So far the voice journals feel like the only misfire here.

For starters: So this game is VERY concerned with naturalistic sound, so it sounds VERY JARRING AND DISTRACTING when you find the audiojournals and they seem to be getting broadcast directly into your brain??

But second of, just… I think I'd be okay with it if it wasn't more than one voice. Why is it more than one voice? (I think I might have gotten two different voices, with different accents, just on Albert Einstein quotes.) The voices definitely aren't *good*— they're distracting in delivery, and although the quotes are good as quotes the voices by themselves give an air of pomposity which doesn't help. But why is there more than one?

Sorry. Backing up, if you don't know what I'm talking about, SPOILERS: As you wander around the island in The Witness, you find tiny dictaphone devices. I've found three so far. They're scattered in odd random places, like someone dropped them. If you tap on them with the in-game cursor, they start playing "inspirational" quotes. The quotes are all about science, and the philosophy of using the scientific mindset to give us a place in the universe. It's pretty obvious how the quotes relate to the game.

But I don't want the quotes to be about the game. Not directly.

I want the audiologs to be diagetic. I want them to be objects that exist in-universe and are there for a reason. I don't want there to be just buttons you can press in-game that play you some quotes Jonathan Blow thought were relevant. This game does an amazing job with selling the idea of the island as a real space. I want to believe in that space. I want, even if the island is just a loader for a bunch of puzzles, to be able to *believe* it has a history and that someone built these objects and buildings. I don't want it to be a collection of abstract spaces chosen for their aesthetics and maybe communicating something through allegory, like the spaces in Braid were. I want, in other words, what people normally just expect in a video game— for the place the game is set in to have a narrative background. I don't myself always expect that, at least not in an indie game. But I think it's needed here.

This is why I don't like there being more than one voice. What I want is the audiologs to be are notes left by someone-- someone visited this island who was really concerned with the nature of rationality and science, and had some of these dictaphone devices with them. In my head, this is the person who left the pillows behind. In my head, there are two groups of people who visited this island. There were some people who lived here. They built the larger, older-looking buildings, the ones that have all fallen down and exist only as foundations. They were apparently turned to stone. Many years passed. Then group two was a single person-- the puzzlemaker. You see these pillows sitting around in various places. Somebody was wandering around the island, finding pretty places, sitting and watching the scenery and drinking, doodling little sketches. You find their sketches, their drinks. Some of the objects— the pillows, the couch, the puzzles in particular, and some of the stuff in the "pottery barn"— seems more modern than other materials on the island. The second person built these things, or brought them. This is the person who made the puzzles. Maybe it's literally Jon Blow. This person found this abandoned island, with the people turned to stone, and was captivated by its mystery and its beauty. They hung out here, checked out the scenery, designed the puzzles and hung them all over everything for reasons unclear but probably as a sort of artwork. And in my head, while they were hanging out, designing their puzzles, sitting on their weird little pillows, reading, they would come across quotes that seemed important to them, leave them on their little dictaphone devices. And then sometimes, leave the dictaphones behind by accident. Because that's the kind of attitude I imagine someone who would spend a long time on this island pondering its mysteries and adding more would have.

But it isn't that. Instead, you have three or more voices reading quotes, on devices that certainly LOOK like they were left accidentally behind, and I don't know how I fit that group of people into any possible storyline of the island. I could imagine one person having a habit of taking notes and absentmindedly leaving the notes around— I could even imagine the notes consisting entirely of historically famous quotes about rationalism. I don't know why a group of people would all get together, record these quotes, and systematically hide them around an island like an easter egg hunt. I can only interpret *that* as breaking the fourth wall. Jon Blow flashing a message at me saying YOU ARE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME.

The quotes *work*. They get across something that meshes with the philosophy of the game. If they work with the philosophy of the game, then why did Blow have to break out of the logic of the game itself to communicate them?

Even weirder: The quotes reflect a mindset where there is an order behind everything, and mere observation and exploration can allow you to understand the order behind the world around you. What this mindset would tell me is that this island has a history, and there is an order to why it is the way it is, and I can understand this by observing the island and its details. But the dictaphones *themselves*, by breaking the fourth wall, force me into an interpretation of, quite literally, intelligent design— having to think of them in terms of messages from Jon Blow, an extra-universal omnipotent creator.

--- --- ---

There's one other thing, and might be more about me than the game so I don't even know whether to share this thought, but it's nagging at me.

If the dictaphones aren't diagetic— if they're messages from Jonathan Blow, the Creator, and NOT messages from a character who exists in-universe; and they're NOT meant to tell me the mindset about someone who visited and shaped this island, they're pointers on what the experience of playing this game should teach me— well, if the quotes are philosophical position statements from the creators of the game, then that means it makes sense to actually critique them as philosophy. And then I notice something weird. The quotes all specifically elevate people who immerse themselves in the study of science, specifically those who focus on pure theory.

This is something I have had opportunity to think about. I don't talk about this an enormous amount, but before I got into games, I spent a few years trying to get into physics. I was specifically really interested in quantum gravity. I tried to self-teach myself quantum physics and gauge theory, and I had this idea that someday I could actually understand some corner of quantum gravity enough to make *some* theoretical contribution to it. This was a big hope of mine. It was also incredibly arrogant, especially given I was working outside of any formal academic structure (I would sometimes bother college professors on the internet) and it didn't work out. The idea itself wasn't bad— there is some SERIOUSLY under-explored theoretical territory in quantum gravity, and an outsider who grasped the math probably *could* find a way to make contributions— but I never quite managed to hack it. I learned some really neat things about differential geometry along the way but never got to the point I could do the math in the papers I was reading, much less extend it. If I'd devoted myself to it, maybe gone back to school for a bit, I *think*— I want to hope— I could have broken through. But I had been at this for several years, and I was frustrated.

So I wound up making art instead. Toward the end of physics being my hobby, I wound up trying to make a video game, and I found I was actually *pretty good* at that, and now that's been my hobby for like… eight years or something. It's rewarding, and I feel good about my choice. I chose not to immerse myself in theory and searching for the nature of the universe. Instead, I made art.

One of the quotes in The Witness is Albert Einstein:

"Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true searchers, which has very few living members at any one time."

By including this quote, Blow is making a clear value statement: That this is desirable, honorable. He may even be saying that this is how he thinks of himself.

But Blow didn't join that society. He made the same choice I made. He chose to make art.

I do not know Jonathan Blow. But I've experienced his art. I've experienced the games that he made. Blow has been massively more successful than me at creating this form of art (video games) than I ever have been, by most criteria of measurement. He is good at it— he knows how to create systems. But the quotes in this game seem to be trying to tell us what his value system is. And that value system seems to suggest that what Blow values is *understanding* systems. This raises a question: Why did he not simply choose to do the thing that he spent three or four years developing a work of art idealizing? He's got the facilities; my own experience suggests that a skilled graphics programmer knows enough linear algebra to retrain into high energy physics. I myself chose not to do this! But this is because of my values; I tried both searching and creating as a focus in life, and I decided that creating was more valuable to me, personally. But Blow, when given a chance to share his values through self-expressive art, chose searching.

What does this say?

Again, I don't know Jonathan Blow, maybe it's inappropriate for me to analyze him like this. But I can't help but wonder: Does it change something about The Witness's message that it is explicitly idealization of understanding through scientific theory from the perspective of an *outsider*, someone praising a lifestyle they themselves opted out of?