Info Tech The clue that there was something wrong should have been that I was writhing around on the floor, sobbing. Yet at the time it made perfect sense. When you’re ambushed by approximately half a million Tetris-style bricks that won’t stop haunting you and taunting you even as you start hitting them and screaming at them to go away, this kind of thing happens. Sometimes you just want to be left alone, safe from the torment, and be allowed to once again live in a manner close to the way you see fit. So the sweat that was pouring and the tears that were flowing just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Scratch that: They weren’t a big deal at all.
It’s only now that I can look back on this that I realize I had a problem. A big problem. I was addicted to Blow. Or, maybe more accurately, I was hooked on doing lines.
In both cases, I guess I should explain (in case there’s any confusion), as a result of Jonathan Blow’s new video game The Witness.
Yes, I had fallen into a trap I didn’t know could still ensnare me at my age of level and experience: I had become so invested in a game that it was taking over (and ruining) my life. I’ve spent plenty of time with games in recent years—as a small sampling: Civilization (as always), BioShock 3, even Fallout 4 if you want to get more recent—and when I was a kid, I was even more addicted to playing anything and everything new, the instant it came out. But The Witness is the first game in a decade, or maybe longer, that returned me to that youthful, terrifying level of crazed devotion I thought I’d manage to abandon.
While I was playing the game in most of the month since its release, it really bothered me. Now that I’ve “finished,” it’s clear why that is: It’s the whole point.
Lines aligning
Looking at it from a distance, The Witness is not hard to unpack on its most elemental level. You begin in a dark tunnel, trudging ever forward toward a glimmer of light that eventually resolves itself as a simple shape: a circle with a short horizontal line connected to it. By selecting the circle and then dragging the pointer you fill the complete shape, and then something happens. In this case, a door opens and you move on, before long facing something that’s slightly more advanced (a line with a 90-degree turn). Solve that one and before long you’re in the broad, bright, beautiful island, à la Myst, where you’ll encounter literally hundreds of puzzles like these.
They get a lot harder very quickly, of course. Sooner than you might expect, you’re progressing from basic mazes to challenges involving separation (there must always be a line between all the black and white squares); symmetry (your line is matched, in mirror image, on the other side of the board); color pairing; connect the dots; my personal ligne noir, shape matching, in which the figures you draw must outline one or more geometrical forms you’re provided (in theory—though the difficulty I had solving these left me seriously wondering); and plenty more.
But even though its riddles rapidly evolve from mild to maddening, The Witness is structured so that you always have the essential tools you need to solve them: Built-in tutorials guide you gracefully through new concepts over half a dozen puzzles, for example, and when ideas are combined, you get a chance to acquaint yourself with the new relationship before things start getting really nutty. Blow may be a gleefully evil sadist, but he’s a fair gleefully evil sadist.
He’s not necessarily an overly obvious one, however. During the course of your time on the island, you’ll discover what appears to be a story: a community frozen in time, with people changed into statues while doing ordinary, everyday things. Who are they? Why are they here? And can you help them—or is your destiny to become one of them? These questions are not easily answered, even if you discover many of the audio and video recordings scattered around that investigate the scientific and spiritual relationships that seem to underlie the land’s logic. Even so, you’ll ponder them as you move from one section of the island to another, either trying to track down the next hint you need or giving yourself a respite from your present frustrations by doing something easier for a few minutes.
Straight, but not narrow
Don’t focus too much on matters like these, though. The Witness really starts proving itself in earnest once you approach the final area of the game, the mountain, and discover something that shows you that the very world itself isn’t what you’ve always thought it was. A squiggly line, on a sign planted on the rock next to you, turns out to be exactly the same shape—when seen from hundreds of feet above—as a lake and river you’ve traversed probably dozens of times. What happens if you take your cursor and treat them as if they’re a puzzle of their own? What indeed.
It’s at this precise moment that The Witness becomes something closer to brilliant, as you’re inspired to backtrack and reconsider everything you’ve looked at across the whole game with this new information. And suddenly nothing is the same. You’re seeing these lines everywhere. On a track at the quarry. On the side of a shipwreck. At the shore of a lake. And in places you wouldn’t think they’d even be possible. I felt a chilling thrill at discovering one that ought to have been impossible (suggestion: look up), but that ultimately made perfect sense.
Whether it’s computers, music, movies, sports, or something else entirely, there’ssomething out there that transfixes us, that drives us against our better judgment (and, in many cases, common sense) to explore and understand to its fullest. Whether the so-called “environmental puzzles” in The Witness could really exist is not the issue (because they can’t). But what Blow and his team have done, in a way I’ve never quite seen anywhere else, is capture the spark of controlled insanity that’s waiting inside all of us to be tapped. Devote much of your life—maybe even too much of your life—to a pursuit, and you really do start seeing it and hearing it everywhere. Then what you do you?
Here, at least, there’s no choice: You have to keep going. And its two endings suggest the places where this may lead: one to disaster (of a sort), a lone, lamentable turn of an endless cycle, and one to release, where you’re forced to integrate your fixation into your existence. Is the real tragedy living forever in your delusion or snapping out of it? What remains once you’ve abandoned all you thought you were?
The Witness, then, is no mere puzzle game: It’s a complex existentialist drama that compels us to examine who are and how—or if—we can be better, and what we’re prepared to do to bring about the outcome we desire. It demands you consider your every action within the framework of how it contributes to your obsession, so that the process of doing so becomes your obsession. Maybe you can escape from that, maybe you can’t, but sooner or later you’re going to have to face it. A friend of mine celebrated his “success” at completing the game with what he assumed to be the highest possible score, only to be drawn back in weeks later when he realized he missed something—and now, once again, you can’t pry him away from it. It’s the “first-person solver” equivalent of Sid Meier’s classic “just one more turn” gameplay model, but worse. In Civilization you might have a better chance of beating down the Babylonians once and for all if you hang on just another few minutes, but in The Witness there’s not much tangible difference between finishing 50 percent of the game and, assuming such a thing is even technically possible, 100 percent of the game.
In absolute terms, anyway. But for those who see the work, even in pursuit of a nebulous goal, as its own reward, the two aren’t even in the same universe. When asked in 1923 why he wanted to summit Mount Everest, George Mallory replied, “Because it’s there.” The Witness reminds us that we’re no different today, no matter what mountains we long to climb.