What an interesting game. I guess I like puzzles more than I realized. I had a few thoughts on the game that I’d like to share. I’m not sure that I’ve spoilered anything, exactly, but since it comes from my experience of the end of the game, it may slightly color your experience if you are far from finished with it.
[spoiler]I can see why people have likened this game to Lost, as there are a lot of similarities, but I don’t like the comparison for reasons of my own. Lost was meant to be an exploration of how characters interacted with mystery, but the show handled all of that horribly; the mysteries themselves were absolutely pointless and incongruous and led nowhere, and yet all of the subtext and clues and outright statements by the showrunners played up the importance of the mysteries and their meanings, essentially lying to the viewers – and not in a fun, PT Barnum way. Plus, the way the characters did interact with the mysteries was annoying and moronic. Like the showrunners. Not a worthy comparison at all, to my mind.
This game is, from one angle at least, about how we… one… you… interact with the mystery/mysteries of the game. Most games are about a story, even if it’s as simple a story as protagonist slaughters ostensible bad guys. This game has little to no story in that sense, and is rather, as I say, an exploration of interacting with mystery. It’s delightfully recursive, in that the experience approaches mystery in terms of solving puzzles, as well as in terms of *how *we solve puzzles – or how we learn to see puzzles and solve them. Further, almost invoking Mandelbrot, we are invited to explore how we examine what mystery there may be to the puzzles themselves (and to the environment they are in… and to the puzzles and mysteries found from *that *new perspective…).
My experience with the game somewhat mirrors my actual experience with trying to understand Zen Buddhism over the course of my life. When I was young, how people talked about Zen and my own fascinations led me to think of Zen as a mystical practice, of the sort in which years of faithful study would give one magical kung fu powers and a sort of opaque wisdom (riddled with riddles). That’s a bit like the way I viewed this game, trying to force it into a twisty story, a psychological thriller. And there’s just enough of that sort of shape and hue to the thing that I was able to hang on to those preconceived notions and thus retard the growth of my understanding.
Later, I finally got it through my head that Zen was not that. That there was something about the meaning of the question of the sound of one hand clapping that was different from what I expected. I began to approach koans like trick questions, leading me closer to, and also farther from, the understanding of them that we are meant to have. I learned that the proper answer to the question of the sound of one hand clapping was to extend ones hand, and I figured that it must be a reference to a handshake, or reaching out to lend a helping hand, or some similar tricksiness.
But then I joined a monastery and meditated atop a mountain for thirty years. Actually, no, I bought and read a no-nonsense book on the Zen koans – a sort of game guide, as it were – and learned that Zen was almost closer to the opposite of the magical mystery tour that I first had thought, and that the purpose of teaching the koans is pretty much ruined when they are treated like a trick questions to which there is a clever answer. At the risk of a recklessly dangerous oversimplification of Zen: when someone asks you some fool nonsense question about the sound of one hand clapping, you can respond with a simple and straightforward demonstration. Thirty years atop a mountain is a long way to go for, “I refute it thus!”
The Witness is very Zen-like, but, and I could be wrong for I am far from an expert in Zen, it has a somewhat different purpose. Where Zen teaches us to de-mystify the world around us, this game seeks to imbue – no, I’m not clever enough to put into a sentence or two what is empowered through the experience of the game’s final moments (both versions). I think it’s something you need to see for yourself.
Or perhaps I should have said, “Puzzle out for yourself.”[/spoiler]