In the ongoing debate about whether or not video games can be art, there’s little doubt as to where Jonathan Blow stands on the issue. He first started turning heads with his 2008 indie sensation Braid, and since then he’s been vocal in sharing his philosophies about how games can and should be made.

After my hands-on time at E3 with Blow’s new game, The Witness, I asked him about the process of making his sophomore title. He also shared his perspectives on what he hopes to accomplish with games and the medium’s potential to create expressive works on par with any other artistic venture.

Working on The Witness

Every choice made in the making of The Witness has a purpose, starting with the nature of the challenges players will solve, Blow said. “The reason the puzzle mechanism is what it is, is to maximize focus.”

He explained that many adventure games have too much input to help the player move through increasingly difficult challenges: there are typically many items in an inventory and an environment, all potentially usable in some combination for a solution. The Witness pares that down to a minimum.

Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Games Summit in 2007. Image: Flickr, SIJM MIGS

The core mechanic of the puzzles is drawing a line through a maze. As players explore the game, those mazes introduce new dynamics and layers to complicate the simple task. During development, Blow brainstormed all the different ways he could present a puzzle based on drawing a line. Once he identified those most important types of thinking about the puzzle mechanic, he was able to try filling in those spaces with the challenges.

That took some trial and error. Blow said he had built enough candidate puzzles to playability to fill up to two-thirds of a second game the size of The Witness. When asked about how he knows when a puzzle is worth including, Blow said he relies on gut instinct. “You just feel it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes I’m not sure. When I’m not sure, usually it turns out later on that I can refine it in a way that makes it good.”

Image: Mashable Anna Washenko

He also developed the game’s bright art style around the need for that focus. “We really just wanted to find the thing that was right for the game,” he said. “I wanted something that felt idealized. Not cartoony, but simplified a little bit in the way cartoons are.” Those vibrant colors actually play a part in directing players and controlling their focus. For instance, one green tree among an an orchard of bright pink trees will draw the eye. And among those trees, a green panel that’s a more neon shade than the tree stands out as well.

Creating focus within the space helps Blow to turn gamers loose in the entirely open world of The Witness. His opinion was that if a designer can prove that there’s something original worth investigating in their work, then a player will be at least a little interested in investing some time in that world, even though that investment might stretch their minds. “You have to have faith that your player is an intelligent person who will bring at least a little bit of effort to the game,” he said. “You don’t break the contract between designer and player.”

How important is the story?

One of the last tasks that remain before the The Witness’ release is the story. Blow explained how that will unfold within the build on display at E3. “You’ll find recordings laying around in the environment that, bit by bit, communicate to you what’s going on,” he explained. Thanks to the totally open nature of the game, that might mean that one player finds all of the audio logs while another only finds half. Or two players who find everything might discover them in a different order, changing their personal experience of the story.

Blow is fine with that. In a year when so many new titles are emphasizing the potential of games to tell stories, he doesn’t share that view. “I don’t feel like the future of games is necessarily about story in the way that a lot of people think that it is,” he said. “I think that games can do some interesting stuff with story, but I don’t think it’s the main thing that games do.”

Most story-telling forms, such as literature and cinema, have different strengths and methods for conveying a plot that Blow doesn’t see as the best match for use in a game. “If I’m doing games and story, then I want the story to embrace some part of what a game is,” he said. “Either it’s generative or its non-linear or its dynamic.”

His experience with The Witness backs up that stance. “In the original conception, it was very story-heavy,” he said, explaining that he then took all the plot points out to seek out a better balance with the puzzling. “I’m finding it’s kind of a nice game even without that.”

The state of indie games

Success, both critical and financial, as an independent game designer is not easy to come by. I asked Blow why he thought his work has been so well-received, and he credited it largely to the uniqueness of his vision. “Any time you do your own thing, and you’re not trying to look like other games or behave like other games, there’s automatically going to be some people interested in that,” he said.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the vision includes some lofty expectations for what games as an artistic medium can achieve. “I take games really seriously. I think they have a great deal of potential to be a very interesting part of what it means to be a human being in the future and how we think about the world and how we interact with the world.”

In turn, that means he as an artist places a heavy burden on his own work: “How do I also make the most meaningful thing that I can? For some definition of meaningful, for some group of people who happen to think about games at least a little bit like I do.”

Blow sees a distinction between his goals and those of many other developers, both from the major studios and among independents. He explained his perspective with a comparison to movies. “If somebody’s going to read a novel or watch a film and not just say ‘oh, that was a good movie,’ but ‘that movie changed my life’ … those usually aren’t the commercial endeavor movies,” he said. “I don’t think Transformers 3 changed anyone’s life.”

He sees many developers who aspire to Michael Bay’s style of blockbuster success. “Some indies basically want to be triple A and they’re just small right now. Other indies want to pursue the art and the craft as best they can.” That’s not his style. “You have to be willing to lose all your money to do something good, I think.”

A slow shift toward meaning

As you’d expect with any artist, Blow’s not looking only to entertain.

“There’s this common cultural idea that I don’t think is really totally true that movies and a lot of pop culture are for escapism,” he said. “I don’t think that’s really true for a lot of people, and when creators think about that it’s a little misguiding.”

Again, he cited cinema as a comparison for his expectations. “When I go to a movie, I don’t want to get away from something that’s my life, I want to go toward something,” he said. “It’s my hope that the filmmaker has something to show me that I will find really valuable.”

Even though he frequently referenced the experience of watching a movie or reading a book, it’s clear that Blow doesn’t want to see games turn into an interactive version of either of those two traditional art forms. But he isn’t shy about his desire to use games to tackle questions that the best artists in those fields also ask.

“[Braid] was very much a game that really cares about some kind of question about what the hell is going on in the world, with being a human being,” he said. “The Witness has a similar kind of question. It’s an existential question of: We’re in this world, there’s some kind of space and there’s light and shadows and shapes and colors and … why? What’s going on?”

Blow knows that he and The Witness have something special to offer people willing to explore those questions through the medium of games. As he said earlier, he places some trust in the players, that they will be willing to enter into the title on a two-way street.

“The game is really working hard to give the best experience to the player, but it presumes that that player is willing to find that experience and understand it,” he said. “To actively engage with it.”

This isn’t a mindset that will suit everyone, but that doesn’t deter Blow from seeing his independent vision through to whatever resolution he finds.

“It’s a very ‘meaning of life’ kind of game and it’s about, to the best of my ability, asking that question of 'what is going on?',” he said. “It’s not a question that you can fully answer. But it’s a game about being a person who really cares about that and wants to know.”