# ideology in jonathan blow's the witness comments on the witness developer blog henry swanson posted july 10 2012 at 10:57 am i wonder where braid falls on the player's length-expectation bell curve between "expensive aaa-garmes 'means' longer / "indies must be as luxuriously long (/padded) as aaa titles - but still cost nothing" that braid had time as a core mechanic yet faces complaints about duration proves my armchair thesis that irony's being outlawed it's no coincidence how some garmes feel 'timeless' - specifically in that they allow players to (temporarily) transcend or suspend time-bound notions of "self" like playing tai chi chuan-fa (cheng 37-step) sex - or indeed any garme with stimulating mechanics you get 'caught up in'. i doubt there were many who genuinely enjoyed braid yet still honestly complained about the length as artfunkel says above - constructing 'mr. whirly' inside research and development mod was brilliant. to what extent time is (or can be used as) a factor when you're having fun is a great question personally i'm hoping for more open ('paida') garme-like experiences that allow the creation of garmeplay suited to one's immediate tastes. a sweet model for this would be david o'reilly's animation the external world just keep on truckin' jon henry phil raptor posted november 30 2012 at 6:34 am hello jonathan ever considered brian eno's theoretical 'generative music' approach for making unique sounds - or indeed entire islands? the thing about a specific graphical aesthetic or overall look is that it has (obviously) changed over time. but then the final result can be seen / read as arbitrary.. yet if that's the case why not use eno's generative approach where instead of building pixel by pixel one sets the boundary parameters of interdependent code systems - eg. shape scale color density - which then interact in unexpected / nonlinear ways that is your sublime little island looks 'organic' enough to have been grown / procedurally generated by a computer. so why can't it be? near-examples of this approach are regularly seen in the awesome demoscene where entire landscapes and accompanying soundtracks explode forth in realtime from a mere 4k. (the difference there is unlike with eno's approach all modular sub-systems are 'locked down' - the demos and the music are the usually the same every time) basically it would be neat to see aspects of the island evolve in small delightful ways.. and despite its puzzles i think your garme as a whole (seeks to - edit] symbolically display a (wonderful) lack of telos; it appears open ended - something a lot of indie garmes seem to share unconsciously anyway just thinking out loud. l8ers phil raptor robert what posted november 28 2014 at 3 am (deleted) much in the same way one may arrive at a more finely granulated measure of irradiance i'm staring at this image trying to intuit how to arrive at an aesthetically meaningful calculation of overall 'interestingness' for any given scene from a given (playable) vantage point such a measurement would eg. take in overall number of light sources average object density color field complexity etc. and generate a 'heat map of visual interest' it might also place tiny virtual cameras around the island for a dev to look through in order to view poorly composed (designed) scenes - much in the same way coin operated telescopes are placed in certain key tourist hot spots of visual interest from another angle r.w **witness the ideology** the ideology of the witness may be partially viewed by repeatedly pressing f5 on the front page of the-witness.net there a series of delightful thought provoking quotations appears hand picked from select cultural heavyweights is meant to send potential players on a private reverie of intense philosophical meditation - though always in strict relationship to teh garme an image of which is displayed above the quotes consider however how exactly on terra infirma one's not only supposed to relate (read into) such quotes in the actual context of selling another hot digital product as a sony corporation ps4 exclusive > thus shall you think of this fleeting indie world of video garmes > a plastic star at dawn a egotistical fart bubble in a stream of dead data > a flash of lightning in a summer cloud above a factory of forced labourers > a flickering lamp a developer phantom and a thin bad dream > just with a few dull environmental puzzles thrown in perhaps johnny blow might not be some conceptually untouchable indie garming buddha another officially unofficially-anointed saviour of video garmes / digital art rather view the witness as just another ultra-privileged rich white-skinned male gaze confounding obsolete classically romantic notions of nature / what's natural(tm) with the concrete material restrictions governing the production of virtual worlds in the modern global information economy in such a seemingly nice neutral non-place and alienated dislocation we're all immigrants despite or rather precisely because of all the pretty colours and fluffy drifting clouds "the witness" smells as 100% artificial as they come - no offshore breeze wafts from its mystical island puzzle lifestyle to relieve foreheads sweating in electronic labor camps rather bear witness to the whole project as it exudes a heavy cloying atmosphere of affable innocent charm masquerading as thoughtful engagement with the cultural - the cool domain of ironically detached blowhards everywhere **on pretentiousness play** one way to think about pretension in garmes is that "garmes are based on imagination (pretense)." so what are johnboy's ideas about ir own garmes? here's ir (failed) attempt to answer ir critics regarding the 'pretend' aspects of braid one of the criticisms that i've heard about braid is "oh i didn't understand the story and so the author failed." well let's look at another genre that people take seriously like the novel novels are not a genre but a cultural format for presenting narratives. also the idea that 'people take novels seriously' might itself be a non-serious notion > very few people on the planet earth could tell you that they understand finnegans wake but it's considered to be one of the great novels quantify "very few." the implication here is that 'very few' could recognize the inherent genius in joyce - clever clogs like blow being one of those few no doubt. therefore one needs to be one of the very few smart ones to recognize the innate brilliance of blow's digital oeuvre something like gravity's rainbow is a very well respected very complicated book that very few people understand but that is part of the value of the medium tolstoy in anna karenina said that "respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be." as for 'the value of the medium' what's that - $60 and a season pass? note how blow's statement about it 'not being about the money' precisely echoes that of high cube-lord ubu notch there's so much to it that it's not all there the first time you glance at it. if you're interested you dig into it and you understand more and more. i think that that's a very valuable thing and i think that if we can do more of that in garmes it would be nice perhaps there's actually very little to it john the very first time one glances at it - and any number of preceding times. perhaps there's no 'value' in digging deeper especially if the developer seems consistently keen to (unconsciously) hint that the realer reason ey makes so much nice dollar value is because ey keeps repeating the same ideological suggestion: that 'there's so many deep layers of inherent meaning in my ideas for those (intelligent as me) who dig them' - a dubious position of considerable hubris // republic of bob