In the summer of 2008, at the beginning of what would become a sort of revolution in independent gaming, Jonathan Blow released his first game, Braid, on the Xbox 360’s digital Live Arcade.
A time-manipulating, postmodern riff on Super Mario Bros, Braid was ecstatically well received, and today, less than a decade later, it has been assuredly welcomed into the canon – a high-water mark for indie gaming and a modern classic by any measure.
It’s been seven years since Braid exploded onto the market, and this week its brilliant, reclusive designer is releasing his much anticipated second game: The Witness, a brain-ravaging, mind-spraining epic that has more in common with Finnegans Wake than Grand Theft Auto V. It’s billed as a puzzle game, but that hardly does the complexity justice: it’s a puzzle game for the mega-brainy and super-cerebral, a puzzle game for gaming’s high-brow.
“It took me seven years to make this game,” Blow says wearily, calling me from a cafe in San Francisco, nursing a coffee and understandably exhausted. “That’s a really, really long time. I’ve spent a large portion of my life on this thing – mostly to make it, in my eyes, as good as it can be.” That rigorous perfectionism is apparent in the final product: there isn’t a detail in The Witness that seems out of place.
The Witness is set on an uninhabited island furnished, perhaps divinely, with a lot of gridded, chessboard-sized puzzles, elaborately wired together and variously affixed to doors, walls, fences, trees and any other surface that will bear them. The object of each puzzle couldn’t be simpler: maneuver a snake-like digital line from one end of the board to another. But the obstacles devised to complicate that maneuver – from auditory cues to tricks of light and color – range from clever to radically ingenious. There are more than 600 puzzle boards arranged around the island in total. A player of reasonable intelligence can expect a roughly 80-hour investment to finish them.
Nor are these 80 hours spent in leisure. It isn’t easy, putting your intellect to work on problems that appear, at least at first, to have no logical solution. You might spend two hours scrutinizing a single hopeless challenge, your head aching, your eyes watering uncontrollably, as you try for the thousandth time to reverse-engineer your way to whatever it is you’re plainly missing. Or you may send your Playstation controller pinwheeling across the room as you swear, with certainty, that the question you’re staring down doesn’t have an answer – when suddenly the right one occurs to you.
There are no hints or tips in The Witness. There are no arrows to guide you, no manuals to consult, no winning strategies to be apprised of. There isn’t a whisper of instruction. There is nothing between you and the puzzle. Scarcely are video games so simple, so pure. If most games are like blockbuster movies, The Witness is a symphony.
“We can do some very interesting things if we put down language as a crutch for communication,” Blow says. “That’s the experiment of this game: just don’t use language at all. I wanted to see what kinds of knowledge and experience we could build up without it.”
Spending seven years on a single project is not a luxury that many game designers can afford – but thanks to Braid’s commercial success, and because Blow had financed and developed the game himself, the returns were his alone to reap. He found himself with a small fortune. What to do with it? Blow’s instinct was to reinvest and get to work on a second self-financed game. But those with more experience in the industry strongly advised against it. “Everyone told me that it isn’t smart to take the money I made on Braid and spend it on another game, because if I don’t finish it or if it bombs I’m broke again,” Blow recalls. “So I took that advice to heart and approached some publishers to talk to them.” It did not go well.
“It became very clear to me that I just wasn’t going to be able to make what I wanted if I took anyone’s money at all,” he says. The big publishers typically seduce young designers with promises of legitimacy and inexhaustible resources – in exchange for which one divests any claim to authority or power. This much was obvious in Blow’s early meetings. “Even just the structure of the deals offered – under what terms I would be getting money and what kind of control I’d have – it became clear: they did not understand the concept of a reality in which a developer would come to them who wasn’t desperate for their money.” Blow came to understand the truth of the situation: game No 2 couldn’t be a studio effort. “I would have to pay for it myself in order to do what I’m doing.”
It’s doubtful, had Blow taken a publisher’s money, that The Witness would have ever made it to the world in its present form. It’s hard to imagine an investor with the patience to see a project of this scale through: an industry accustomed to shipping out annual installments of the hottest space saga or pirate adventure can’t quite comprehend Blow’s glacial methods and peerless tenacity. The kind of resolve that makes The Witness so flawlessly coherent makes no sense to the triple-A studios. Genius needs time. They’d rather get whatever they’re working on out the door.
And yet the greatness of The Witness has to do with more than mere technical precision. Its ambitions are intellectual and philosophical – it strives to be, and succeeds as, a work of serious thought. Such an ambition is virtually unheard of in the gaming world. It isn’t simply that developers seem more interested in machine guns and rocket ships than in emotional nuance and psychological shading. It’s that developers are rarely afforded the opportunity to express themselves as artists at all. The most distinctive thing about The Witness is that it is resolutely the product of a single creative vision. It is the personal expression of an author: the game is Jonathan Blow.
“When I sit down to try to make a game,” Blow says, “it’s not that different from what a serious novelist tries to do. I’m seriously wrangling with an idea that I’m to express in a particular form.” Elsewhere in the industry this authorial impulse hardly seems to occur to people. “I try to talk to other designers and I feel like I’m talking to aliens. They just don’t understand why I do things this way.”
Serious novelists tend to be well versed in literature and other arts. But it may be, I suggest to Blow, that a lot of video game designers are familiar only with other video games – meaning the intellectual pool drawn from isn’t deep. “I suspect you’re right just looking at what’s produced,” he says. “You don’t feel strong influences from other forms. You might play a game that has a good story. But compare the quality of that story to a novel, and the novel just beats the shit out of the game in every dimension.” The reason? “If your idea of a good story is a Star Wars novelization, that’s very different than if your idea of a good story is Gravity’s Rainbow.”
It may be helpful, in fact, to think of Jonathan Blow as a kind of Thomas Pynchon of gaming, and of The Witness as his Gravity’s Rainbow. He certainly aspires to that kind of depth and difficulty. “Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t holding your hand the whole way through to make sure you understood every paragraph. It’s exploring things it thinks are interesting, and if you can keep up, great. If you can’t, you can come back to it in a few years and see it from a different perspective. Games don’t seem to have that at all – and that’s part of what makes art deep and interesting. That’s what really interests me.”
Of course had Blow actually penned a successor to Gravity’s Rainbow, his readership could be counted on to be rather small – the audience for experimental fiction not tending so vast anymore. Blow, meanwhile, has a captive audience the size of a small country: he estimates that a million people played through Braid to its conclusion. The Witness could be played by even more. “That’s a really big number for somebody making a relatively individualistic artistic work. Could someone writing a novel today have a realistic expectation of a million readers? That’s kind of nuts.” As to the question of comprehension – will his million players get it? – Blow has no illusions. “I don’t want that to define my work. I don’t want to make games for Metacritic. I want to make games for people who like to read Gravity’s Rainbow.”
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