{"id":93293,"date":"2016-01-07T16:41:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T21:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93293"},"modified":"2016-01-07T16:41:27","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T21:41:27","slug":"ready-player-none","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/07\/ready-player-none\/","title":{"rendered":"Ready Player None"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talking to Jonathan Blow about his new game, <\/em>The Witness.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From The Witness<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t print this,\u201d Jonathan Blow tells me. I\u2019ve just asked him how his game The Witness <\/em>is going to end, having spent an hour playing it alone at the Bryant Park Hotel\u2014in a suite I\u2019d discovered was actually Blow\u2019s personal room when I got a glass of water. He\u2019d gone to the lobby so I wouldn\u2019t feel like I was being watched as I played. I felt immediately conscious of being in someone else\u2019s space as I stepped through the bedroom to reach the bathroom sink. The bed was still unmade; a small bag sat agape on a chair beside a pile of clothes in the corner. Blow\u2019s games excel at making one conscious of these things: of being in someone else\u2019s territory, at once intimate and opaque. Like unknowingly stepping into someone\u2019s bedroom, it\u2019s natural, when you play his games, to want to make sure you can find your way back out again, even as you think about going further in.<\/p>\n

Blow is the designer of two commercial games\u20142008\u2019s Braid <\/em>and now The Witness<\/em>, due out later this month\u2014and he\u2019s as much a point of fascination as his creations. A 2012 profile in The Atlantic <\/em>by Taylor Clark<\/a> called him \u201cthe most dangerous gamer.\u201d Though Braid <\/em>added, by his own admission, \u201ca lot of zeroes\u201d to his bank account, he lives in a largely unfurnished apartment in Oakland, displaying what Clark described as \u201ca total indifference toward the material fruits of wealth.\u201d His longtime friend and programmer, Chris Hecker, told Clark, \u201cYou have to approach Jon on Jon\u2019s terms. It\u2019s not \u2018Let\u2019s go out and have fun.\u2019 It\u2019s more like \u2018Let\u2019s discuss this topic,\u2019 or \u2018Let\u2019s work on our games.\u2019 You don\u2019t ask Jon to hang out, because he\u2019ll just say \u2018Why?\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The media casts him as a reclusive ascetic\u2014a hyperbolic narrative, but one that\u2019s also \u201ca little bit true,\u201d Blow admits to me. He often smiles when he talks, lazily resting his head on a balled-up fist. There\u2019s a new hint of corporeal decadence to him: the space between buttons on his black and velvet shirt stretch open and reveal glimpses of his pale torso. He doesn\u2019t fidget or adjust, projecting instead the kind of ease one finds only in people wearing pajamas. \u201cIf someone asks me how I spend my day, I\u2019m not going to lie to them and say I go down to the pub and have a beer.\u201d Instead, he lives inside his work, an apostate from the world where people have subconsciously accepted the idea that personal fulfillment should happen everywhere but the office.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Blow seems to live in the future Marshall McLuhan predicted in \u201cThe Future of Sex,\u201d a 1967 Look<\/em> magazine essay<\/a> he co-authored with George B. Leonard, in which electronic media has effectively merged our pastimes with our work, creating a new form of utopian productivity driven by the desire to learn. \u201cAlready it is becoming clear that the main \u2018work\u2019 of the future will be education, that people will not so much earn a living as learn a living,\u201d McLuhan and Leonard wrote. In the future, the whole world would become a kind of classroom, a place where \u201ceducation\u2014in the sense of learning to love, to grow, to change\u2014can become not the woeful preparation for some job that makes us less than we could be but the very essence, the joyful whole of existence itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Witness<\/em> is fifteen to twenty times bigger than Braid<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>by Blow\u2019s estimate. It opens cryptically, with the lights coming on inside a narrow white corridor with a circular door at the end. The door has a single electrical panel with a straight line across it. When you approach it and click the x<\/em>\u00a0button on the controller, you zoom into the panel and use the analog stick to trace over the straight line, which opens the door. The next room is pitch dark save another yellow panel at the far side, this one asking you to trace a right angle instead of a straight line. On the other side, steps lead to an enclosed garden with a large exit gate conspicuously connected to a series of cables: these, sure enough, can be followed to more panels, each of which requires a complicated pattern to return power to the exit gate. On the other side, a vast island of forests, rocky cliffs, and cryptic structures house more panels, all of which call upon some peculiar nonverbal logic.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne reason I spent a long time making this game,\u201d he says, \u201cis 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.\u201d Where most puzzle games want to make players feel smart, Blow wanted the puzzles in The Witness <\/em>to impart a sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you say something\u2019s supposed to make you feel smart,\u201d he says, \u201cyou sort of discard the reality of what\u2019s happening, like the specific ideas. It almost says, Well, there isn\u2019t any merit to those specific ideas, and there aren\u2019t any ideas that are better or worse, it\u2019s just whether you feel smart or not understanding those ideas. I think that\u2019s actually a little bit of a nihilistic view\u2014 it\u2019s not the way that I think about things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early on, Blow hired the novelist and occasional games writer Tom Bissell to flesh out the story behind the game\u2019s puzzles, which are distributed across the island in hidden audio logs and notes. But the story always seemed to get in the way, adding a kind of radio interference to Blow\u2019s idea of communicating abstract thoughts through puzzle panels. \u201cPart of the reason for why you\u2019d want to go off to this lonely place,\u201d he realized, \u201cis to focus on objects of contemplation and not have human drama going off to the left and right distracting you. But that\u2019s exactly what we do to try and make an engaging story: have human drama go off to the left and to the right of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Witness<\/em>, he saw then, was in part about dethroning language as our preferred means of expression. Since they\u2019re interactive, games can come much closer to representing ideas by enacting them instead of simply describing them. \u201cOne of the things that happens is the game goes through all these ways of making surprising situations, things that you didn\u2019t understand and now you get it,\u201d Blow tells me. \u201cSomehow, in looking at this thing from all these different angles and through all these different levels of zoom, it just builds more of an appreciation for the phenomenon, of that leap that happens in the mind when you come to understand.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you try and talk about why, language isn\u2019t that helpful. I think we know what that feels like, then you try and explain why and it gets very wordy after a while and doesn\u2019t connect with the truth of what it feels like to have that inspiration. Really what the game is about is just turning an eye on that thing. The puzzles and panels around the world is just one of the templates we use for giving that a place to live, or a format for presenting it, but the actual panels are not the important part. It\u2019s the ideas and the sense of sudden, clear understanding about the ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From The Witness<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In my time with the game\u2014I was granted only an hour with it\u2014this interplay between ideas and objects was palpable. Sometimes it came together with a lapidary grace; other times it felt comically awkward. One early puzzle is built around three panels in a building that hangs precariously over the ocean. The second and third panels are exact copies of the first, but melted in varying degrees, distorting the proportions and symmetry of their grids. The traced line to unlock each is identical in practice, but the warped visual references make the repetition feel like mystical guesswork or outright divination. Another puzzle is set in a clear panel with no suggestions for which pattern you should trace\u2014until you notice it perfectly frames an outcropping of rocks in the bay. Outlining them completes the circuit. A later puzzle obscures rock formations with bushes, leaving you to guess at their final shape.<\/p>\n

In The Writing of Stones<\/em>, a kind of tone poem from 1970, Roger Caillois extols the overlapping patterns and mineral relationships he found in stones: the exchange between material embodiment and abstract patterns. He described humans as \u201cthe last comer into the world, intelligent, active, ambitious, driven by an enormous presumption.\u201d Their habits and structures of thought only one of an infinite number of structured variations that have \u201cemanated since the very beginning from the architecture of the universe and from which all other beauties derive.\u201d In this spirit, Blow seems to have designed a game in which players can begin to witness themselves in some way, to gradually appreciate the patterned habits of their own minds and how mutable and adaptable these can be.<\/p>\n

As poetic as these abstractions can sound, they\u2019re also products of a kind of luxury and wealth. The more than seven years it\u2019s taken to complete The Witness<\/em> would have been impossible without the profits Blow earned from Braid<\/em>. To make that game, he worked as a consultant and freelance programmer, spending $200,000 of his own money. Braid <\/em>grossed more than five times that sum on its first day of release. It went on to sell more than 450,000 units<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I ask Blow if he thinks of himself as rich, he says no. \u201cI spent all that money,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI\u2019m in debt now.\u201d After a number of dispiriting meetings with big publishers about his next game, Blow decided to self-finance again. One publisher had insisted on retaining lifetime rights to the game, meaning it could be spun off into sequels without his input. Another wanted an unacceptable amount of creative control; another still demanded that the game be ready to release in the first quarter of 2011. \u201cConsidering what year it is now, that would have been a total joke,\u201d Blow says. \u201cI realized publishers were not used to talking to people who weren\u2019t desperate for money. None of the terms were geared toward someone who couldn\u2019t pay for something themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blow used the profits from Braid<\/em> not to furnish a lavish and hedonic life but to buy time and space for his work. \u201cWhat money lets me do is just lets me make the things I want to make or otherwise affect the change in the world I would like to do,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the main thing I get out of it. I\u2019ve been able to do that by making this game, so that\u2019s great. But I don\u2019t throw wild parties every week that celebrities show up to or anything like that.\u201d When he finally ran low on funds, in 2013, an even richer friend, an unnamed tech entrepreneur, came to his aid, wanting to help him see his vision through to the end. I ask Blow what that end is in The Witness<\/em>\u2014if he knew when he started where it would all lead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did,\u201d he says after pausing for a second. He starts to say more, stops, and then starts again, seeming to whittle an unseen thought into the right body of words. It\u2019s the first time he\u2019s been this unsteady, even in describing something he\u2019s been sure about since the start. \u201cDon\u2019t print this,\u201d he says, \u201cbut sort of the backstory is\u2014this is complicated and nuanced. But what eventually\u2014basically the whole game, from the start, when you wake up in this tunnel, is \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

The answer seems both obvious and alien\u2014like The Witness<\/em>, or like finding yourself alone in someone else\u2019s bedroom the morning after a long, dreamy sleep. Blow sounds like someone attempting to describe a song by explaining what it looks like on staff paper. When I leave his suite, I begin to feel the smallest pulse of nostalgia for it. Nothing there was mine but the time\u2014and a tendril of consciousness that had felt like it was reaching out toward something instead of just passing on by.<\/p>\n

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York and the author of <\/em>Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating and Other Issues for Men. His work has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>The Atlantic, <\/em>Bookforum, <\/em>The New Inquiry, and <\/em>Guernica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talking to Jonathan Blow about his new game, The Witness. \u201cDon\u2019t print this,\u201d Jonathan Blow tells me. I\u2019ve just asked him how his game The Witness is going to end, having spent an hour playing it alone at the Bryant Park Hotel\u2014in a suite I\u2019d discovered was actually Blow\u2019s personal room when I got a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":742,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15070],"tags":[20704,216,7651,3232,1132,20703,687,1080,16274,19108,20705,494],"class_list":["post-93293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-games","tag-braid","tag-design","tag-games","tag-gaming","tag-interviews","tag-jonathan-blow","tag-language","tag-money","tag-puzzles","tag-roger-caillois","tag-the-witness","tag-video-games"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJonathan Blow Discusses His New Game, \u201cThe Witness\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 7, 2016 \u2013 Talking to Jonathan Blow about his new game, The Witness.\u201cDon\u2019t print this,\u201d Jonathan Blow tells me. 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