it has audiologs, which many games have used for story-telling.  On the other hand, the audiologs are clearly just a bunch of readings from philosophers about the nature of perception and it seems pretty obvious after a while that they aren't adding up to any sort of narrative and are probably just a bunch of readings Jonathan Blow and his team thought were interesting.  But is it really just a case of "This game looks similar to other games which did have stories in them"? 

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4 hours ago, Archduke said:

After my experience, hearing Blow's thoughts about not wanting to waste player's time feels especially tone-deaf.

 

 

What pretentious Jonathan Blowhard thinks is valuable for a player's time may not be what you think is valuable for a player's time. 

 

Also I'll admit what I'm about to say is a super pretentious statement but here goes. While those of us in the Witness protection party are vigorously defending the game, I honestly think if more of the general public took the time to sit down and play it then a larger fraction of people would side with you and Danielle than with us. Not because I think people are dumb or uncultured but because The Witness is a game that values things that are not broadly valued in society. Although I think the real majority opinion would be with the consensus of most of the game reviews which is nice puzzles and mixed reactions to everything else.

 

And if you haven't watched them I strongly recommend watching the videos on the previous page if you want to understand what values The Witness actually has. There's a lot in those videos that I didn't know until watching them even after playing through The Witness in its entirety and they cleared up a lot of things I only half understood.

 

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Haha, it's more that I groan every time someone mentions The Witness on Waypoint Radio because I know Danielle's going to have to get in one jab, at least, about how it's a mean game for snobs. Sometimes she holds out for a couple minutes, but I'm in the forties in my listen-through and she hasn't managed to let it pass once yet.

 

I had a similar thing with Patrick on Match 3 whenever Life is Strange was brought up. He would always go into how it "swung for the fences but missed" but he was happy that it at least tried to do many things. I couldn't help but think Fuck your selfie, Patrick. It was good. 

 

Also, on Waypoint, i am starting to groan every time Austin says "the notion" and I keep a running tally during listens to see how many times he uses that phrase. I think the average is around 3 or 4 times an episode, and it is rubbing off on Danielle and Rob as well. 

 

5 hours ago, Latrine said:

And if you haven't watched them I strongly recommend watching the videos on the previous page if you want to understand what values The Witness actually has. There's a lot in those videos that I didn't know until watching them even after playing through The Witness in its entirety and they cleared up a lot of things I only half understood.

 

 

Definitely. I don't agree that Blow didn't have respect for player's time, and I even listened to the full hour speech (loved it) to get one of the puzzle solutions. It is a very meditative game, and a story would ruin it. Also, I don't remember a story being a highlight in any of the marketing leading up to release, but most of the marketing I cam across was just people chatting about it on pods, so I might have missed it. 

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12 hours ago, Latrine said:

 

To play devil's advocate here, it's just like her opinion man. Sure an opinion can be mind-bogglingly wrong (as is painfully the case here) but it seems to me to be an honestly held opinion and her job is to share her honestly held opinions. Some might say that it's an intentionally controversial opinion serving as clickbait but I think she's been so forthright here that it can't possibly be the case. She's joining the proud tradition of vocal video game crazies like Tom Chick, Ben Kuchera, and Rowan Kaiser and I for one am glad to see the gender barrier on bad video game opinions finally broken. To those who dare to hate with flair, I salute you!

 

I find her opinion to be the most accurate one in the game press. I very nearly quit the game on the spot when I found the first audio log, but I somehow pressed on for about 150 puzzles before giving up. I regret playing the witness.

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1 hour ago, Badfinger said:

 

I find her opinion to be the most accurate one in the game press. I very nearly quit the game on the spot when I found the first audio log, but I somehow pressed on for about 150 puzzles before giving up. I regret playing the witness.

 

 

Sure but one reason I have a bigger issue with her opinion than yours is because she is in the game press. She influences the consensus and reinforces what I find to be an overly critical opinion. Just because you hate something doesn't mean it's okay to dogpile the hate, particularly in the face of a vocal rejection by a large segment of your core audience (look at the Youtube comments on her video, they're mostly not standard awful Youtube comments but they also mostly disagree with her thesis.) I would just let it go, accept that other people like a thing that I don't, and then forget about it.

 

Btw one other odd thing is that even though I'm quite passionate about defending The Witness from claims of pretentiousness, a lot of the stuff in there doesn't align with my personal value systems. I'm not a spiritualist and I was quite surprised to learn that my man P.J.Blow is very into all that stuff. In his interview with Adam Conover he even said he was in the audience for the Rupert Spira video that's in the game. But still, even though I don't buy into this stuff I appreciate being exposed to all these things I previously dismissed outright. 

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The unfortunate truth is that The Witness doesn't purport to believe in a single unchanging worldview. The audiotapes strewn throughout present to the player various and sundry types of philosophies, and even in some cases spiritual or religious beliefs. It's a mishmash of things. It's much more considered than RATIONALITY RATIONALITY RATIONALITY RATIONALITY RATIONALITY all the time. Moreover, it hardly insists that you believe anything it does present. It felt to me more like it was just saying, "hey, here's a point of view or philosophy, make of it what you will". And that's also confirmed by Jonathan Blow across various interviews.

 

It's also a fucking amazing video game, and those things are easily ignored if they really super bother you.

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9 hours ago, Urthman said:

But why is this?  We don't demand that every statue and painting in a museum tell an explicit story.  We don't feel cheated that DaVinci never reveals (and probably didn't know) what the Mona Lisa is thinking or smiling about.  Why is this beautiful puzzle box disappointing because it doesn't have a story inside it?  Why is it impossible for some people to even see the puzzle box without assuming the existence of a story?

 

I wrote a big post about art, but I'll spare you my ramblings. Suffice to say that The Witness isn't asking an open-ended question like a piece of art would. It's prescribing an answer to us that doesn't have room for anything more than surface-level interpretation. (It allows us to interpret the philosophies behind the answer, but not the answer itself.)

 

Now, let's talk about games.

 

I'll re-iterate some stuff that most of us probably know. Games help us learn real skills by providing practice. Chess teaches us about social roles and war, shooters teach us caveman-style survival tactics, etc. The narrative of a game (not to be confused with the metaphors that most games use), provides us with an engaging story layer. It's the fluff that, while not integral to the skills being taught, is useful for player enjoyment and retention.

 

When I, as a player of games, see extraneous elements in a game, I expect them to be harmonious with the game's narrative. The existence of an empty town, for example, builds an expectation that there is narrative reason for it to be there. The lack of attachment to the core gameplay is what makes me perceive it as fluff, and start to build expectations as to what the full extent of the fluff could be.

 

The question may be asked, "Why don't we expect the pieces of Monopoly to have a rich backstory?" The answer being: the pieces in monopoly are metaphor, they aren't narrative fluff. We accept the metaphor as being limited because we're lazy, and we don't want to have to internalize a huge metaphor to play a game. However, we expect more from the fluff.

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@Urthman @Archduke It's funny because Brian Moriarty's talk that's in the game, the Secret of Psalm 46, is exactly about this topic of how game design influences our perception of game meaning. It's almost as if the Notorious PJB predicted this argument would happen. Man, the longer this discussion goes the more I appreciate The Witness. Thanks to Danielle for making this all possible!

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2 hours ago, Latrine said:

 

Sure but one reason I have a bigger issue with her opinion than yours is because she is in the game press. She influences the consensus and reinforces what I find to be an overly critical opinion. Just because you hate something doesn't mean it's okay to dogpile the hate, particularly in the face of a vocal rejection by a large segment of your core audience (look at the Youtube comments on her video, they're mostly not standard awful Youtube comments but they also mostly disagree with her thesis.) I would just let it go, accept that other people like a thing that I don't, and then forget about it.

 

Btw one other odd thing is that even though I'm quite passionate about defending The Witness from claims of pretentiousness, a lot of the stuff in there doesn't align with my personal value systems. I'm not a spiritualist and I was quite surprised to learn that my man P.J.Blow is very into all that stuff. In his interview with Adam Conover he even said he was in the audience for the Rupert Spira video that's in the game. But still, even though I don't buy into this stuff I appreciate being exposed to all these things I previously dismissed outright. 

 

 

What if she loved it and instead of making a lemon face every time it got brought up, she just gushed uncontrollably for 45 seconds? That's a really slippery silly slope you're sliding down, especially with the kicker at the end that she's the one that should just let it go and not you.

 

I also very much disagree that her opinion is the consensus. She is one of the gaming press's very few dissenting opinions on what was more or less categorically a critical success.

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3 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

What if she loved it and instead of making a lemon face every time it got brought up, she just gushed uncontrollably for 45 seconds? That's a really slippery silly slope you're sliding down, especially with the kicker at the end that she's the one that should just let it go and not you.

 

Believe me, I'm listening through Waypoint Radio, like I said, and Patrick doesn't compulsively gush about Dark Souls when it's mentioned in passing nearly as much as Danielle compulsively shits on The Witness... and that's saying something.

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Just now, Gormongous said:

 

Believe me, I'm listening through Waypoint Radio, like I said, and Patrick doesn't compulsively gush about Dark Souls when it's mentioned in passing nearly as much as Danielle compulsively shits on The Witness... and that's saying something.

 

You know that's not the point. It's not the job of someone in the media to pull their punches because they are going against consensus. It's no less egregious to wildly cheerlead for something you like than it is to rail against something you dislike.

 

I also beg to differ, because I sent them a desperate email begging them to stop taking a third of the podcast up with Dark Souls every week. They talk about the Witness what, half a dozen times in 60 podcasts?

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23 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

 

 

What if she loved it and instead of making a lemon face every time it got brought up, she just gushed uncontrollably for 45 seconds? That's a really slippery silly slope you're sliding down, especially with the kicker at the end that she's the one that should just let it go and not you.

 

 

I like it more when people love loving things, I'm fine with that. I'm not saying she's not entitled to her opinion but she's clearly paying a price for it in terms of reaction to her work and it might be more strategic for her to just write articles and make videos about other things. As mentioned this is not her first piece on the topic, it's more like 3rd or 4th, plus the countless podcast discussions. If I was in her shoes I think I would've already taken the criticism to heart and not chosen to produce this latest piece. I'm going to move on anyway but I think it'd be more reasonable if it was only just one Witness review.

 

23 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

I also very much disagree that her opinion is the consensus. She is one of the gaming press's very few dissenting opinions on what was more or less categorically a critical success.

 

My point wasn't that it was the critical consensus, but that it would be the public consensus if you rounded people up and forced them to play a game that most of the population wouldn't do of their own free will. That's of course a crazy scenario but I think it's an educated guess.

 

My other point is that the critical consensus among game reviewers is quite different in some respects from the consensus of the diehard fans. Most game reviewers enjoyed the puzzles but did not find much value in the philosophical content. But they didn't go so far as to bash it with the big P word or say that it has an "abhorrent worldview". I think that consensus is what most people who bought and played the game of their own free will agree with.

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38 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

You know that's not the point. It's not the job of someone in the media to pull their punches because they are going against consensus. It's no less egregious to wildly cheerlead for something you like than it is to rail against something you dislike.

 

I also beg to differ, because I sent them a desperate email begging them to stop taking a third of the podcast up with Dark Souls every week. They talk about the Witness what, half a dozen times in 60 podcasts?

 

I'm not asking Danielle to pull her punches. That would be ridiculous and unfair for me to ask. I'm asking her to stop beating a dead horse. You know those are different things.

 

The Witness came out over a year ago and is largely not present in the cultural conversation anymore. Nevertheless, Danielle brings up how The Witness is pretentious and disappointing at least three times on Waypoint Podcast in the months of November and December 2016, then published an eight hundred-word critique of it on the website on December 31, then published another four hundred-word critique of it to go along with a three-minute video yesterday. The only coverage of The Witness on Waypoint is Danielle saying, over and over, the same things she was saying over a year ago on Idle Weekend, in episodes posted on January 29, February 6, February 12, and March 4. I'm not trying to silence anyone here and, if Danielle's opinion of The Witness happens to change for better or for worse, I'd like to hear about that. I just don't like seeing Danielle turning into the Cassandra of games journalism, trying to warn people that The Witness isn't a good game because of some frustrating moments and its "abhorrent worldview" and despairing that she's being ignored. She's not being ignored, people have different opinions and, after a certain point, repeating criticism like that is just yucking someone else's yum.

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Again to play devil's advocate, Danielle probably hasn't thought about it as deeply as we have. She does a lot of other shit besides shitting on the Witness. We're all busy with shit and most of the time we just gotta keep doing the shit we gotta do. Speaking of which, I've got a lot of shit to do. Peace. 

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That's a fair and valid criticism I think. I don't disagree that the timing was seemingly random to drop a video about the game this week. However, the game came out in 2016. Talking about it in November and December is exactly when game people talk about the games that came out that year. I can get down with getting tired of the nuance or sameness of the criticism, but holding it against someone for talking about a game during end of year discussions doesn't hold water for me. She talked about it a handful of times on one podcast, a handful of times on another podcast months later, and there are two articles on a website?

 

I do think her argument about the game has changed, but it has the same fundamental streak. It used to be screw this thing on every level, and it's changed over time to asking why they wait until the end of the game to laugh in the face of everything they just told you. Instead of just being not for someone, it's middle fingers all around.

 

I can guarantee that she's spent more time thinking about this game than I have.

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I'm quoting this so people can minimize it if they want. I really didn't mean for this to get this long, but the Danielle/Waypoint view on the Witness has been rolling around in my head for a while.

 

Quote

I think the thing that makes me wince whenever The Witness gets brought up on Waypoint Radio is nobody is making a strong case for the game on thematic grounds, so it’s hard to see where in the conversation we are. There’s a version of the criticism of the Witness that goes: It’s a game filled with logic puzzles with a video of a British guy dunking on art in favor of science. If you can’t figure the puzzles out, it’s because you haven’t thought hard enough. The valuable thing in this game and life are people who are good at approaching things logically, and that’s not just an awfully limited view of the world, it’s a harmful one.

 

Then there’s a response that goes: If you look at the theater in the game, there are five more videos! Aren’t you curious what those videos have too? And when you find those videos, it turns out they’re about seeking in all of its facets including, but not limited to, the scientific method. The seeking theme isn’t just limited to the videos and audio-logs. It’s right there in the puzzles. The bullshit broken-branch puzzle in the temple is bullshit if you think pure logic is the only way to approach the puzzle. But the Witness doesn’t want you to modus tollens your way through, it wants you to notice the strangeness of how the puzzle seems incomplete, to wonder at how you might complete a broken puzzle, maybe to remember that those apple-tree puzzles which also hid important information with broken branches. While pure logical reasoning will get you far in the Witness, here, it’s practically screaming at you to break beyond the boundaries of the puzzles. It wants you to have epiphanies.

 

But that isn’t where the conversation ends. If I had to anticipate what an extended criticism of the Witness’s worldview from Danielle (or Austin, who has mostly hinted at his opinion) would look like, it’d probably hinge at some point on the death of the author, and I think that would be entirely fair. The James Burke video is probably the first one you're going to run into, and I bet there's a significant number of people for whom it is the only video they’ll see in the Witness. There’s a considerable prioritization there, in that first, most accessible video. The Witness gives it to the dude who dunks on art in favor of science. Putting aside the videos, a lot of the puzzles in The Witness are solved purely logically, to the point that I could probably express them in symbolic logic if I were cleverer and had a lot of time. (There might be a temptation to say that even the solution I described to the aforementioned broken-branch puzzle is about logically deriving a conclusion through a set of priors scattered throughout the game, but I think at this point you’d be well on the way to stretching what counts as “logical reasoning” to mean “thinking about anything.”) J-Blow might have intended to make a game about seeking in all its facets, the argument goes, but it says a lot that he filled it with logic puzzles and put scientism front and center.

 

I’m not satisfied with that account of what the Witness is about, but I think it’s a fair and complete one. I think it discounts the other videos and audios too heavily, ignores the environmental puzzles (which are hidden, true, but don’t work otherwise) and the environment-based elements of the regular puzzles. I think it contains a (quite understandable) allergy toward scientism that leads to missing (or discounting) that the nonanthropocentrism in Burke’s worldview might fit neatly next to Gangaji and Tarkovsky. My problem, however, is that I’ve never heard anyone make the stronger case for the Witness having a troubling worldview (and having just gone back and read Danielle’s earlier piece, I’m not sure she’s heard a good case for what The Witness is supposed to be about, if she thinks the secret ending satirizes rather than adds to what came before).

 

Throw all that together with the fact that the internet just completely messes with perspective in arguments. Whenever I hear Danielle criticize the Witness, it is usually the only thing I’ve heard anyone say about The Witness in months, and I’m wondering why she had to pull out a game I love just to poo on it again. What I don’t hear is that Danielle probably has hundreds of people who are all responding “Actually, The Witness is good” at, let’s say, varying degrees of politeness. That’s all leaving aside what I half-remember to be Danielle’s original problem with The Witness, which I think was that you had to be willing to trust that somewhere there exists a tutorial to whatever puzzle you’re stuck on, which isn’t necessarily obvious (and some of the puzzles are dumb/unfair/un-fun anyway).

Edited by Upthrust
fixed a link

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12 hours ago, Latrine said:

Again to play devil's advocate, Danielle probably hasn't thought about it as deeply as we have.

Er, what

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5 hours ago, osmosisch said:

Er, what

 

Okay fine, that's an unfair statement. What I meant is that while she's considered the segment of her audience that is criticizing her position here, she's well aware of us, she's made the decision to produce another piece that reaffirms her opinion and the opinion of another segment of her audience that is not quite as vocal but is out there. And she's decided she can do that and then move on and do all the other things in her job while ignoring whatever additional blowback comes from this piece. And I guess Austin and whatever editorial process at Waypoint have backed her on all these decisions.

 

To be frank I feel like this whole argument is a mini-cultural battle between so-called P. elitist techbro intelligentsia and the counter-culture reject marginalized outsiders who've drawn lines around capital `A` Art and what it means to them. My opinion now is that this culture battle is tiny and stupid and wrong and I'm stupid and wrong for spending as much time as I have fighting in it. (Although it has been kind of an endorphin rush.) 

 

Also it's not nice to quote just the first line of my post and drop the context. Have a good day.

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12 minutes ago, Latrine said:

 

Okay fine, that's an unfair statement.


OK. Try to cool off a bit and do some of that allegedly deep thinking about more than The Witness.

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8 hours ago, Upthrust said:

(or Austin, who has mostly hinted at his opinion)

 

I think you meant to link to something different here, and I'm interested in what it was supposed to be.

 

Anyway, the most Austin has publicly discussed The Witness, that I'm aware of, is on this podcast. There he discusses (what I imagine are) bits of a long written piece he was writing (but ultimately never published). You get the sense that, while he has strong opinions, he's struggling to finalize a statement that's persuasive enough for his own high standards. But still: if you've never heard a "stronger case for the Witness having a troubling worldview", Austin makes one that I'm very fond of.

 

The case (which I'm paraphrasing and interpreting, not quoting) is: The Witness is firstly a mindfulness tool, and secondly a proponent of the ability of humanity to solve problems through the power of – not just "logic" – but a voracious exploration of all available avenues of thinking. It is, in that regard, enviably hopeful. But it can also come off as naive and facile: political and material realities aren't so much ignored as much as they're never presented to exist at all. Austin highlights how, in particular, The Witness is eager to discuss the conceptual differences between Rinzai and Soto schools of Zen Buddhism, but is wholly uninterested in any political reasons behind that split. 

 

None of this straight-up invalidates Jon Blow's version of pro-mindfulness, or of exploratory introspection, or etc etc. But it does create a tone to the game that's less palatable if you're unwilling to temporarily put aside the real-world – if you aren't in a position, practically or emotionally, to indulge in purely abstract and internal arguments that are purposefully blind to politics. 

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2 hours ago, Latrine said:

Also it's not nice to quote just the first line of my post and drop the context. Have a good day.

Hopefully the last line is safe to quote on its own.

 

I'm glad osmosisch called it out because I definitely cringed when i saw it. I meant to call it out, too, but got distracted and forgot. It wasn't just unfair; it was rude. I understand what you were trying to say (I think), but I'm sure Danielle has given this a lot of thought. I believe with all my heart and head that she's wrong but that's a separate thing entirely! U:

 

Re: Austin: I'm fairly certain he's, on multiple occasions, expressed a generally similar sentiment as Danielle, and/or implicit/explicit agreement with Danielle. And that's fine. I think he's wrong, too, if that's what he believes! It's rare for me to disagree with him, now that I think about it. But on this, I'm afraid I must. ):

 

Re: The Witness' lack of political bent: I think that Jonathan Blow is aware that he explicitly did not discuss politics. I also don't think he needed to. It would have drastically changed the tone(/message?) of The Witness, which, I think, is one of meditative thought. I guess the same as Austin's "mindfulness tool", really. So I partially don't disagree with Austin. PHEW. But yes anyway political stances in The Witness would have made it explicitly... political. (U:) There's no reason to do that. The goal of The Witness is to provide various points of view, and in some cases to compare them, but never to say which one is the correct point of view. (Also I'm glad he didn't because I see some of the things he does express political opinion about, and I disagree. HEEHEE.)

 

EDIT: I'm being informed elsewhere that Austin doesn't necessarily agree with Danielle, which... oops. If so, I fucked up. Ignore that third paragraph! It never happened! (I'll leave it for posterity.)

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I mostly agree with you. Considering the various ways Blow could've presented this subject matter (Blow specifically, not how anyone could've), the one he chose was probably the best. Overtly "apolitical" is, of course, itself a political stance, and a very privileged one at that. But that doesn't make it bad. It certainly doesn't make it worse than alternatives.

 

Ultimately, I agree with everything I've written in the post above (which I'm now realizing is just as much my own thoughts as it is Austin's... I don't think he ever called The Witness a "mindfulness tool"). But none of it changes my personal opinion of the game, which is very positive.

EDIT: FWIW my own reservations about the game are much more shallow and surface level: I didn't enjoy the audio logs (or most of the videos) but for purely aesthetic reasons. They felt haughty and sophomoric, and kind of like I was playing the video game version of a Ken Burns documentary on world philosophies. Fortunately, clicking on the audio logs is optional, so that problem sort of solves itself.

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4 hours ago, dium said:

 

I think you meant to link to something different here, and I'm interested in what it was supposed to be.

 

Oops, you're right! I fixed it to link to this tweet: 

I'm really not sure how it would have fit in to the apparently-abandoned piece he was working on, but there's something about that video that works really well.

 

As for the Run Button podcast, I'm glad you linked it because I missed it, and I do like the critique Austin outlines there. Even if I still overall like the themes that The Witness is presenting, it's hard to argue that it isn't trying to apply them as a worldview when a bunch of the audios and videos are explicitly about solving the problems of the world, and that worldview does have definite flaws (even if I'm partial to it).

 

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