Jonathan_Blow

It is easy to get the wrong impression from the movie, because like all movies of that kind it is a quick summary of ideas.

The real thing that bothered me was not response from players, but from pundits or critics. I felt like they all came from this English-major kind of school of thought and only wanted to talk about the story part of the game as the bit that had meaning, when in fact the game design and other aspects of the presentation are obviously very important. I felt like there were many folks proclaiming "we are the people who are smart and who understand video games, and we will tell you what this game is about!", but those people had a very poor understanding of the game! The thing that really bothered me was that these people, if loud enough, might permanently damage the way the world sees the game... in the first couple of weeks this seemed pretty likely, but as time has gone on, it hasn't come to pass. Not too much anyway.

In the movie it seems like I am worried about players generally, or Soulja Boy or something, but that is not the case. It was pundits.

First I designed a bunch of puzzles, then we spent a long time figuring out what the environments would be like, then we designed more puzzles and modified the old ones, then we refined our ideas about the environments, while simultaneously designing puzzles that would best-exploit those environments, etc.

It was an iterative process (and one reason why the game took so long to make!)

In fiction writing, there is this concept that you want every sentence to do more than one thing: you want to describe the setting and set the mood and introduce the character. You want to say what happened and show how a character feels about it and foreshadow a later consequence.

For some reason game designers never got this memo.

This is one of those weird things the internet really picked up on that I didn't think was that important. I just, offhandedly in an interview sometime, was discussing how some puzzles are easy and some are hard, said "there's at least one puzzle that fewer than 1% of people will solve", as a way of illustrating the range of difficulties.

But somehow people picked up on this and it became A BIG THING ABOUT THE GAME. I did not mean it to be so.

I was thinking about the door in the shipwreck, but it doesn't matter that much. There are some other things approximately as hard as that, and "The Challenge" is probably harder, though who can really say? Everybody has different amounts of trouble with different things.

I don't worry too much about difficulty. I like it when puzzles are hard sometimes, but if they are well-designed they will also be interesting if they are easy.

The real thing to be careful about is that if you make a difficult puzzle, you don't put it in such a place that it blocks people from experiencing most of the rest of the game. (Except in the endgame, which is supposed to be a difficult linear sequence that challenges you).

The actual puzzles in The Witness did not have much influence from other areas, except maybe just math.

But the overall mood / theme of the game had a tremendous amount of influence from other areas. I'd list those here except that the game itself tells you what they are in a much more thorough way.

Did you do any research about this or it just came to you as you were designing the game?

My previous game, Braid, was the early research for this. In The Witness I wanted to focus on the kind of nonverbal communication that I saw happening in Braid.

In Braid, I had kind of lucked into it, though non-linguistic communication has been something I have been interested in for my entire life; I just sort of haphazardly found ways to explore it in game form at first, but once I saw it happening, I picked up on it and pursued it deliberately.