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View Full Version : Inside vs. The Witness: Sincere Critique vs. Exploitation



IMPress Polly
10-27-2016, 07:35 AM
Jonathan Blow has been widely credited with bringing indie games into the cultural mainstream of video gaming with his legendary 2008 title Braid, which was the first indie game to yield fame and fortune for its creator. This development incentivized many, many other previously reluctant people to go ahead and make their own independent games, leading directly to their present commonality. Blow has been regarded as a genius since Braid for both this accomplishment and for the sheer brilliance of the way that Braid turned innumerable longstanding video game tropes on their heads (like for example what appears to be a damsel in distress narrative for most of the game is ultimately revealed to expose the player as a stalker and the 'kidnapped' woman as one who seeks protection from you) and constantly introduced new elements all along the way. Blow's new game The Witness, however, I think shows the danger of even indie-based success going to one's head, as, in contrast to Braid, it comes across to me as a rather exploitative game.

It's quite hilarious reading the glowing critical reviews of The Witness for the bullshit they think are its accomplishments: the way its more than 600 puzzles achieve complexity through simplicity of design, thus feeling very Silicon Valley Zen Buddhist or whatever. Those who's take on the game is of that nature obviously haven't seen its so-called secret ending. Here's a look at the normal ending that these reviewers probably earned versus the "secret" ending you unlock by completing all the puzzles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4-C9dUOHxw

Ya see what I'm getting at? The "secret" ending aims to reveal to the player just how pointless everything they've just done actually was! It does so by revealing that the player character has been inside a game industry motivational program. When he awakens, supposedly better prepared for life, he finds that he cannot relate to the real world at all now. He stumbles around, applying the type of "gamey" puzzle solutions you've just spent over 70 hours mastering to a real-world environment and it just looks pathetic and ridiculous. Eventually he gives up, stumbles outside to his little Buddhist garden, and falls asleep on the bench. The point here is obviously that the player was being used the whole time, tricked into believing that they were discovering the meaning of life by solving hundreds of pointless puzzles and watching video logs packed with vague, 'thought-provoking' quips from various historical philosophers when in reality spending all this time in artificial environments has instead actually rendered you less prepared for life! Clearly the reviewers missed this subversive point! ...Or did they??

Did the reviewers actually, in fact, miss the point of the game or did they just see through the exploitation involved in the process of reaching the game's theoretically subversive conclusion? You see, the player must spend over 70 hours doing the very sort of things that the "hidden" ending critiques: engaging on the basis of its design artifice. In theory, the design of The Witness is fundamentally like that of Braid, but blown way out of proportion to a pretentious degree. Braid was a much smaller and far less expensive game after all! There's no $40 price tag and 70 hours of time investment in pointless "gamey" conventions required in Braid to get the player to its point. In fact, The Witness is the most expensive indie game ever made! Blow excuses this by highlighting its size, but this only brings us back to the question of why it is so large. Does such a simple message really take more than 70 hours to convey or are you really just being used? Has Mr. Blow's current celebrity status gone to his head to such a degree that he's really just trying to pass off what in reality is a pretty conventional, superficial game filled with plastic, themed environments (jungle zone, lava zone, desert zone, ice zone, etc.) and pointless puzzles and video logs as a bold, brilliant, and subversive work of art? Unfortunately, I think that's exactly the case. I think that Blow is engaging in much of the very sort of exploitation that The Witness's final ending critiques and that this takes a lot away from the game's impact.

(For more details on this theory of Mr. Blow's motivations, I recommend checking out Liz Ryerson's excellent article on this very subject in The New Inquiry! (http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/taming-the-inexplicable/))

There is a worthy contrast: the people at Playdead's new game Inside proves anew that one can convey this same sort of idea far more efficiently than does The Witness. Inside conveys the same fundamental point that it takes The Witness more than 70 hours to in less than 5 hours and for a price tag of $20 rather than $40. Inside reminds me a lot more of Braid than does The Witness!

Inside has a nameless player character traversing a conventional type of gaming environment from one end to the other, solving a bunch of puzzles as their means of navigation and survival. Along the way, you encounter hordes of zombified people with special mind control helmets on until eventually the game has the player character put on such a helmet...and then lie down and go limp, implying that the player character has, in fact, been one of the zombified people under mind control the whole time! It turns out that a giant blob-like monster has apparently been controlling the player character in order to free itself from the laboratory where it's been hold up. The implication here is that you, the player, are a mindless zombie being used by the designers of games like these in order to alleviate their own feelings of being controlled by others. The result is a straightforward, to-the-point commentary on the victimization of gamers by the video game industry that wastes no time on filler material in the conveyance of its aim to psychologically liberate you.

I enjoy it when games critique the games industry! But I just wanted to point out the difference here between superficial and sincere critiques.