bvilleneuve

@ottoman673: I hope it didn't come across like I was saying the puzzles were too hard for you. I'm not saying you're deficient or anything. I'm just saying that there's a certain attitude a person can have where the act of doing the puzzles is inherently very rewarding, and you seem to not have that attitude. Again, I'm not saying that's something wrong with you! Just saying that attitude seems to be the common element among people who like The Witness, and a lack of that attitude is the common element among people who don't like it.

I'm still having trouble figuring out what your objection to the quotes was. Can you dig into what it was about the Schweikart quote that bothered you so much? For what it's worth, I don't think it was meant as a comment on geopolitical affairs. For that matter, none of the audio logs are meant to be taken as dogma. They're just supposed to stimulate your brain and make you think about the experience from a different angle. In fact, I remember that particular audio log as one of my favorite moments in The Witness. I found it the first time I went to the top of the mountain, and it gave me something interesting to think about as I looked out over the island, at all the puzzles I'd done and at all the puzzles I had yet to do. And it helped to cement what to me is one of the major themes of The Witness, which is taking away all the petty bullshit that usually occupies us (whether it's geopolitical strife or hollow reward treadmills in video games), seeing what remains, and trying to nurture that.

If learning and demonstrating that learning isn't reward enough for you, then The Witness probably just isn't your thing. It's not that you're dumb -- lots of intelligent people don't like The Witness, and that's okay -- but you might not be much of a self-directed learner.

The animosity you (and lots of others) seem to have is a bit more troubling. It seems like these days anytime a tries to do something interesting or philosophical, people aren't at all interested in engaging with the work. They just reject it wholesale as "pretentious." What do you mean when you say The Witness is pretentious? What useful information does that give a person in a discussion of this game? Because it seems like the meaning of that word has been diluted to the point that it just means you don't like a thing and aren't interested in thinking about it anymore. That's anti-intellectual, and ultimately damaging to video games as a medium.

@kcin: Right. The beginning of The Witness is there to teach anyone who's seeking to learn that what at first appears to be a jumble of visual and auditory information can actually, with the right openness to the signs and signals, be sorted into useful communication. Which in a way means from the very start The Witness is always teaching you that as an environmental lesson and as a logical lesson, often at the very same time. Which really underlines how thematically consistent (and amazing!) this game is.

For a long time, Half-Life 2 was my gold standard demonstration of this kind of subtly guiding design. The Witness has completely replaced it.

@kcin: You're right, now that you mention it I did only go up to the bluffs by deciding I'd start the game by searching out and following every single visual cue offered. I learned some really interesting things by doing it that way, and I think I would actually recommend that anybody starting The Witness from nothing should do that.

In fact, I'd even recommend anybody who didn't consciously notice the little guiding cues at the start of the game should go back and try to see them. There's some cool stuff. Like, for instance, the very clear divide in the right outside of the starting castle, which is almost absurdly tightly-designed to encourage you toward the left path where you'll learn that sometimes you just won't be ready to solve a puzzle yet, and to get you used to backtracking. And the way the path leads directly down a very inviting little divide in the rock, with a beautiful sense of perspective that just makes you want to go through it and see what's on the other side. And the way, after you finish the bluffs, there are several very clearly delineated paths that will all take you in a different direction. And the way that the game's visuals actually subtly divide back before the mirror puzzles, if you're the type of person who really likes the color pink and who might subconsciously want to go a little off the beaten path. And the way that we obvious path followers who finish our first linear set of logic puzzles are given a shooty laser as a reward, while people who go off the path and solve a set of perspective/perception-based puzzles are given nothing but a beautiful view of the village area.

Basically I've been having a bunch of fun close-reading The Witness's design.

I disagree completely. Shutting down panels isn't punitive, it's communicative (mostly) and obstructive (slightly). As many people have noted, it's possible to accidentally find solutions to the vital tutorial puzzles, and if you're not fastidious about testing different hypotheses until you're sure your mental model is correct, it's possible to get quite far into the tutorials without fixing your misconceptions. If you're putting in solutions that you could easily check and see aren't valid, you have nobody but yourself to blame. If you believe your solutions are valid, then returning to an earlier puzzle will help you correct yourself. And if you're the type of person who's satisfied just brute forcing their way through this game, I'd question why you're even playing in the first place.

This is interesting advice, but I would caution people against trying to pass this as some kind of standard starting kit to The Witness. I followed the path up to the bluffs, but after that I briefly checked out the desert, didn't figure it out, and moved on before even completing a single puzzle. I only finished the desert many hours later, with knowledge from other areas of the different ways puzzles could be solved and a big helping of just feeling like dubbing around until I understood it. If I'd tried to bang my head against the desert until I was done I would have had a bad time. I think The Witness benefits greatly from always giving yourself the freedom to walk away from a set of puzzles without feeling like a failure and without feeling like you've missed anything.

Thematically speaking, I think that's one of the most powerful things about The Witness, and it plays into one of my favorite pieces of quoted material from the game (some of you will know what I'm talking about): At a very low, panel-to-panel level, there are rarely more than a few correct paths that solve a given puzzle. But when considered in aggregate, there is no wrong (and by extension no single right) path through the island. Which end of that spectrum holds the key to what The Witness is as an experience? I (and a certain quoted individual) would argue that it's neither end--it's all about the connection between the two.

So The Witness is about finding and nurturing the intrinsic rewards of solving very difficult problems, which will allow you to cast off the shackles of extrinsic reward systems and ultimately live a more fulfilling life less dependent on ephemeral praise from your electronic entertainment.

...And you guys are seeing an ending where everything is reset and you're left with just the knowledge you've gathered that nobody can take away from you and hey that was all that ever mattered at all really and not finding it thematically satisfying?

I just don't know that I can relate. I loved it.

@nicolenomicon:

I didn't have any of these problems. I guess I've always been sort of a self-directed learner. When I felt like I'd solved a puzzle but I wasn't sure I had the correct understanding, I didn't just wander off and assume that was that. I actually would go back and re-solve the puzzle different ways assuming different things until I was sure I had it right. For me, the puzzles weren't the reward, they were a conduit to allow me to learn and to demonstrate learning. And that makes it so that I don't even understand the other big criticism people throw at The Witness (i.e., that it doesn't reward them enough for completing puzzles), because learning is its own reward, and unlocking more puzzles just meant more opportunities to demonstrate new learning. It was great.

And on the movement speed, you know there's a run button, right? You can get from one side of the island to the other in a couple minutes, tops. And anyway, I found that the movement speed made perfect sense considering the insane density of this game. Adding a more linear tutorial would have destroyed the whole point of The Witness. The first and most important thing that The Witness tells you is that it has things to teach you if you just open yourself up to learning.

I guess it's not for everyone.

@aethelred: @mylifeforaiur:Yes, it went up on PSN before Steam. It'll be up on Steam in about three hours. It doesn't bother me much, though. I have to go to work anyway. It's crazy. I've been looking forward to this game since I was halfway done with college, and now all that's standing in my way is one day of work.

As is implied above: Zero puzzles. But just you wait until twelve or so hours from now.

@davidh219: I'm seeing your arguments, and I'm not going to make a personal attack or anything cuz that's gauche as hell, but what do you imagine developers are doing when they charge more than you think a game is worth based on production costs? Do you imagine it's a classic "greedy devs lazy devs" situation?

For me, at least, the amount a game cost to make doesn't enter into my decision one single iota, because I know the limits of the knowledge I can possibly hold about any video game's development. I guess I just trust developers to charge the lowest amount they can when taking into account the market for their game, because why wouldn't they? And I trust developers to release their games when they're ready, and not to just sit on them polishing things that don't need polishing.

And I agree with you about bread, it's a huge pain in the neck to bake it yourself.