Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

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I've been playing The Witness recently. I've enjoyed it a lot, and had a lot of "aha moments", but I wouldn't say I altogether understand the game. It has a very elusive nature. I'm working through (what I believe to be) the "ending" at the moment, but there is still a lot of the pre-ending stuff that I haven't figured out yet.

At first glance The Witness is a puzzle game, made annoying by the fact that you have to walk everywhere instead of clicking "Next Puzzle". But then you occasionally see things in the environment that are just really pleasing. An example that springs to mind is a bunch of broken metal in a window[0], and some branches on a tree, that line up with the sun (which doesn't move) to cast a shadow of a woman sitting underneath a tree[1].

And there's loads of this stuff. And noticing it doesn't contribute anything at all to the apparent objective of the game (except where it does!), but it adds so much that you just wouldn't get if it were the simple puzzle game that it initially appears to be.

I really like this game.

[0] https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3706

[1] https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3705

I think one of the key flourishes of the game has to do with intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. The game never presents a locked door where there is some key elsewhere, and the key goes into your inventory, and now you can open the door. At all times, all doors are openable. But you may not know the rules to the puzzle on the door yet. Once you learn them, the 'key' is knowledge and the 'inventory' is your mind.

If you're keen to this then you will find it surprising how few games work this way.

Outer Wilds does this as well.

This is one of my favorite things about that game. You could technically beat The Outer Wilds on your very first time loop, but in practice you need to explore just about everything in order to understand how to do it.

That game has a moment when you realize it's not quite about what you thought it was about. I hope this isn't a spoiler but there are black obelisks around the world. If you know what they are for then you've found this secondary goal

I think it's the game I've played that comes closest to feeling like a genuine mystery. Even though I think I've finished it, there are many aspects I still don't "get". It may just be that it's good at simulating this experience (sort of like a Lynch movie) but I don't think it matters. It's a great puzzle game wrapped in an enigma. And a piece of art too.

When you're done playing, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0

Games are part art, what's more to understand?

There's some fun image out there I can't exactly recall, but it's basically of an interview with some game devs, and one of them saying something like "We wanted to have a pot with flowers on the table here, and when you come back to this room later, the color of the flowers changes. No gameplay consequences. But we cut it for time. Why did we want it? Because we thought it'd be cool."

But in a lot of games there's tons of stuff like that which doesn't get cut. Gamedev is full of those "because it'd be cool" or other vague artistic reasons (as opposed to business reasons or researched game testing reasons) for something to be there, or something to be polished well beyond reason.

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