He aims to convey, unlike your typical video-game designer, an advanced understanding of art and wants his audience to engage in abstract philosophical discussion. And indeed, many elements of The Witness give off an enigmatic, mysterious, multifaceted vibe. The story is mostly nonexistent for the better part of the game, the island is eerily empty, and there’s something that feels ineffably strange. Yet the island is equally designed with commercial accessibility in mind: It’s colorful, attractive, detailed but reasonably generic, and any part of the island can be approached at any time. The constant tension between those two approaches is never fully resolved.
While playing the game, it’s hard to know exactly where Blow wants to place the audience. Because as cultural commentary, the island of The Witness feels pretty … impotent. Hidden audio logs, read smugly by professional voice actors, use famous quotations to introduce players to concepts like the infinite complexity of the universe, the dangers of cognitive bias in science, Zen Buddhist philosophy, and the role of science vs. art. These quotations often feel arbitrary, not particularly profound even in the game context. Even if they are an optional feature, one wouldn’t expect the logs’ lessons to so widely miss their mark.
If you look even harder, you can find secret codes that unlock video clips you can watch in a theater inside the game’s world. Two clips come from lectures on the value of inner awareness. I enjoyed these videos so much that, paradoxically, they made me all the more aware that I was watching them in an artificial video-game facade of a movie theater. If the game is telling me to pay close attention, then I can’t help but notice how hollow and constructed everything in its world really feels, in spite of its constantly trying to assert itself as some kind of symbolic representation of our own world.
