“Thus literature can create an experience that, illusory or not, appears as a means of discovery and an effort not to express what one knows, but to experience what one does not know.” —Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death
Most gamers are familiar with “walking simulators,” in which the primary gameplay is walking through an environment. The tagline of Gone Home, which Meg Eden has discussed previously on this blog, nicely sums up the goal of the typical walking simulator: “A Story Exploration Video Game.” This tagline makes clear that while walking is ostensibly the primary gameplay, walking simulators also rely on the player’s pre-existing ability to read (be it notes scattered across a desk, signs on the side of the road, or dialogue boxes) as the means of exploring a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
On its face, The Witness comes off as a standard walking simulator: You play the game by walking through an environment that seems to tell a story, which you expect to unfold as you solve a series of puzzles strewn about the island.
Unlike most other walking simulators, however, The Witness continually frustrates the player’s desire for narrative—i.e., a who, what, when, where, why, and how of the game environment. That is because the goal of The Witness is not to tell a story. Instead, The Witness is about the player’s experience of learning to play it.
“One reason I spent a long time making this game,” Jonathan Blow, the game’s creator, told The Paris Review, “is because I just tried over and over again with the setup of these puzzles to create situations where you can have that experience of going from not understanding something to understanding something.”
While walking simulators like Gone Home peel gameplay down the element of interacting with a story via written words strewn about an environment, The Witness peels any sense of story down to the gameplay itself—and that gameplay is not walking, but the act of learning to read. The Witness’s unique focus on telling the story of the experience moving from knowing to not knowing by learning to read proves useful beyond games because it provides an intriguing model for how to approach difficult, unreadable, and/or experimental literature: as a video game.
Learning to Read: The Video Game
The beginning of The Witness.
The Witness begins in a tunnel, which has a closed door and yellow square at its end. You’ve probably played a game before, or seen someone who has, so you already know what to do: Move forward. Upon closer inspection, the yellow panel contains simple dot with a line extending to its right. The game prompts you to press a button, and your brain takes it from there—click the circular cursor on the circular dot and drag the resulting white line to the end. The door opens.
The game’s first “puzzle.”
Congratulations! You have just solved the first puzzle of The Witness without any written instructions. Despite this, the game has already begun to teach you how to read. In fact, The Witness will teach you to read its environment so well that you will begin to see dot-and-line puzzles literally all around you—in the shadows of trees, the clouds, or even the wrecked hull of a ship—if you can just give yourself enough time and forgiveness find the right perspective.
When you first see this puzzle directly after the game’s beginning area, it looks impossible...
…until the game teaches you to read it.
Treating Our Books Like Video Games
As a writer whose fiction is accused of being “unreadable,” I am interested in how we can use the experience at the center of The Witness as a strategy for reading “difficult” texts.
Narrative theorist Natalia Bekhta considers unreadability—i.e., the core challenge of The Witness—a “productive textual quality” in that “it forces the reader to look for new reading strategies,” which is exactly what happens when you come upon an unreadable puzzle in the game and abandon it, only to have a Eureka moment an hour later when you encounter that same unreadable element in an otherwise decipherable panel.
Blow referenced a particular “unreadable” or “difficult” text that inspired The Witness in an interview with The Guardian: “I want to make games for people who like to read [Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow.” Blow goes on to say:
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.
Gravity’s Rainbow is notorious for being difficult to read on multiple levels: narrative, structural, syntactic. It is packed with a sprawling cast of hundreds of interconnected characters, a plot line that spans wars and years and lifetimes, obscure references, and sentences that sprawl across pages. As video game critic and self-proclaimed two-time reader of Gravity’s Rainbow Tim Rogers put it in his recent pre-review of Death Stranding: “Now if you asked me what Gravity’s Rainbow was quote-unquote about, I’d be like…I...I don’t know…[...]...it’s about a lot of stuff.”
The meaning and intelligibility of Gravity’s Rainbow are not dependent on the reader understanding every reference, sentence, or plot thread—or even the entire book as a whole. The meaning and intelligibility of Gravity’s Rainbow depends on the reader’s desire to make the book make sense in a way amenable to them—to experience a seemingly impenetrable novel as something that means something to them.
Gravity’s Rainbow depends on the reader’s ability to tolerate unknowing and build coherence with the tools the book offers them: A character mentioned on one page in passing may appear later as a central figure, or a symbol that seems purely metaphorical one chapter may land in the countryside a smoldering mess the next. The book encourages you to trust that you will build yourself a net of meaning as your traverse its sprawling landscape. Even if you miss a few (or, y’know, a lot) references or feel like the part you just read has no meaning whatsoever, you can move forward, loop back when ready and needed, so long as you can tolerate not knowing.
Similarly, The Witness offers multiple levels with which the player can engage. The primary puzzles of the game teach you to read them in increasingly complex and combined ways, ultimately leading you to the island and central mountain blocked off at the beginning of the game. However, you can also engage in aforementioned environmental puzzles, timed puzzles, puzzles on abandoned panels strewn throughout the game, and more.
Instead of a linear narrative to traverse across, there is a hole to circle deeper and deeper into. The more you build a working knowledge of the game, the deeper you are able to go and the more meaning you are able to derive from the puzzles and the environment.
Similarly, the longer you spend with Gravity’s Rainbow the more tools you gain to use to prune back the unintelligibility. Researchers believe our brains are primed to seek out stories (if you put stock in that kind of thing), so it’s no surprise that once we have even the smallest understanding of a landscape—be it obscure symbols on a grid maze or the recurring image of rockets spanning across sections of Gravity’s Rainbow—we can begin making our meaning and way through (and to) it.
Precisely because it attempts to guide us step-by-step through the actual mechanics of this process—this learning to read the seemingly unreadable—The Witness offers an enticing method of approaching difficult texts: Play. By encouraging the player to choose a starting point and path of progression that matches their level of comprehension—by encouraging them to explore free of linear progression (there is no order in which you have to solve the game’s puzzles, and you don’t even have to solve all of them to get to “the end,” a rather meaningless term for this game which will have to be discussed another time)—and by inviting players to engage with meditation on perspective and not-knowing through the game’s cryptic videos and audio files, The Witness highlights the playfulness and interactivity at the heart of literature. Not knowing how to solve a puzzle is not a failure, just as being unable to perfectly understand Gravity’s Rainbow is not a deficit. Not knowing is an opportunity to experience the transition from confusion to clarity—to see where you’re at, to examine what you’re missing, and to let that strange mixture of time and effort make up the difference.
So the next time you come upon a wackily formatted story, or a series of sentences that seem like they should cohere into a whole but just quite don’t, or a book that seems to sprint ahead without a care for whether you’re following along, consider treating it like a video game.
Environment, puzzle, or both?
S.M. Balding is a writer and gamer who spends a lot of time wondering what a story really is. Follow them on Twitter to see if they ever find the answer: @susanb