Kolzig

The Witness by Jonathan Blow

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8 hours ago, dium said:

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").

 

ULTIMATE SPOILERS HERE - If you read this without playing the game, you cannot have the experience Jonathan Blow has said was the whole point of The Witness.

 

 

What Blow says in interviews is that the driving idea behind The Witness was simply the desire for the player to have the experience of  "Aha! Wow! Wait...how many of these have I missed?!" caused by unexpectedly seeing something that seemed confined to a 2D frame out in the 3D world.  His original concept was an RPG where the player is learning runes from scrolls to cast spells and then, looking back down after climbing a mountain, sees a learnable spell rune in the shape of the path up the mountain. 

 

It seems to me that the rather modest and inoffensive point the game is making by adding all the readings and videos is simply, "Hey, I wonder if that feeling of surprise and seeing the world in a different way is related to any of the deeper thoughts various philosophers and theologians have had about enlightenment, mindfulness, and seeing the world?"   And I'd say the game makes no real claims one way or another, so it's bizarre to me that people can actually get upset about it.

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I'm basically only tangentially interested in whatever the intended point was.

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12 hours ago, osmosisch said:


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

 

 

I meant my own statement was unfair, not yours. I apologize for implying Danielle was thoughtless, that was too harsh.

 

10 hours ago, dium said:

 

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.

 

 

This is an interesting line of criticism, The Witness certainly does inherit a level of cultural appropriation that's questionable. However I think that in the modern cultural context that's devoid of these topics it's somewhat laudable that a game even presents eastern philosophy and its western derivatives to modern audiences, and I don't think that's an entirely apolitical choice either (possibly for good or ill). Also I don't think it's the job of every artistic endeavor to be everything to everyone, if you're going to criticize a work for all the things it omits the list would be endless. If The Witness were part of a pervasive tradition of the erasure of political analysis, particularly regarding the history of these philosophies, then the criticism makes more sense to me. But I don't know enough about how the western derivative philosophers have operated to know how valid this might be. 

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4 hours ago, Urthman said:

you cannot have the experience Jonathan Blow has said was the whole point of The Witness

 

 

I agree with what you say in your post but I think people often make the mistake of claiming that the Witness (and also Braid) have a single point. I don't think that's the case for either game. We're talking a lot about the philosophy of the Witness but you can't ignore all the puzzle panels which don't directly tie into that. The Witness isn't just a collection of line puzzles, but it is also a collection of line puzzles. No one theory perfectly explains all aspects of the game. Blow made this argument flippantly when defending Braid by saying no one understood the game but basically he was saying people spent more time analyzing the text and story of Braid and not the puzzles which are a larger proportion of the game design and are interesting in and of themselves. This video does a good analysis of that:
 

 

Edit: Actually I just listened to more of that podcast with Austin and got to the point where he says Blow told him that we wanted the Witness to be "the first authentic game" (pretentious if true) which kind of contradicts my point here. I can actually kinda see how Austin's interpretation of Blow's point applies to the Witness, I think the Witness is closer to being singular in its purpose compared to Braid, but it is still quite an overreach to say that all elements of the game are in perfect harmony with a singular purpose in my opinion. 

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17 minutes ago, Latrine said:

 

I agree with what you say in your post but I think people often make the mistake of claiming that the Witness (and also Braid) have a single point. I don't think that's the case for either game. We're talking a lot about the philosophy of the Witness but you can't ignore all the puzzle panels which don't directly tie into that. The Witness isn't just a collection of line puzzles, but it is also a collection of line puzzles. No one theory perfectly explains all aspects of the game. Blow made this argument flippantly when defending Braid by saying no one understood the game but basically he was saying people spent more time analyzing the text and story of Braid and not the puzzles which are a larger proportion of the game design and are interesting in and of themselves. This video does a good analysis of that

 

He seemed to be expressing the opposite point in the Adam interview. He seemed to be claiming that the puzzles, which you often must change your perspective to solve, are thematically in line with the philosophical underpinnings.

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1 minute ago, Archduke said:

 

He seemed to be expressing the opposite point in the Adam interview. He seemed to be claiming that the puzzles, which you often must change your perspective to solve, are thematically in line with the philosophical underpinnings.

 

 

Perhaps he was (see my edit above), but there's also a lot of puzzles that are just about the internal consistency of the puzzle rules or interpreting the symbolic language contained in the puzzles which are often given to you through tutorial-like sections. The game is still a game and you still have to be taught to do certain things and just solve esoteric puzzles which are not entirely in-line with the ideas of changing your perspective or coming about an epiphany through chance or self-study. Also I feel it's more clear how these things align in retrospect, more than a year after the game's release with all these interviews and analysis available. Within the initial player experience I don't think the supposed purpose of the puzzles are well communicated, and in fact it would be even more pretentious if there was a point in the game that explicitly told you all the puzzle panels were meant to do X to unlock your mind. (Although now that I think about it that point might exist with the audio logs in the cave under the mountain.)

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Please help me. At a certain point in the game, puzzle screens started glitching on me. They'll change in between loads. Sometimes they switch back to the correct puzzle if I click on them, sometimes they don't.


Thing is, it started right after I completed a significant area so even though it is annoying I assumed it was part of the game, given how much the game messes with your assumptions about how its world works. For ages I've figured I was just stupid but I have not seen anyone else mention this so I am wondering if it's a bug.
 

If this is a bug - how the heck do I submit a bug report with all the logs and such if I don't own the Steam version? I can't find a support email anywhere.

 

If it's not a bug, to avoid spoilers you can just write "it's not a bug" and leave it at that, and I'll continue stupidly on.

 

Screens (from one area but it happens all over the island):

shot_2017.05.05__time_20_52_n04.png

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shot_2017.05.05__time_20_43_n02.png

shot_2017.05.05__time_20_52_n02.png

shot_2017.05.05__time_20_52_n03.png

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I... am pretty sure that's a bug. It's been a while, but... That's nuts, I've never seen anything like it. D:

 

They should definitely never, ever change between loads.

 

I do not know how to submit a bug, sorry. ): But I can at least confirm that you're not wrong in this theory??

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Yeah, I did all the lasers and never saw anything like that. Weird. Also no idea how to submit though.

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Thanks for the assistance in helping me realise I'm not stupid.

 

I sent an email to [email protected] just in case that account exists. I also posted on the Steam tech support forum even though my copy's not Steam because that was the only place I could find developers taking bug reports.

 

I browsed through the first dozen or more pages and I think I might be the only person experiencing this bug... or if there are others, they're all assuming as I did that it's part of the game!

 

Edit: I did find online that much later in the game (spoilers) 

Spoiler

there is a puzzle series where the visual elements are shifted but you still have to manipulate the line as if there was no offset

- some people have reported this as a bug even though it isn't. I haven't got there yet but it seems really similar in feel to my actual bug!

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My best guess would be to tweet at Jonathan Blow at... @Jonathan_Blow. That's all I got.

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I got a reponse from [email protected] / [email protected]

 

My video settings were too high, and the game was running out of video memory. Lowering the settings fixed it. Now I feel silly for struggling with this for months without once thinking to lower my settings.

 

Thanks to Andy at Thekla for his help and also to y'all, now I can finish the game!

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It's been interesting continuing to read this thread while trying to avoid end-game spoilers. I greatly enjoyed playing The Witness when it first came out but....I think it was a good example of why I don't often play games when they are first released. I kept hearing other people talking about how far they were, or what they were getting out of it, and I was really enjoying it as a kind of calm, at-my-own -pace refuge. Eventually I got stuck on several sections at once, ended up looking some things up (which killed my sense of momentum) and after not playing it for a week or so, filed it away. Now I've started it again from scratch, playing with my partner, and I'm having a much better time. Being able to split the workload or trade off relieves a lot of the fatigue, and I can't wait to finish it this time. 

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