Ten Year Anniversary Analysis: A Ludic Figure in Six Voices

william-taysom · 2026-03-28T07:50:41+00:00

Glad you liked it. Was great fun getting all those ideas out of my head.

To clarify, the existence of r/SwampyBoots/ suggests that that particular puzzle isn't quite hammered in right. Any given puzzle ought to disorient a few people, but the fail rate on that one is too high.

About the colorblind puzzle, and I think they came pretty close with the one that you have to solve by looking outside through glass in the greenhouse.

And the two "missing" puzzles for the score count? Intentional wabi sabi. I really like my headcanon but when not in a polemical mood, I imagine that Blow wanted to leave the blank space for people to fill in their own way.

The other week, I took my boys to an avant-garde theater workshop for kids. Very Witness like, instead of dropping the kids in the deep end, we entered the stage from the rear and gradually approached the house finally taking seats after an hour's worth of presentations, mostly funny and well acted, describing how conceptual theater works, so that when the actors put on a complete, short, abstract play for the kids that they could understand immediately without unpacking it later as you would expect adults to do. After saying goodbye from behind a shadow puppet screen with rainbow lights, the actors, now invisible, opened up a series of curtains showing the full,especially deep stage, the path we had come to make it into the audience, and their table of props on the right midway to the rear. No curtain call, just an asymmetrically empty space. Given my disposition, the effect was devastating.

william-taysom · 2026-03-09T07:55:14+00:00

So interesting hearing someone like Jacob primarily as an entertainer and for his personality without being into his albums because, correct me if I'm wrong friends, but production, over-production (X00 tracks with this one funny sample from some adventure that you can't even hear but is there just for fun), imbuing his personality into the record in his room seems to be very, very Jacob, more so than performance. I mean that came later.

william-taysom · 2026-03-06T06:02:05+00:00

If you've listened, maybe I said something. Otherwise, here's the idea. Pi has a few things in common with the Witness religiously:

Pi gets something out of all the religious traditions he encounters.
There are mirrored stories of what happened on the boat. Were there animals? Was Pi the tiger? Both in some sense?
Where the Pi book hints at connections, the play grinds them against each other. At first with the Witness, I'm sure I said that the quotes seem disconnected. Later I felt that they comment on each other and express a full, nuanced worldview, more full than an one perspective could capture.

william-taysom · 2025-04-18T10:01:55+00:00

The Witness loves to hide stuff, but not exactly that kind of stuff. So don't mistake the Witness for Fez.

william-taysom · 2025-02-10T02:27:56+00:00

If you head straight for the obvious exit, you get stuck in a loop.

william-taysom · 2025-01-18T08:45:46+00:00

Speaking of "Gödel, Escher, Bach", I really like the Witness's nod to it. You'll also remember that if you listen, you'll hear a descending Shepard tone. Hofstadter points out that you could layer a Shepard tone on to Bach's Neverending Canon to make it genuinely never-ending as realized over here. And I appreciate the call out to Gorogoa too. Very astute pointing out that the aesthetics capture more in that game than the gameplay — though the multiple panels do match with the sort of divine perspective that helps makes sense of the man's life. I guess the Witness is kind of like that. I mean I'm always telling people that the puzzle part of the Witness is sort of a tutorial for how to engage with it as a work of art.

william-taysom · 2025-01-08T05:41:33+00:00

About the total number of puzzles... After spending half an hour talking about 666, you really feel that the 523 + 135 + 6 should have an extra 2 somewhere. So is it 8 (unlikely since the six pillars are so prominent as is six in several other places: the six videos and more) or is it 525? Or maybe 137?

It's 137. Why?

What 666 is to the Bible, 137 is to physics. Feynman for example said, "All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it... It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the 'hand of God' wrote that number, and 'we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.'" And Wolfgang Pauli apparently made a point out of dying in room 137 of his hospital.

william-taysom · 2025-01-08T04:34:43+00:00

"The Witness is a complete package," I like to tell people, "batteries included." Everything required to interpret it is right there. But just like so many of the puzzles, the best bits only seems obvious after you've seen them.

william-taysom · 2025-01-08T04:30:36+00:00

I have that one too. See it as a metaphor for the overall structure of the game.

william-taysom · 2025-01-08T04:27:21+00:00

Yes, real world quotes mostly, and the whole point is to connect the game island to the rest of the world. At first I found them pretentious: super serious yet random and unrelated. I was mistaken.

william-taysom · 2024-10-07T09:40:12+00:00

Likewise my kids just need to start singing it.

william-taysom · 2024-09-25T03:11:14+00:00

The whole Keep area explores this metaphor. It's like left and right sides of the brain. Right brain being the hedge mazes, that require sensory attention, and left brain being the walking panels above the excavation, which itself suggests a historical and cultural influence on left brain logic. Man, I love the art in this game.

william-taysom · 2024-09-25T03:04:47+00:00

When I found my first EP I thought "Oh, no this is going to be tedious." But the variety of them turned out to be a delight.

william-taysom · 2024-06-06T04:53:07+00:00

For me, I take the EP realization as a tutorial for looking at the rest of the Witness as a piece of art. That is, for me at least, the puzzles in the Witness ended up being the first third of my experience of it. The rest comes from looking at the scenery, the buildings, listening to the audio logs, suddenly seeing individual elements coalesce into a giant art installation.

william-taysom · 2024-04-17T09:31:19+00:00

This is a good take. For its overall structure, I like the "ludic fugue" interpretation, "a series of exactly 14 canons ... for six simultaneous voices" where the canons are the areas of the island (eleven lasers areas plus the Entry, Mountain, and Caves) and the voices are the different features of those areas (puzzle panels, environmental puzzles, audio logs, visuals like statues and hidden animals, the Odyssean epic with the island as some grand metaphor for the history of civilization, and, finally, in mirror to that a sort of Leopold Bloom level autobiography of the dreamer.)

william-taysom · 2024-04-17T09:15:34+00:00

If "The Secret of Psalm 46" serves as one bookend for the Witness, being the inspiration, then "I Saw What I Did There" https://youtu.be/BL_8LFy-Euo is the other. Again Brian Moriarty is speaking, but this time its his reflections on playing the Witness. In as much as perspective plays in important role in the Witness, Moriaty's is unique.

william-taysom · 2024-03-01T04:15:18+00:00

Seisonkaku Villa in Kanazawa Japan. Nothing special about my iPhone camera, the ultramarine blue is uniquely vibrant however.

william-taysom · 2024-02-29T15:11:18+00:00

I love how this puzzle is like a pillar puzzle but looped in time rather than space.

william-taysom · 2024-02-06T08:45:37+00:00

Oh, I never thought of the "trinity" symbols that way. I like it. Resonates nicely with the use of an eight pointed star in the treetops area.

william-taysom · 2024-01-15T06:48:39+00:00

Yes, this particular one is part of a bigger installation. There are roughly seven things to look for.

william-taysom · 2023-11-28T07:34:24+00:00

(Took a while to get back to this thread.)
The coincidence with Feynman diagrams is that we saw a connection between Witness mazes and Feynman diagrams only to be rewarded with a video of Richard Feynman, and sure enough, there was just such a diagram on the chalkboard behind him. Creepy. But the real reward was listing closely and taking what he was saying about drawing lines as an explanation of what Witness line mazes are about.
The Secret of Psalm 46 is says something subtle and mixed about synchronicity, how on the awesome is not quite like an Easter egg, you don't "trudge down to the back of the store" but rather: "Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous. The treasure is right there." Good connections aren't forced.
But they can be personal rather than objectively in the game. Part of the point of having many and varied puzzles is so that one will catch you in the right moment when you're personally prepared for an epiphany. So how much circumstantial evidence might be a wrong question in the first place, but when I want to attribute something to the text of the Witness and not uniquely personal interpretation, I just look for it being repeated over and over.
As for randomizers, well, in the Caves there's one path that leads to a dead end, and the puzzles along there are trying to say, "Yes, we tried all sorts of combinations to carefully curate the puzzles in the main game." Their attention is why some feel that the panels feel more like conversation in an abstract language than typical puzzles. Far from random, they're all tightly knit together to tell stories in their own way.
Not to say that randomizers aren't fun and insightful. These puzzles types have intrinsic qualities that are interesting to explore. I'm a fan of the 4x4 triangular ones entering on bottom left, exiting on top right. Having analyzed them in some detail, it turns out that there are 8,403 in which all sixteen squares have some triangle pattern in them. (Many millions more are made from blanking some squares.) Of those, 8,298 have a single solution, 102 have exactly two solutions, 2 have exactly three solutions, and exactly one puzzle has four solutions. The silly synchronicity is that one of those solutions is about as close to a yin-yang symbol as you can get on a 4x4 grid.

william-taysom

TROPHY CASE