'Use your imagination to find a way into level 7'

When a friend of mine was studying 19th century literature, she and her classmates complained to their professor that there were too many books on the compulsory reading list. They argued that they wouldn't have the time to read multiple 400+ page books in just a few weeks. The professor simply replied that if they would live how the people lived during the period the books were written in; without TV, without radio, without computers and phones, then they would find it easy to consume that much literature.
The takeaway was thus that in order to appreciate something created in a certain time, one also needs to understand the broader context of its creation and reception.

I was reminded of this anecdote when I recently started playing the original The Legend of Zelda. Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto in 1986 for the Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System, the game is famous for its open world exploration that helped to shape the way games are made today.

I had already acquired the game about ten years ago, yet I had quickly given up on playing it then. I couldn't get a grip on the game and found it too frustrating to figure out what to do and where to go. My mistake was that I tried to play the 40-year old game like one would approach a modern game; by going in blind, without any prior knowledge, without even reading the instruction manual. Unsurprisingly, the abundant limitations of 1980's technology were unable to properly impart to me the subtleties of the games' design.

So, when I decided to retry the game, I aspired to adhere as closely to the experience and expectations that someone would have when the game first came out.
The internet wasn't yet a presence in people's homes, but printed media were a vital and abundant source of information. I therefore sourced a copy of the game's printed instruction manual and read it thoroughly. Magazines like Nintendo Fun Club News also contained maps of the game that showed the location of many (hidden) aspects, as well as tips about how to approach traversing its landscape. Miyamoto had also meant for kids to collaborate on beating the game by exchanging information, so I found it acceptable to consult a modern internet guide for the beginning of my journey. This meant that I wouldn't spend a long amount of time finding vital items to aid me in the early parts and I could focus my energy on exploring the bulk of the game by myself.

In this manner, I found the game surprisingly forgiving and accommodating to the player. The present-day consensus is that this is a difficult game, but this thus seems to be principally an issue of knowledge. Going in head first is not always the answer, yet learning, or developing, some strategies to overcome obstacles is nevertheless easier than in some later games.

As for the game itself, you play as a boy named Link, trying to rescue princess Zelda and destroy the evil forces of antagonist Ganon. You do this by traversing the world, discovering useful items and weapons in underground labyrinths, and defeating the villains you find there.
Practically, this means that the game is broken up into an overworld, together with nine 'levels', which in theory can be played in any order. 

The overworld, the entrance to a level, and a level, or 'dungeon'.

The manual, however, mentions that 'if Link does not fight in the right Level order, he might meet a miserable end at the end of the labyrinth.' A player is thus warned from the start.
The location of the first two levels, or dungeons as they are now known, are shown in the instruction manual. The third dungeon is easily found, or stumbled upon, by going left instead of right at the starting screen.
In the third dungeon the player also obtains the raft, which according to the instruction manual can be used to 'float across seas and lakes when Link launches this from a dock'. There are only two docks in the game and the closest one to the third dungeon leads directly to the entrance of the fourth.

The first four dungeons are thus straightforward to find, and complete, with only the information found in the instruction manual. It was only at the fifth dungeon that I encountered my first difficulty that had me seek further advice from a guide.
In the fourth dungeon one finds a clue telling you to 'Walk into the waterfall'. With some wandering around the overworld, I found the only waterfall in the game and walked into it. There I was greeted with an old woman who gave me another clue: 'Go up, up, the mountain ahead'. As had I arrived from the right, I proceeded left and there I didn't find any path that led me up any mountain.
Being confused, I found that the shortest route to this point would have had me enter from the left and that the road up the mountain lay on the right, the place where I had come from. If I were a kid in the 1980's, I would have had more spare time and probably figured this out with a bit more trial-and-error, or else I would have seen the position of the fifth dungeon in a map found in the third issue of Nintendo Fun Club News...

Dungeon number six is once again easy to find if one wanders into the new area of the overworld that has become accessible by the acquisition of the ladder in dungeon five, which 'lets Link cross holes or rivers that are as wide as he is', and its workings are demonstrated immediately after it comes into the players possession.
The dungeon is however the first real 'difficult' part of the game, as a greater number of powerful enemies are found in it, as well as an enemy that will eat your defensive shield. Although the player has probably died a few times getting to this point, this is the first part where a number of attempts will be required before proceeding.
However, with the patience, and spare time, of a kid in the 1980's, replaying the dungeon and progressing a little further each time is simply part of the fun. All it takes to beat this challenge is a little bit of practice that comes from a few repeated attempts.

In contemporary commentary on the game, dungeon seven is often considered one of the easiest in the game. I beg to differ and would argue it's the most difficult by some margin.
Dungeon seven is the most puzzle-centric dungeon in the game. Its clues are cryptic, if they are present at all, and they aren't covered by either the instruction manual or the maps found in Nintendo Fun Club News. Even the detailed 108-page book The Legend of Zelda: Tips and Tactics (available for Fun Club Members for $4.99) has only three pages dedicated to dungeon seven and provides no solutions to any of its puzzles.

Finding the entrance to the dungeon is the first chore. A clue is found in dungeon six, which tells you that 'there are secrets where fairies don't live'. Such a location is easily found, as there are two identical ponds where a fairy restores Link's health, while a third pond exists that has no fairy. These ponds are useful places that the player has surely found and noted at this point.
However, nothing happens when the player uses the strategies that have so far led to the discovery of secret passages, like bombing walls or burning bushes. Even the detailed Tips and Tactics book merely tells you to 'use your imagination to find a way into level 7'. If one proceeds to try anything and everything, you'll find that the whistle, which otherwise summons a whirlwind that transports you to different parts of the overworld, now drains the water in the pond and exposes the entrance to the seventh dungeon. Or as the instruction manual clearly states: 'The whistle is the most mysterious of all the treasures in this game. [...] People say it opens up paths for Link.' 
Such leaps of logic are exactly what gives games of this era their punishing reputation a few decades later.
Unfortunately, this is only the first curveball that dungeon seven throws at the player. In previous dungeons, hidden rooms could still be seen on the map of the dungeon. Yet in order to progress to the end of dungeon seven, you need to find the entrance to a room that according to the map doesn't exist. There is also a room with an enemy that is impossible to pass, and a text that says 'grumble, grumble'. The solution here is to use an otherwise completely optional item that can only be bought, at a rather high price, in some of the shops found in the overworld.
The boss of the dungeon is located at the end of a tunnel. The entrances to such tunnels are found by pushing blocks that thus far followed a few clear patterns. Although the location of the room with the tunnel entrance is hinted at in the dungeon, no mention is made on what kind of 'secret' is to be found there, even in the Tips and Tactics book. The frustration of finding this entrance is further exacerbated by the presence of multiple enemies that are difficult to avoid and transport the player back to the beginning of the dungeon.
There is no f-ing way that I would have figured any of this out with the materials that were available to me in the 1980's. The only redeeming quality of this dungeon is that its enemies are easy to beat, which makes the constant retracing of your steps somewhat bearable. Otherwise the dungeon undermines all patterns that the game has shown the player so far and demands of them to make these mental leaps without any external help.
The only reason this dungeon is considered easy today is that its enemies don't put up much of a fight. Therefore it's a straightforward walk to the end if you already know where to go and what to do, but if you don't, then navigating its rooms is a Herculean task. 

Conversely, dungeon eight has a hidden entrance that isn't mentioned in any official materials in- or outside the game. Yet its location looks sufficiently out of place that I deduced its presence when I entered the screen for the first time, just after finishing the second dungeon.
This dungeon is a straightforward fight with many tough enemies. Like dungeon six, it has a reputation for being difficult, but all it takes is some practice and repeated attempts. 

I had some trouble finding the entrance to the ninth, and final, dungeon, because the clue I had been given is that 'spectacle rock is an entrance to death'. Apparently the rock formation is meant to resemble spectacles or something?

Spectacle Rock

In either case, I was intent on finishing the game without any further hints. To my surprise, even the daunting labyrinth of the final dungeon was not too difficult to navigate with some repeated attempts and the aid of a notebook and a pen. The first time I entered the final dungeon I had died 37 times. After recovering all the items hidden in the dungeon and defeating the final boss Ganon, I had only died a further nine times.

So with about ten hours of playtime, I had finished the game that a few years earlier I had given up on in the first ten minutes. By playing the game in the way it was intended to be played, I was able to complete it with relative ease. Everything needed to complete dungeons one through four, or the first half of the game, can be found in the instruction manual that accompanied the game. Dungeons five and six are manageable with some determination or the aid of widely distributed maps. Dungeon eight can be found by simply being observant and the final dungeon is tough, but far from impossible.
The only part of the game that is then poorly designed by any standard is the 7th dungeon. Its puzzles are too esoteric, its logic is too convoluted and there are too many variables to brute force a solution. This is the only point where any player would throw up their hands in frustration if left to their own devices.

Puzzles in a video game are notoriously difficult to design, as it's tricky to imagine the kind of connections a player is (un)able to make with the information they have. For this reason games today are extensively playtested during development. At the time of The Legends of Zelda's development, only a handful of people worked on a game and they were literally figuring out how these things could designed and implemented. It was clear that the developers wanted the players to use their own investigative skills to solve the mysteries of the game, yet at times they ask a more from the player than is reasonable. Their ambition, combined with the novelty of the experience, has left The Legend of Zelda with some flaws that are difficult to ignore and make the game unpalatable to modern audiences.

But in the end such observations are irrelevant. Shigeru Miyamoto himself has said that the inspiration for The Legend of Zelda was the feeling of adventure he had while exploring the forests of the Kyoto countryside as a child. Seen this way, it doesn't matter if you beat the game or not, and it doesn't matter if you discover all of its secrets.
In The Legend of Zelda, there is a strong sense of things to discover and there are genuine obstacles to overcome. No matter how far you progress through the game, it will be an adventure, and getting anywhere at all will leave you with a sense of accomplishment. In 1986, when most games were high score chasers mimicking those designed to gain profits in the arcades, it was an pioneering project and an experience that would leave a lasting impact in the mind of any child who decided to spend their time on it.

Paper Plane

At Stephan Balkenhol's exhibiton 'Something is Happening' at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, a sculpture was on show with the straightforward title 'Paper Plane'.
In this sculpture a man is holding a simple paper airplane above his head. This paper airplane has a bit of an unusual, squarish, shape, that's very different from the pointed darts one usually sees paper airplanes depicted like.
The shape of this airplane is however very similar to the design created by aeronautical engineer Ken Blackburn, which earned him the world record for the longest flight time from the 1980's until the early 2000's: 

 

If we believe that Balkenhol was aware of this airplane design, then the pose of the man in his sculpture becomes interesting. It's a relatively passive pose, vaguely reminiscent of how a child with a kite would stand, holding the thing that is supposed to 'fly' high up in the air. 

 

Yet part of the reason Blackburn held his record for so long was the combination of his throwing technique with the design of the plane. He threw the plane nearly vertically with a speed of close to 100 km/h to get it as high in the air as possible. From there the plane stabilised and had a slow descend.
This is no mean athletic feat and the intensity of the movement is of course very different from the idle attitude commonly associated with a paper airplane.
 

Stephen's Sausage Roll

Stephen's Sausage Roll is a puzzle videogame, created by Stephen Lavelle and first released on the 18^th of April, 2016. I first played it two years later, on April 19, 2018. A few weeks after that I completed the game. Enthralled by what I experienced, I first attempted to find the words to clarify my experience in 2019, almost five years ago. Back then I was unable to express what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll so unique that its shadow looms over any other puzzle game I've played since. It nevertheless has been on my mind in all that time and I've replayed it in full somewhere in 2020-2021. Recently I've started playing it again, and this time I feel like I had some insight into what the game forces you to do that makes it such a radical experience.

The premise of Stephen's Sausage Roll is seemingly simple, even banal. It's a sokoban-style game, which means that the player controls a character and you have to push objects on a grid-based system to put them in specific positions. You play as an unnamed character, often called Stephen by the games fans. You're holding a oddly-shaped fork and you roll sausages onto grills.
The game consists of an overworld of interconnected levels, each containing a single puzzle. Within a group of puzzles the player is free to choose in which order they want to solve the levels. To enter a level one simply aligns 'Stephen' with a Stephen-shaped translucent outline in the overworld. 

You then enter a level that contains the player's character, one or more grill tiles and one or more sausages.

The objective of each level is then to grill all sausages on both sides. You do this by pushing the sausages so they roll over.

When all sausages are grilled, you have to return to your starting position. This is non-trivial in some levels.

And that's it. That's the game's entire foundation. Grilling slightly more than 200 sausages is all you have to do. It's a simple premise, but it reaches a great depth through its pitch-perfect execution.

Reaching this depth is only possible because everything in Stephen's Sausage Roll has a function. Even if rolling sausages seems like a silly premise, the shape of the sausages determine their movement. Each sausage is two tiles long and one tile wide, but most importantly it is cylindrical, has a top and a bottom and therefore it can roll over. This in turn determines its movement, which can be distinguished between a roll and a slide. The comically oversized fork of Stephen makes it so your player character also takes up two tiles, but he instead has a front and a back and a centre of rotation that is clearly placed on only one of the tiles. In later levels it also becomes possible to separate the fork from the figure, which brings a whole new dimension into play.
The same exacting attention to detail is unmistakeably present in the level design. The world of Stephen's Sausage Roll is fully interconnected, the overworld is simply what happens when all the ground tiles from all the levels are present at the same time.

This is all the more impressive because in each of the levels, taken on their own, there are exactly enough elements present to solve, or sometimes create, the puzzle. There is not a single superfluous tile in the entire game. At times there are open 'fields', but their function is usually only to make the awkward movement of the character more tolerable to the player. 

Take The Great Tower, for example. This is commonly the level where the shock of possibilities really dawns on the player. Up until that point all sausage rolling has taken place in a two-dimensional plane and then this daunting behemoth shows up unannounced. Yet the level itself is quite generous. There is a large field where the player can mess about with the mechanics while dismantling the tower, so they can (sub)consciously teach themselves how the sausages (inter)act in a third dimensional plane.

And teaching yourself how Stephen Sausage Roll works is a vital part of the gameplay. The game is often described as 'difficult' and when this is seen as a negative aspect, one of the criticisms aimed at the game is that it doesn't do a good job at teaching its rules to players. I would very strongly disagree with this sentiment, however, because it simply isn't true. There aren't a lot of rules or mechanics present in Stephen's Sausage Roll. In fact, I already covered nearly all of them in this post so far. Thus knowing the rules to the puzzles in Stephen's Sausage Roll is almost trivial and anybody with the slightest knowledge of video game mechanics will instantly be familiar with them.
What's unique about the game is not the complexity of its rule set, but that it's only concerned with the ultimate logical consequences of that set of rules. From a few simple rules, Stephen's Sausage Roll extracts a great number of complex, and at times unintuitive, possibilities. What's more is that it expects of you to understand these right from start of the game.
The first levels in Stephen's Sausage Roll are likely the most difficult to the player, because they have to internalise the logical outcomes of a system they aren't yet familiar with. Most levels in Stephen's Sausage Roll demand that you reason backward from the unseen, but implied, end state of the puzzle. The player has to reverse engineer the puzzle-making process, so to speak.

As a player you have to understand the final position of all the sausages if you want to be able to solve the puzzles. This doesn't mean that if you know an end position you have also solved the puzzle, as is the case in many other games. No, in Stephen's Sausage Roll this is simply the beginning. Nowhere is this more clear than in an early puzzle titled the Clover.

At first glance the level appears relatively straightforward, as all sausages are located directly next to a four-tile grill. Yet when you proceed to grill the sausages in that way you ultimately end up in the following predicament when you attempt to return to your starting position:

This is an 'unexpected' outcome because as a player you're initially only thinking of the abstract goal of the puzzles: to grill some sausages. Yet returning to your starting position is a crucial aspect of the puzzles and thus it is not the grilling of the sausages that one needs to be concerned with, but grilling the sausages so that they end up in a particular position. In order to do this, you need to trace your steps backwards from the end goal and see what initial movements can lead to this outcome.

This backwards reasoning is somewhat common in puzzle games, but Stephen's Sausage Roll is the only game I can think of that absolutely requires this kind of understanding if you want to progress in the game at a reasonable pace. There is very little, if anything, in the game that entertains a player with an incomplete understanding of its mechanics. If you experience frustration in Stephen's Sausage Roll, and there will be plenty of moments where you do, it's only because of your own incomplete understanding. From the very beginning the game always provides you with all the knowledge you need, but not a single sliver more than that.
Even if I am now quite familiar with the possibilities of Stephen's Sausage Roll, in all my playthroughs I found that the game got easier, not harder, as I went on. Even as the complexity of the puzzles grows exponentially towards the end of the game, having much more experience with its rules means that it's far easier to see and understand the solutions to these more complex puzzles.
And at the point where you as a player have acquired this necessary insight into its mechanics, then the levels look less and less like puzzles, but more like an attempt to express a certain idea about the game and its possibility-space. In nearly all instances these are elegantly communicated through the minimal, yet absurdist, design, and the game becomes a beautiful glimpse into the mind of Lavelle as a designer.

Although I've come much closer to expressing my feelings about Stephen's Sausage Roll with this text than I did on previous attempts, I still don't believe I've quite been able to articulate the exact nature of what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll so extraordinary. After six years this short text of adjectives is apparently the best I can do. Therefore I strongly suggest you play the game for yourself and experience first hand what I and many other commentators have difficulty finding the right words for.

Wario Ware, Inc.

Wario Ware, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ is a video game that was published for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2003, when I was thirteen years old. Although I didn't know any other people who owned this game at the time and it was considered a distinctly odd title, I enthusiastically purchased it when it was released. Seventeen years later, I still play the game regularly and find that some elements of the game have become exemplary of characteristics that I search for in different fields to this day.

Wario Ware, Inc. is a game that explores the idea of 'microgames'. 

At the time of its release the mini-game was a popular topic within video games, with a mini-game being a smaller game within a larger game. For example, in the 1999 title Shenmue, your goal of the game is to avenge your father's death, but within the game one can go to an arcade to play darts or go to 'work' and stack crates with a forklift. Mini-games thus consists of smaller and more contained tasks within the scope of a larger video game. They also commonly posses different control schemes than the rest of the game, further setting them apart from the larger game that encompasses them.

The microgames of Wario Ware, Inc., however, are presented within the lore of the game as the quick cash grabs of a new money-making scheme by Wario, the negative alter-ego of Nintendo mascot Mario. Wario has understood that videogames can make you money and in his scheme he creates the simplest games one can get away with in order to quickly make as much money as possible. This results in 213 of such microgames that give the player only a single task to complete and a few seconds to complete it. These games are divided over 9 different themes, which are presented with Wario Ware, Inc. as belonging to different 'developers' Wario has hired.

 

All the microgames of Wario Ware, Inc. are controlled with only the directional pad (or d-pad) and the 'A'-button. This was an important aspect of the collection of microgames that stuck out in my mind at the time.

In the early 2000's the more complex control schemes we're used to today were still being introduced and having more options, input wise, was considered important. The very popular PlayStation 2 had a controller with dual analogue sticks, possesing full 360 degree motion, four face buttons and four shoulder buttons, with Nintendo's own Gamecube having only one shoulder buttons less. Most popular games at the time were looking to utilise the maximum number of uses for these 16 possible inputs.

It was in this time that Wario Ware, Inc. gave the player a very limited number of input options. Only up, down, left and right were used for directional input and the A-button was used for everything else. The B-button, start, select and the L and R shoulder buttons of the Game Boy Advance were simply not put to use. The only other game in my collection of over 70 Game Boy Advance games that doesn't attempt to use all the buttons available on the the Game Boy Advance is Skip Ltd.'s Orbital. This game only uses the A and B buttons and was published a few years later, towards the end of the Game Boy Advance's life cycle. 

Despite the unconventional direction Nintendo took for the controls of Wario Ware, Inc., I am however strongly of the opinion that this extremely paired-down control scheme lies at the heart of the appeal of the game.

As one might suspect, the scope of each microgame in Wario Ware, Inc. is extremely limited. Each game lasts only a few seconds, often with nothing more than a single prompt given to the player, before the next game is presented. The entire game consists of figuring out what to do, quickly doing that thing and moving on the the next challenge.

 

Gameplay of Wario Ware Inc.

 

If one expects a newcomer to this game to figure out what to do and successfully execute that action within 2 to 3 seconds, their options have to be limited. Most of the time, one can either move something on screen with the d-pad or perform some kind of action with the A-button. 

In fact, 46% of the 213 games present in Wario Ware Inc. only require the player to press the A-button. 33% only employ the directional buttons and just 21% of the games require some combination of both.

This exploration of how little one can give the player to do and still provide a fun experience was perfectly suited for the Game Boy Advance. The Game Boy Advance was a portable games console and somewhat modest in computational power. This was during a period where the industry as a whole was reliant on retail sales and the accompanying scale of budgets ask for a focus on 3D rendered games of great complexity. 

The Game Boy Advance however only provided two-dimensional graphics, with very limited 3D capabilities. This led to the Game Boy Advance sometimes being seen as a portable version of the Super NES, Nintendo's home console that defined videogames during the 1990's. 

In the eight years that passed between the introduction the Super NES and that of the Game Boy Advance, a lot had changed in the make-up of the video game landscape. Especially the introduction of 3D-graphics in the previous generation of home consoles had brought new perspectives on gameplay and two-dimensional graphic styles had evolved into shapes that simply weren't conceivable during the Super NES's heyday.

Wario Ware, Inc. is a game that took optimal advantage of these more nuanced and comprehensive views about the position of video games with two-dimensional graphics. The whole game is a reflection on the games and tropes that influenced the previous 20-odd years of video game production, something that would only be possible with the appropriate distance from its sources.

This distance was not only mental, but also physical. While home consoles often aim to leave players glued to their TV-screens for hours on end, portable game consoles are generally enjoyed in quick sessions of ten to twenty minutes. This fact made the Game Boy Advance the ideal platform for a game like Wario Ware, Inc., as it technically allows for a play session that lasts but a few seconds.

That a portable console possess a much smaller screen than a television was likewise a blessing in disguise, as a smaller screen demands games that are much more clear and legible.

Various Mario-related Games

The sometimes subtle ways that Wario Ware, Inc. toys with player's expectations and previous knowledge are perhaps best illustrated with a number of examples.

One of the microgames of Wario Ware, Inc. is titled Super Mario Bros. This microgame is a faithful recreation that looks and feels exactly like the first moments of the 1985 original, albeit in an extremely short version that only lasts a few seconds. Super Mario Bros. is perhaps the most classic example of a 'video game' and certainly the one a general public would be able to recognise. It's therefore telling that the creators of Wario Ware, Inc. chose to present a version of the game that doesn't significantly alter anything about the original formula. Other than its length, of course.

The approach they took in one of the introductory microgames is however very different. Super Wario Bros. is a sort of dumbed down remake of Super Mario Bros. The already simple pixel art of Super Mario Bros. is reduced even further and Wario, as its new main character, jumps automatically and continuously. This makes him pretty much invincible to the enemies he's confronted with and all the player has to do is to move Wario in the direction of the enemies in order to fulfil the 'Stomp!' command at the beginning of the game.

Somewhat later in Wario Ware, Inc. we encounter a microgame called Donkey Kong. The 1981 original  was the introduction of 'Jumpman', the character that was later to become Mario. Inclusion of such notable titles in Wario Ware, Inc. give an impression of the history of video games in general and Nintendo in particular. In contrast with the original arcade version, Jumpman is static in this short rendition and the player can only press the A-button to jump over the barrels that are coming towards him.

The next game, Grow Wario Grow, is a bit more complex. We're presented with a game segment from Super Mario Land, a Mario platforming title for the original Game Boy. A fully controllable Wario character is inserted into this world as a foreign element. This Wario is presented in the style from the game Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, a spiritual sequel to Super Mario Land featuring Wario as the protagonist, after he was introduced as the antagonist in Super Mario Land 2. In the microgame Wario has to steal the power-up mushroom that would 'normally' be intended for the small Mario on screen, thereby introducing a comical anachrony to the lore of both depicted games.

The last game in this list is titled Wario Bros. This is a brief remake of the original 1983 arcade game that introduced Mario's brother Luigi as Mario's counterpoint with similar abilities. Within the lore of Wario Ware, Inc., Wario himself is the developer that created this particular remake, so naturally Luigi is replaced by a Wario character that has to beat Mario. Otherwise the gameplay is faithful to the original arcade game.

 

The reduced form and simplicity of these games are what glues them together and allows these various iterations and critiques to be presented as a unified whole.

This pared down purity of game play also shows that it's frankly inherently fun to get feedback on some tactile sensation. Although I don't know the how and the why of this phenomenon, anybody who has ever pressed a piano key can understand the wonder of producing a sound, even if one doesn't 'know' how to play. Although the individual games of Wario Ware, Inc. don't appear to be much fun individually, the short goals one has to achieve are fun in and of itself, while the variety and sheer amount of them keeps a player engaged for longer periods of time.

Because the frantic and constantly shifting game play is a important part of the Wario Ware, Inc., familiarity with its controls is a key aspect to the prolonged enjoyment of the game. After this original game, Nintendo has released three other original games in the series; WarioWare Twisted!, WarioWare Touched! and WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

These games follow the same basic structure of short microgames that are divided in sections over different 'developers'. With innovation being a core part of Nintendo's game design philosophy, each of these games introduced a new way to control the games. 

Twisted! was released on a cartridge with a motion sensor that meant you had to control the game by moving the physical console in a circular motion. Touched! highlighted the features of the then new Nintendo DS, by showing multiple ways that the then-novel touch screen could be used and something similar was done in Smooth Moves, to highlight the myriad of possibilities of the new Wii Remote for the Nintendo Wii home console.

Because these controls were novel to all players, the sequels were structured very differently than the original.

In the original, there is a small collection of twelve games to introduce the gameplay and the controls of the d-pad in combination with the A-button, but after that any new player has all the tools to tackle the mishmash of actions that the game demands them to perform.

This faith in the player to understand what they have to do isn't found in the other games and as a result they are presented in a much more linear fashion. 

In Twisted!, the eight successive developers each add a small feature to the possibilities that the new control scheme brings. In the first section, there are rotational movements of 0 to 45 degrees, which is followed by somewhat larger movements of 0 tot 90 degrees in the second section of games. This is called 'mini spin' inside the game and is followed by 'big spin', where the console is rotated 180 degrees or more. After that the A-button is introduced with a collection of games that only require the player to use this button and nothing else.

In the fifth collection rotating the console is combined with pressing the A-button, completing the introduction of the controls, which are then taken in a few directions with minor gimmicks in the other four sections.

A similar succession is found in Touched!. It starts with games that require nothing but taps of the stylus on the screen. This is followed by wiggling the stylus, which is in turn followed by drawing lines, which is followed by drawing a line that connects specific points. In the fifth section there is then a number of games that ask the player to perform more than one action. The sixth section requires you to draw circles, echoing the games found in Twisted!. The seventh part requires you to use the built-in microphone and in the eighth and final section all the previous possibilities are combined.

Smooth Moves on the other hand was controlled by the Wiimote, a controller offering full motion control on the x, y and z-axis. The near infinite possibilities that motion controls in three dimensions offer had each microgame in Smooth Moves start with its own prompt on how to hold the controller. 

These changes in structure meant that the player was much more primed to the task that lays ahead. While this is helpful for a player to get acquainted with the game more quickly, it does greatly decrease the replay value of the game by limiting the ability to be surprised in the future.

While I have played, and enjoyed, the other games in the series, it is only the original that I still play regularly today. In the beginning what's enjoyable about the game is getting acquainted with the various microgames, so that one is able to finish them within the short time you are given. It doesn't take long however to become familiar with the many microgames and then the fun challenge is to see how many games one can finish while they keep on increasing in difficulty and speed, trying to improve on one's own high score. At this point Wario Ware, Inc. transforms from a game rooted in bewilderment into a game of skill. In order to allow this shift to occur in the player, steady practice is required. 

All games in the series offer a mode wherein every microgame is sampled, but only in the original the various microgames can be split up into smaller parts while still retaining a good amount of unpredictability of what the microgames will ask of you exactly. It is this variety and possibility to challenge oneself while gradually becoming more and more familiar with various components of the whole set of microgames that makes replaying Wario Ware, Inc. more fun than the later sequels.

In essence, Wario Ware, Inc. Mega Microgame$! is a game that is made up of smaller elements and ideas, that are distilled to their bare essentials and given cohesion through careful curation and presentation. It is a reflection on what came before it, as well as an exercise in expanding possibilities, by attuning to the specific characteristics of the platform it was created for.

It are these qualities that I have found, recognised and enjoyed in Wario Ware, Inc. The game was an early introduction to the critical, yet embracing attitude to the world I would come to appreciate much later in life and I hope to enjoy playing it for many more years to come.

It's Not Like I Have All the Answers

 

A little while ago I was messing around making some doohickey's with the aid of an Arduino and it struck me that art has a strange relationship to electronics in general and writing code in particular. It's a relationship that I've found difficult to describe and even more difficult to define, so I hope by writing about it here that I'll be able to get some insights into my own thoughts on the subject.

Writing code, or programming, quite literally consists of nothing but making a list of logically valid statements. Unlike more pure mathematics, these statements are furthermore pre-defined by other human beings. While some mathematics can be discovered or invented, depending on your viewpoint, programming generally consists of applying the known possibilities of a set system.

If one is privy to my conception of art as object manipulation uncommon in daily life, it stands to reason that no piece of programming could ever be considered art. As all possibilities can be theoretically known in advance, any uncommon or surprising ways to write code is dependent fully on the understanding, or lack of understanding, of the person perceiving it.

Yet at the same time I'm aware that there are such endeavours like 'The International Obfuscated C Code Contest'. Most of this is way above my pay grade, but the first winner in 1984 was a program that 'prints hello world, where read is write'. Clearly that is a way to write some code which is uncommon in daily life. Simultaneously one could describe it as object manipulation as well, as no code affects anything unless some physical object changes according to its laws.

Then there are also initiatives that commission 'web art', like turbulence.org. I again have mixed feelings about this. Some of the projects seem like genuine uses of the internet that can only be the result of some unusual interpretation of its workings, but other projects are just data visualisation or some slightly-odd way of using social media. Are those latter projects genuinely different from the famous photo of an egg on instagram or the brochure design of the yearly fiscal reports for some multinational corporation?

 

One of Cory Arcangel's projects for the initiative was titled Data Diaries, wherein he substitutes the video data of a QuickTime file with whatever was in the RAM of his computer at the time, resulting in various glitchy patterns of colours. Which is you know, interesting, but at the same time he just loaded the data of one program into another that isn't meant to display that sequence of information. Fundamentally this is not that different from opening something like a .png in a text editor and then marvelling at the strange text that appears. Which is something that has happened to many people on accident, especially to those among us who have been using computers before the 2000's and had to deal with the many incompatible file formats of the time.

The level of skill on display here is therefore hard to pin down. On the one hand it's obviously higher than that of your average user, because it deliberately circumvents some ways in which a program is meant to handle data. On the other hand the result it gives is a garbled mess that even an expert couldn't distinguish from an accidental glitch. A glitch that could possibly be caused by a manufacturing defect in the computer's hardware and thus have no relation to the artist's actions at all.

A defining feature of artwork in traditional art media is that discernable traces are left by which an informed spectator can retrace the origins of a work. Digital artworks often rely on logical processes that aren't formally valid and by extension they also can't be mentally reverse engineered to any reasonable extent, thereby calling into question how a viewer must approach the work. 

By analogy I am thinking of shuffling methods in a casino. Any skilled dealer with the dexterity to shuffle cards in a truly random fashion, also has the skills to order them exactly how she wants them to. A common solution to this problem in high-profile casinos is for dealers to shuffle the cards by making a big pile on the table and moving them around like a toddler would, as this ensures a fully random order while being in plain view of all the players. Is that thus the smartest or the dumbest way to shuffle?

The influence of technology on art has always been a strange one. As already covered in one of the earliest posts on this blog, new technologies rarely have an immediate impact on art making. Over time they can however become quite significant after clear and common methods are established, for which artists are able to find contrasting solutions.

However I don't think that this particular problem is at play with coding. Coding itself hasn't changed fundamentally over the decades and I also think that you can't change it in any fundamental way to make the act of coding artful, or however you want to call it. Just like how in more general mathematics, no artist has ever truly called Euclidean geometry into question. 

But then again there are also artists like M.C. Escher that do at least appear to mess around with those mathematical ideas, albeit in a circumlocutory way. 

Perhaps more broadly speaking one can say that coding might not have much ability to go truly beyond its mathematical intricacies, but its influence on the physical apparatus it's meant to manipulate could posses such an ability. 

It also occurred to me that electronics in art rarely get to look like electronics in the way that we all use them in our daily life. Consumer electronics are often packed inside closed plastic or metal containers, both for protection and an aesthetic appeal to consumers. No consumer would want an iPhone if it was just some battery and a screen soldered to a PCB.

 

 

Artists commonly expose the insides of the electronics they work with when making art. This is perhaps to show that it is not simply an off-the-shelf product and that the artist did something unusual to make the work show what it shows.
I'm of course inclined to say that this is to distinguish the electronics artists use from the electronics found as objects in everyday life, but perhaps it has more to do with aesthetics or a general interest in seeing how things look like on the inside. My first Game Boy had a transparent case and I was absolutely fascinated with seeing how the thing looked like on the inside, without having the slightest clue about the functions of its various components. As there are plenty of decorative fashions in art that have little to do with the content of the work, perhaps exposing the electronics is simply one of them.

I'm sure you as a reader have gained little insight from these ramblings, but in the process of putting pen to paper I nevertheless have understood that the crux of my own confusion lies in the apparent paradoxical relationship between the extreme axiomatic restraint of Boolean algebra and the seemingly limitless number of ways it can be exploited by way of electronics.

Art is the Result of Human Actions

Back in 2014-2015 I wrote my master's thesis on the ontology of art and recently I found out that my former academy has gotten round to publishing it in their online library.
It contains quite a few grammatical errors and I probably would word some things differently today, but all in all I think quite a number of its ideas still hold up a few years later.

For those interested, the full text can be found here:
https://catalogus.hogent.be/catalog/hog01:000673585

Edit on 12-3-2021: 

My alma mater has decided somewhere in the meantime that the full text can't be accessed without an account for their website, presumably requiring you to either study or teach there. So I apologise for that inconvenience.

Funny thing is, I cited this thesis in another text and I was told by an editor I didn't need to mention the date whereon I consulted that webpage, since it was a 'stable link'. 

Academia has a lot to learn about the internet.

Edit on 10-11-2022:

Somehow they changed their site again and I'm happy to report that it's once again freely available to anyone interested.

Edit on 8-9-2025:

Once more the webpage has changed, making the thesis inaccessible using this link. This time the culprit is apparently a switch to WorldCat for their database, which also means you once again need to be somehow affiliated with the institution in order to access it. 

An Existential Statement of the Form ∃x φ(x) such that φ(t) is True

This post is a bit unusual as I will talk about my experience with The Witness, a video game released in 2016. I'm writing about this game because it is a puzzle game which does not give explicit, verbal, explanations about its own rules and as such I feel its existence is relevant to a view of art in general.

The Witness is a game that has a very large scope. Starting from a simple idea of a puzzle where a single line runs from a beginning to an endpoint, the full game contains an entire three-dimensional island to explore with various themes and settings.
The core gameplay of The Witness, as it's presented to the player, consists of solving line puzzles. The player has to draw a line from a circle to a rounded-off end of a line.

Throughout the game there are multiple symbols added to the puzzles that define ever-more complex rules for the route the line can take between these two points. These rules are never explicitly explained to the player, however, and the main hook of the game consists of the player figuring out what the rules are that govern these puzzles and their symbols.
The clearest example of this is the swamp area. Before you enter the swamp, you have traversed through at least two other areas. Then when you enter the swamp you see this set of puzzle panels:

 

These panels, starting on the right, gradually teach you how to define a shape within the panel with a line. It starts out extremely simple and by the sixth panel you have a decent idea on how to define a shape. When finishing this puzzle, you look to the left and you see the following:

In this view going straight seems like the most logical step. The walkway leads to an open area and the yellow path is brightly marked. This yellow marked path actually contains a puzzle that you haven't been shown the rules to yet. By this point you've nevertheless realised that part of the game is figuring out these rules, so you fumble until you get it to work and bring you further along, only to encounter two other groups of puzzles ten seconds after:

These puzzles require definite knowledge about how you're allowed and able to combine the various shapes within a single line segment, knowledge these first six introductory panels haven't touched upon. So you get frustrated and you move backwards to where you came from. At the earlier junction where you went straight, you now turn right and you find these:

A total of eight panels that very explicitly serve as a reference on how you can combine the shapes by a single line. Panels four to six even share a single solution to make it very clear what matters and what does not matter when defining these shapes. After you have found these, the rest of the puzzles in the area are quite straightforward, increasing the difficulty largely by introducing a higher density of shapes and adding a few smaller rules.

Acquiring this kind of knowledge is how most players will spend a large part of the game. Knowledge is introduced and then tested in a number of puzzles, which tend to be somewhat trivial once you have formulated the rules right. After you solve all the puzzles in each area, you activate a laser that points to the top of a mountain, clearly indicating that this mountain is somehow a point of interest.

Once you have gone through a number of areas like this, you have become acquainted with the game's mechanics and you enter into its last areas: the town and the mountain. In these areas it is no longer about gathering knowledge about the mechanics of the various puzzles, but about applying this knowledge and understanding it more deeply to solve a wide range of complex and creative puzzles, without ever being able to do anything other than moving around and drawing lines.

This latter part of the game, once you have seen most of the island, was for me by far the most enjoyable part and I found it ended rather quickly once I got there.

So far, so good, you might think. Designer Jonathan Blow has made a silent game about solving line puzzles on an island. Fun to explore if you're into that sort of thing and if you don't like drawing mazes then maybe this game isn't for you.
The story doesn't quite end there though and in order to delve more deeper into other aspects I first would like to point out some flaws I find with the part of the game I have just described.
As you can see from the description above, the first part of the game is more or less about learning, while the second part is about applying the knowledge gained in the first part.

If the first part of the game is about learning the ruleset of the island, it is important that this introduction is done clearly and, more importantly, without contradictory information. For the most part, Blow and his team succeed in doing so and have demonstrated well that it is perfectly possible for a game to let players figure out what they need to do without actually telling them. The earlier example of the swamp puzzles show that is very possible to provide a clear introduction to the rules for a puzzle using non-verbal communication.
Even the existence of environmental puzzles, considered one of the game's biggest secrets, is at one point communicated very, very, clearly. One of the areas closest to the beginning also has you use elements from the environment to find its solutions, which should be a huge clue that you should pay attention to your surroundings.

Before I delve further into those, however, I would first like to bring back the focus on what has frustrated me the most while playing The Witness. This is the fact that it at times deliberately obfuscates the kind of information that is necessary to understand the rules to the game. Blow has stated in interviews that this kind of obtuseness is something he has tried to avoid and while I believe he has genuinely tried to do so, I can't say that he has always succeeded, at least in the way I experienced this as a player.
For example, let's take a look at the introduction of a symbol with one of the more complex rulesets. The first panel and a solution look like this:

Which is fairly straightforward, even if you have no idea what's going on. The puzzle only has twelve possible routes and three of those are correct solutions. Even when merely fumbling around at random, I still have a one-in-four chance of finding a valid outcome. Like in the introductory panels of the swamp, this is more than alright, as any grounded deductions about the functioning of a symbol can't reasonably be made from any single panel. Which is exactly why the following panel is so problematic:

This is the next panel you encounter in a set of five introductory puzzles. The other panels are only activated once the previous panels have been solved, so there is no other way to continue except solving this panel. Because we only have the knowledge gained from the previous panel, the player can't reasonably be expected to have a well-formed hypothesis of the function of the symbol yet. At the same time, making a lucky guess isn't realistic either. Where the previous puzzle had twelve possible routes, this one has 184 possible routes. Only six of those routes are valid solutions and all of those solutions are longer than the average route. So while the number of solutions has doubled from the previous puzzle, the number of possibilities has increased fifteen-fold. You are therefore asked to extract an enormous amount of knowledge from a tiny amount of information. While in retrospect it is technically possible to come to the right conclusion given what you already know about the puzzle, I don't believe it is an effective, nor refined, method for teaching a new set of rules. From my own experience I can only think that these particular panels were designed in this way as to provide an artificial difficulty level that is perceived to be necessary when solving any kind of 'puzzle'. In my own playthrough, I got stuck trying to figure out this rule for about thirty minutes, before obtaining a hint for it outside the game. This quickly made me understand what the rule was and I consequently solved all other puzzles in that particular area within the next half hour.
The difficulty therefore doesn't lie in comprehending the system, but in simply knowing its rules. If you know the rules, it is easy, if you don't, it's extremely difficult.

The Witness is described as a game where you solve puzzles and I believe many of its problems stem from this description. In my opinion, the game mostly presents its panels as logic puzzles. In a logic puzzle you are given a set of rules and you have to understand how they interact with each other to see what their possible outcomes are. Figuring out the rules themselves isn't a challenging puzzle, or at least it shouldn't be. Shoots and Ladders, for example, does not automatically become a puzzle game by simply refusing to explain the rules.
Where Blow has gone astray in some parts of the game is that sections that should have been there to non-verbally explain the rules of a certain puzzle and have instead been treated as if they were puzzles themselves.
This has made some parts unnecessarily difficult, while at the same time partly undermining Blow's own vision of creating a game that allows a player to grasp the concepts of said game by simply observing well and 'being treated as an intelligent person'.

There are also other parts of the game where things are made more difficult than they need to be in a more arbitrary matter. After finishing the puzzles in the jungle, for example, the laser you have to activate is located within a small maze. This is already somewhat annoying on its own account, but it is made worse by the fact that the actual entrance inside the maze to the room that contains the laser looks like this:

It's right there in the center and I couldn't see it either. There is a little open area with a distinctive tree next to the entrance to help recognise its significance, but this tree simultaneously blocks the clearest view of the entrance. In the end I just used the knowledge that every maze has a solution by simply following a wall to its inevitable conclusion, which is tedious at the best of times. I can understand the importance of mazes for this game and have no problem with the other instances, but this particular one was a needlessly burdensome implementation for what in every other area is a fairly straightforward path.

Another component of the game that has been somewhat of a double-edged sword for me are the aforementioned puzzles which incorporate the environment, most notably the sunshine. I wholly applaud their inclusion and I think it's one of the main reasons The Witness feels like every part of it is somehow connected to all the other parts. At the same time I can't help but feel that the gameplay implications are occasionally extremely frustrating for the player. The vast majority of these puzzles require the player to stand precisely in a specific spot to either find the solution or see the puzzle at all. Even when you know where to stand, it is still sometimes awkward to get it right, with many tiny button presses required to obtain the correct viewpoint. It is thus once more the case that if you posses a certain kind of knowledge, the puzzle is hardly a puzzle at all, but if you don't have this knowledge the solution is literally out of sight.
At times these puzzles are made even more difficult by introducing a changing element on a timer. In that case moving around haphazardly to find the right viewpoint and at the same time trying to keep an eye on where you are going is cumbersome and adds little to your understanding of the puzzle's mechanics. I believe that as soon as you understand how a puzzle ought to be solved, executing that solution should be trivial. Unfortunately this isn't always the case in The Witness. Blow's previous game, Braid, also had these kind of moments where once you understood the solution to a level, there was still some finicky platforming maneuvers necessary to execute that solution.
It must also be mentioned that I had to play the game on a low graphic quality setting. This admittedly kept the game playable, but it certainly didn't help with of some of these puzzles that are so dependent on the way things appear. Especially in puzzles that had to do with shadows it was at times unclear whether I had the wrong solution or if I had simply mistaken one pixelated line for another.

Then there are also some decisions made during the design process that I can't really understand or account for. In some puzzles, I would estimate about one tenth of them, the puzzle panel turns black after you input a wrong solution. Then you have to go back to the previous panel and redraw the solution for that panel to light up the other panel again. This already tedious endeavor is made worse by the fact that the solution to the previous panel is still highlighted there. You just need to mindlessly trace a line that is clearly visible before you can go back to the panel you want to be working on. 

I have yet to find a good reason for those particular panels shutting off after inputting a wrong solution. As I said before consistency is very important if you want to teach somebody about anything, so having some panels shut off while others do not without any particular reason can't really be justified in my opinion. Perhaps some playtesting would have shown the errors of my ways, but even their necessity at parts of the endgame isn't enough for them to be included earlier in a more forgiving setting.
The wrong turn taken in the swamp described at the beginning is also an example of this kind of problem. It's understandable that having all the panels in a single line is monotonous and therefore unwanted, but simply luring the player away from something that is required to progress further isn't a very elegant design solution either. There surely must have been better and more consistent solutions for these kind of issues.

As a whole, I would argue that one of the more general problems in the Witness are those kind of diminutive lapses in consistency.
The interface of the game is kept very simple, for example. A great effort has been made to make sure that the only interaction the player has with the world is done so by drawing a line from point a to point b. It is one of my favourite features of the game and is wonderfully implemented, both mechanically, visually and conceptually.

That being said, there is one common item in the game that doesn't require you to draw a line. These are small voice recorders, found at various places all around the island. You have to click on these and then they play a soundbite. Why an exception has been made for these voice recorders is never made clear. There are other ways to play media on the island, including audio, and all of those use a line-drawing interface. The only reason I can think of for housing these soundbites in tiny, clickable, voice recorders is that in that way they are more difficult to find, or perhaps easier to hide. I'm not sure if that alone is worth losing a certain sense of cohesion in a game that otherwise goes through extreme lengths not to use buttons or any other forms of interaction.

Elsewhere in the puzzles there is at times a similar inconsistency. This doesn't hurt the puzzles in isolation but are detrimental to an overall view of the puzzles, and therefore the game, as a cohesive whole. One of the earliest puzzles you will encounter shows that its possible to have two different outcomes from a single line.

Yet in most of the puzzles found in the rest of the game, even those with multiple beginning- and endpoints, there is only one valid beginning and ending for any single line. There are some important puzzles much later in the game where knowledge of this kind of possibility is required to progress at all, but I think that showing these kind of multiple solutions as one of the few distinct possibilities at the beginning of the game is similar to the 'I before E, except after C' rule. Even if it's true on some occasions, the rule has just as many exceptions, so perhaps its better not to teach it at all.
In another instance the rules are more complicated than they need to be. In the game there are two different symbols which indicate two different kind of exclusion of other symbols. Their rules aren't readily compatible if they were to be used in the same panel. As far as I can remember they are never used together in the game, but at the same time that begs the question why there are two different types at all. I can understand why one of them was introduced in a particular area and then barely used in the rest of the game, as it only applies to one other set of symbols. Yet given the view that one part of the game is about learning mechanics and the other is about implementing those mechanics, the inclusion of this symbol in one area seems like an ad-hoc solution to flesh out a section that would otherwise be rather short.

It is easy to confuse these kind of inconsistencies with an expanded ruleset that keeps elaborating on the players knowledge and possibilities. I would therefore say that there is an important distinction between having a player expand their understanding and simply negating or ignoring something that was previously explicitly shown as an (im)possibility.

These criticisms aside, The Witness is definitely an unique game. It is vaguely reminiscent of the nearly uncrackable adventure games of the 1990's and as such it often gets called an adventure game, as well as a puzzle game.
The thing is, I don't think The Witness fits into either of those monikers. In my opinion it's an understanding-what-this-thing-is game. This works on many different levels, but is best exemplified by the fact that the very last part of the game, far beyond the ending as described in the beginning of this text, is something called 'The Challenge'. The Challenge is a tightly timed sequence of puzzles that are randomised each time you attempt it, while also requiring you to memorise the solutions to puzzles early in the sequence to use in a later part of the sequence. To be able to complete this challenge, you have to fully internalise the mechanics of the game, as nothing short of skill and understanding will allow you to complete it.
So while the game seemingly is about solving puzzles, or discovering the so-called secrets of the island, in my experience the very core of the game is concerned with not only exploring, but also communicating, the fullest of consequences of what can be done with a single concept. It's about taking a simple idea, drawing a line between two points, and expanding that idea as far as it can go while still maintaining a cohesive, playable game. Making that game cohesive and enjoyable is trying to let the player venture on this journey as well and let them think about this concept as if they thought of it themselves. In other words, The Witness is an understanding-what-this-thing-is game.

It is precisely in this point that The Witness is different from any other game I've ever played and I think it therefore has gotten a somewhat odd reception. The game has received critical acclaim for the most part, but neither the positive nor the negative reviews manage to make a meaningful distinction about this point. For some the lack of a singular narrative and meaning has been a point of criticism, but this almost becomes irrelevant if the game is seen as a far-reaching exploration of a single mechanic. The little narrative that is available in the game then mostly serves as commentary on the exploration itself, not its outcome. This is very clear at the endgame, where a secretly recorded casual conversation about the inclusion of the voice recorders is re-enacted by voice actors and played from a voice recorder in the game.
Likewise and oddly enough has The Challenge at the end been negatively perceived by some critics as a strong break with the 'calm and contemplative' gameplay of the rest of the game. I don't think this is the case at all, with The Witness cramming in a great deal of implications in a relatively short amount of time, with The Challenge merely being a possible, but logical, outcome of those presented facts.
A very common comment I have encountered are the 'incredibly difficult puzzles', but that really isn't true either. If The Witness came with an exhaustive manual detailing all the rules and mechanics of the different puzzle types, I believe arriving at the first ending in The Witness will be a somewhat trivial matter for most players. Solving those puzzles therefore hasn't been interesting at all in my view.
What however is very interesting and peculiar to me is that at the same time I also believe if a player was somehow in possession of this manual, it will take them much longer to complete The Challenge at the very end. While I at times have my problems with the way The Witness teaches its mechanics, I am in full agreement with the idea that this kind of self-reliant teaching ultimately leads you to a deeper understanding of what the game is.

One of the concerns that Blow had while making The Witness has been investigating what makes video games unique as a medium. The obvious answer is interactivity and it is precisely this kind of deep, elongated, investigation into the workings of an otherwise lifeless object that interactivity allows for. In the physical world it's never sufficient to merely analyse the components of a game in order to figure out how it is played. Chess pieces don't tell you anything about even the basic rules of chess and a football field doesn't tell you anything about the offside rule. Software in general, and video games in particular, are the only medium that essentially consist of nothing other than rules. To explore the full extent of a single rule therefore seems like a good way to investigate the 'true' possibilities of the medium.
The Witness is commendable as possibly the first game that attempts to discover what can be done if a simple rule is truly taken to its furthest consequences, without taking the common real world limitations of finances, time or company structure into account. It has come short at this attempt in some places, but being the first of its kind these shortcomings are expected and can be overlooked when the game is taken as a new beginning, rather than an end.

On Skateboard Photography and a Way of Looking at Things

This is a story about artists and their ability to look.
Not too long ago, a friend showed me a number of photos another artist had collected. In these photos, a person was either jumping or falling and the artist noted that people were surprisingly bad at noticing the small differences in this ambiguity.
‘In this one, for example, do you think this girl is jumping or falling?’
‘Jumping’, I replied immediately.
He was surprised. ‘Most people think she’s falling’, he said.
I replied quite intuitively and without much thinking that there is no way she could have fallen because her arms were straight up in the air and very tense. Nobody falls like that, as you try to find your balance when you fall by redistributing your weight and the straight arms imply some amount of determination.

To me this was supposed to be common knowledge, available to everybody in the world, but I realised that even a simple thing such as inferring what happened right before a certain moment from the details in another person’s body is not something that is innate in us. It has to be learned. I took a second, and I realised I had learned this by looking at skateboard photography.

Skateboard photography is not like other sports photography. Sports photography hardly ever captures a crucial moment and tends to serve better as a sort of general illustration to a verbal description that accompanies it.
This is not the case with skateboard photography. A skateboard trick is often composed of a series of relatively small movements that when combined last about a second or two. Unlike something like a javelin throw, however, each skateboard trick is done in a different physical context. Even courses designed for competition change at every event and thus some amount of environmental detail is necessary for a photograph of a skateboard trick to make sense. Of course you can describe the surroundings in words, but as everybody knows, it’s much easier to show a space in a picture.
The goal in a skateboard photograph is thus to accurately convey the entire story of the trick. Where the skater comes from, what part he actually performs the trick on, what the trick is, sometimes even what trick the current trick is combined with, where he will ride away and how likely it is that the trick was successful on this particular attempt.
This seems like a lot of information to gather from a single moment that lasted less than 1/1000 of a second, yet after a bit of experience it becomes almost second nature. As a skateboarder who grew up with printed media, all this information is readily available to me and even other details such as whether the skateboarder is right- or left footed can be learned from a glance at a single still.

Though I must say that I had to learn to identify these subtleties and I remember eleven-year-old-me studying them very consciously, analysing the photographs that had presented me with the seeming impossibility of piecing together the entire story of what these skaters were doing.
There are two tricks in particular that stand out in my memory. The noseslide and tailslide. As the name implies, one of these is done on the front, or nose, of the board, the other on the tail.
So a noseslide looks like this:

While a tailslide looks like this:

If you know nothing about skateboarding you are probably looking at these pictures as if they were nearly identical and indeed, that’s the way I saw them when I was eleven years old. I knew, however, that there was supposed to be a difference and the difference lies in the way a skater approaches the object in each of the tricks. Riding up to slide on an obstacle a skaters' board is parallel to the obstacle, while the wanted end position is near-perpendicular to it. An ollie, the way to jump on a skateboard, works by tapping the back really hard and then moving your weight forward to drag the front up as it is suspended in the air. If one understands this correctly, it becomes obvious that a noseslide is a far easier trick, as it allows the person to move his weight towards the obstacle, while in a tailslide the weight of your upper body initially wants to moves away from it, before the lower half can make contact with the obstacle.

When you look at the previous to photographs closely, you can see how this is reflected in the positions of the body of both people. The guy doing the noseslide has his arms perpendicular to the obstacle and in a straight line with his board. This follows from him trying to guide his board nose first towards the obstacle.
The guy performing the tailslide, on the other hand, has his arms parallel to the obstacle and nearly perpendicular to his board. This also follows from the nature of the trick, where the position of his upper body guides his mass alongside the obstacle, while his board moves with the front away from the obstacle.
An observant reader may have also concluded that these two skaters are going in opposite directions. The guy performing the noseslide came from the left hand side and moves towards the right, while the guy performing the tailslide came from the right hand side and moves towards the left.
It thus seems that the basics of observing a single moment in order to understand what happened before and after are not that difficult to grasp, yet it tends to elude even the most accomplished sports photographers. To a skateboarder, the photographs professional sports photographers tend to make of skateboarding are laughable, as they say nothing about these existing contexts, often providing only a moment of ‘intensity’.
On the other hand, accomplished skate photographers have often gone on to make great careers in documenting other sports, such as Atiba Jefferson in the NBA and Chris Ray in the NHL. Their experience with constructing an entire story has given them considerable advantage to most other photographers that are merely trying to capture ‘the moment’.

Something comparable tends to happen in art. The ability to gather this kind of information from an image is often called visual knowledge and is supposed to be related to one’s ability to look. On the contrary, one’s ability to 'look' has nothing to do with your ability to recognise another person’s actions, as is exemplified in the anecdote that started this story. As artworks are the results of things done by people, being skilled in both telling the story of an action, as well as understanding its necessities, will be far more important than the way one looks at a sunset for its perceived beauty.