Understanding the Witness - Mechanical Transference and You - Extra Credits

Tucked away in a secret theater inside the Witness is a film clip from the indie movie Nostalghia, where we watch a man agonizingly - and for no rational reason - try to carry a flickering candle flame across a watery courtyard. This little clip brilliantly captures the feeling of playing The Witness and presents a metaphor for the player's struggle to solve its difficult puzzles.
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♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM

♪ Outro Music: "Atop a Snowy Summit" by Dj CUTMAN

[Rugerfred]

The youtube red loading bar it's indeed quite tempting and asking to be solved.

[wedmunds]

I spent hours trying to complete an perspective puzzle I saw in my park after watching 13 hours of streaming of this game... It consisted of a rotten apple on a tree leading to a perfectly even branch that lead to a floating log in the lake and finally to the brown duck next to it.

[snomangaming]

So this puts the game in a lot of perspective for me. I was really frustrated with the game because of the lack of anything story-wise, as stated in the beginning here. Funnily enough, I did everything in this game, EXCEPT watch all the clips in the theater. My bad! This made a lot of sense tho. How odd to make a game about how much the developer obsessed over said game. Definitely unique, and I wouldn't expect less from Blow

[GoldphishAnimation]

EC, give your artist a cookie for that book with a question mark looking like something one would accomplish in the game. That's just genius.

[DeadUnicornClub]

Tetris.
Can't believe you didn't bring this up in the video.
Tetris.... you all know what I'm talking about.

[ElwoodPlays]

03:23 his hair is shaped like a puzzle and I love that.

[simongreve]

I would have preferred to see a video about the Witness focus on the fact that the entire game is a masterclass in tutorials without handholding. Every new area introduces new elements and through its puzzles slowly lets you teach yourself what everything means and how to go about it. Granted some area's are more succesful at this than others, but when when the mechanics of a particular puzzle finally snaps into place in your mind it feels extremely rewarding.

[JohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnny]

I love how you pack in a bunch of environmental puzzles in this

[krautgazer]

This is the best review I've seen of The Witness. It does justice to the sheer brilliance of the game.

[jonathananatrella]

This game, to me, was a reflection of autism. This might seem like a weird connection to make, so let me explain:

I have high functioning autism and the puzzles were a very good reflection on how I think. Not just the way you solve the problem or make a pattern, but also the way they're seemingly pointless and confusing to people on the outside at first glance. But once you understand how they work, they make a lot of sense.

Another way this reflects autism that I wasn't seeing at first was how you wander about this environment, you don't talk to anyone, but instead interact with your environment by touching things. I need to touch things to really understand them, I need to feel the textures and get the tactile stimulation.

The obsessive compulsive puzzle solving you mention in the video also is a part of it. The way I feel compelled to touch things and draw patterns, my tics, my tunnel vision focus I have on things that really interest me. This obsessive behavior is shown quite well in the game.

I would not be surprised at all if Blow himself had ASD. This certainly isn't the first time someone on the spectrum has made a game, after all. Satoshi Tajiri (the creator of Pokemon) is an adult with Asperger's Syndrome.

[FlameRat_YehLon]

0:12 0:18 0:18 0:18 0:23
0:25 0:33 0:36 0:52 1:03
1:38 1:40 2:25 2:29 3:06
3:10 3:26 3:52 4:12 4:29

I think I find them all.

( 0:09 is obstructed and hence unsolvable. 1:42 is unsolvable anyway due to the place the two star shape goes. Other stuffs might look like environmental puzzle but doesn't qualify one for various reasons.)

[Carlitonsp]

This episode kind of shows the drastic difference in why the EC crew play games and why others do. I've heard a lot of play say the puzzles are unrewarding and uncompelling and just stopped playing playing because they felt they had no reason to. For a lot of people, Puzzle games are played as a challenge that is intended to have a sense of outside reward, either an idea of how this can help you outside the puzzle or a sense that you're somehow improving. That seems to be completely gone from the Witness, (I don't actually, I haven't played the game) and it feels more like an attempt at seeing everyday life through a filter of sorts, which is not necessary what others play puzzle games for.

[austinbeige]

The Witness is one of only a few games that can be considered a masterpiece and that transcend the medium. It can stand comparison with the greats of literature, art and film. The shame is that few developers have fully utilized the flexibility of the medium to expand and experiment with narrative devices. Not only has Jonathon Blow done this he has done it superbly. I've been playing video games since the early 80's and the Witness is by far and away the best game I've ever played.

[Silvndr]

Jonathan Blow: "I see puzzles."
Me: "Where?"
Jonathan Blow: "Everywhere."






And then we all see puzzles

[extrahistory]

Play the Witness, and you start seeing its puzzles everywhere. But why? Can that help us understand it?

[tobedetermined]

I appreciate how the animators put enviromental puzzles in the video itself.
The narrator's tie within the first 2 mins has a puzzled and the rope the two green shirt wearers tug on has a puzzle as well.

[marblethunder]

"This reminds me of a puzzle." - Prof. Layton.

[hagamablabla]

I think games like this demonstrate the separation between games made for fun and games made as art.

[kobijack]

“Did you solve them all?”
Me: don’t do it
Also me: it’s only 20, and in a 5 minute video, I’m sure I can do it.
Me again: W H Y.

[ChazzzyF]

As a person who hasn't played The Witness, I can see one large flaw in this method of storytelling that may hamper it's accessibility to some players.
The game relies on you becoming obsessed with these arbitrary puzzles before the narrative about obsession can really take effect. And if a player doesn't get obsessed in the same way that Jonathan did, then this game is going to lose all meaning, and bore the player.