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The Witness is an argument. It uses game design, audio, and video to present its case about our relation to the search for truth.
Developer Thekla and designer Jonathan Blow’s puzzle game is a challenging adventure where you draw lines, listen to orations, and watch YouTube clips. It sounds simple, but as you go through that journey, The Witness uses these elements to make claims about the human experience while also providing evidence for those claims.
Put simply, The Witness is about exploration and the human need to reach out and understand the unknown.
But here is its thesis broken down into the broadest points:
The Witness claims that the search for truth is the story of humanity. Individually, we witness existence moment to moment, and then we collectively combine those experiences over eons to empower the next generation of explorers to witness something new as a representative of our species.
That’s a big case to make, and it all starts with you playing a game.
You have the capability to seek the truth
Playing The Witness in the context of its wider argument is about the importance of games throughout history to both people and animals.
In The Witness, you encounter confusing puzzles with esoteric rules. When you first try to solve these, they can appear daunting to the point of impossibility. Or you might assume that you’re not smart enough to figure these things out. But over time, you slowly begin building up a mental vocabulary that enables you to decode and conquer these mazes until you reach a level of fluency with the game’s world.
In this way, The Witness is no different from the games of other species. A lion cub plays with its siblings to help it get comfortable with moving and leaping. This is preparation for a life of hunting and fighting off competitors.
Studies have also shown that rats (and some primates) play games to fine-tune their fight-or-flight responses.
The Witness is a way to help you fine-tune your fight-or-flight response in the face of challenging cerebral problems. If you battle through Blow’s puzzles, you may end up feeling more capable of taking the more complex ideas of the real world.
And having confidence in your capability to understand and solve problems is something The Witness reiterates in one of the first videos you play in the theater room hidden beneath the windmill.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2...and-you_school
The Witness: How to solve every puzzle (walkthrough guide)
The Witness: How to solve the ship’s red door, the puzzle that’s stumped the Internet
The Witness: spoiler-free tips for solving the island’s hardest and most secret puzzles
The Witness: What it means
Developer Thekla and designer Jonathan Blow’s puzzle game is a challenging adventure where you draw lines, listen to orations, and watch YouTube clips. It sounds simple, but as you go through that journey, The Witness uses these elements to make claims about the human experience while also providing evidence for those claims.
Put simply, The Witness is about exploration and the human need to reach out and understand the unknown.
But here is its thesis broken down into the broadest points:
- You have the capability to seek the truth.
- It’s noble to seek the truth.
- Interpreting the truth through common experience is important to understanding it.
- Truth isn’t a puzzle.
- You’ll never reach the truth.
- Stop seeking the truth.
The Witness claims that the search for truth is the story of humanity. Individually, we witness existence moment to moment, and then we collectively combine those experiences over eons to empower the next generation of explorers to witness something new as a representative of our species.
That’s a big case to make, and it all starts with you playing a game.
You have the capability to seek the truth
Playing The Witness in the context of its wider argument is about the importance of games throughout history to both people and animals.
In The Witness, you encounter confusing puzzles with esoteric rules. When you first try to solve these, they can appear daunting to the point of impossibility. Or you might assume that you’re not smart enough to figure these things out. But over time, you slowly begin building up a mental vocabulary that enables you to decode and conquer these mazes until you reach a level of fluency with the game’s world.
In this way, The Witness is no different from the games of other species. A lion cub plays with its siblings to help it get comfortable with moving and leaping. This is preparation for a life of hunting and fighting off competitors.
Studies have also shown that rats (and some primates) play games to fine-tune their fight-or-flight responses.
The Witness is a way to help you fine-tune your fight-or-flight response in the face of challenging cerebral problems. If you battle through Blow’s puzzles, you may end up feeling more capable of taking the more complex ideas of the real world.
And having confidence in your capability to understand and solve problems is something The Witness reiterates in one of the first videos you play in the theater room hidden beneath the windmill.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2...and-you_school
The Witness: How to solve every puzzle (walkthrough guide)
The Witness: How to solve the ship’s red door, the puzzle that’s stumped the Internet
The Witness: spoiler-free tips for solving the island’s hardest and most secret puzzles
The Witness: What it means