The Witness

I have been playing The Witness recently, and I feel like its themes, or at least what I percieve as its themes, are powerful and interesting enough to be worth going into in some detail. I won't be spoiling anything in particular about the puzzles or the story, but in a sense discussing the themes is a meta-spoiler. You may want to play the game first to get the full value of experiencing these themes firsthand rather than having them described to you.

In mathematics, a witness is a fancy term for an example. If you say that aliens exist, a witness is an alien. If you want to prove that not all prime numbers are odd, a witness is 2. Many proofs are complicated, but existence proofs are, in this way, very simple: you just need a witness. Much of the game involves solving simple checkerboard puzzles by drawing a line from a start to the end. You are given the board, the game asserts that the board is solvable. All you have to do is provide the witness.

Of course, a witness is also a person who observes something, and observation is the other thing you do a lot of in the game. Despite its core mechanics being no more fundamentally complex than what you'd find in a standard mobile puzzler, the real magic of The Witness comes from its setting and environment. The puzzles are tangible, physical things that you find as you explore the island they inhabit. At first, this seems like a curious and extravagant way to make a puzzle menu. Later, you realise that the puzzles and the environment build on each other in ways that make them inseparable. Finally, you realise that the puzzles are the island, the island is the puzzle, and it was only your narrow-mindedness that tried to pull them apart in the first place.

It may sound surprising for a puzzle game, but the main theme of The Witness is spirituality. This manifests mostly through the game's collection of audio logs scattered throughout the island in hard-to-reach places. Each one is a few minutes of beautifully narrated monologue from a famous thinker on the nature of truth, God, the universe, and other philosophical topics. The main unifying theme behind these is that they address the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, between the physical and the ideal, and between person and God. Not God of the bushy beard and thunderbolts, mind you, but God of the unknowable ultimate truth.

All that over squares and lines? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. In fact, the best moments of The Witness do have a kind of religious quality. You spend such a long time running around, thinking, trying, failing, trying again, and all the while completely lost in the mechanics of the puzzle, down in the figurative and often literal weeds. When you figure it out, however, when you have that spectacular "a-ha!" moment? Your thoughts fly out of the weeds and up into the clouds. You haven't just drawn a line, you've made a discovery, found a new truth with a life of its own. It is no coincidence that the game's final level is atop a mountain, overlooking the whole island of discoveries you made to get there.

And that feeling is really something beyond The Witness itself. Rather, it's about the joy of discovery, of knowledge, of having in whatever small way that window into the great truth of the universe. That truth is there, has always been there, and by just scribbling lines on a piece of paper you can be a witness to it. In that sense, this game provides a simple vehicle that lets you experience a kind of scientific spirituality, Einstein's "cosmic religion".

Experience is, not coincidentally, another big theme in the game. Why bother to make a game when you could explain this idea with a book? The thing is, you can't read a new feeling. And if someone tells you something, it never feels the same as discovering it for yourself. Indeed, I accidentally read the solution to one of the puzzles and it was immensely disappointing. Sure, I beat that puzzle, but the puzzle was just lines on the screen. I missed out on the experience of discovering the truth. In that sense, experience generation can only happen through your actions, can only work because this is a game where you participate.

Near the end, the game turns inward and begins examining itself. It becomes obvious that this experience generation is not a coincidence, but the whole point. Many games are made with a tutorial, but this is a tutorial made into a game. Normally that doesn't work, because the game ends and then what good is a tutorial? However the final, perhaps strongest message is to look around you. The puzzle isn't the board, it's the table the board is sitting on. It's the house around the table. It's the island under the house. It's the sky above the island. The Witness is a tutorial on how to think, and the final level is to turn the game off and keep thinking.

How audacious is that? There are lots of educational games out there, but this is something else entirely. Not content to merely explain or describe, The Witness is a series of experiences that walks you, one self-directed step at a time, to enlightenment. Many of us have believed games to be capable of truly amazing things, but evidence has been pretty thin on the ground. In its own way, this game is a proof by example. It is the witness. And, if you play, you can be a witness to it.