Now, I recognize the world doesn’t need another Think Piece calling Jonathan Blow and his work pretentious. Search “Jonathan Blow pretentious” on Google, and you can find plenty of forum posts and mid-tier gaming website articles that have that market nicely cornered.

That’s not what I’m here to do. Not exactly. The question I’m interested in is less: Is The Witness a pretentious game? But rather: What do we even mean when we call something pretentious in the first place?

We could go to the good ol’ Oxford English dictionary, though I tend to be wary of letting dictionary definitions steer the conversation too strongly. There we see “pretentious” defined as:

“Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed.”

Which is fine. As a rough outline for pretentiousness, it does the trick. A guy hitting on a girl at a party is throwing out incorrect references to classical music that he clearly doesn’t know anything about, and he gets called on it when it turns out the object of his attraction works as a professional cellist. He was being “pretentious” because he was operating under a pretense that he possessed a base of knowledge that he really didn’t have. There’s a falseness, an element of deception at stake.

But that definition sort of starts to break down when we talk about the kind of “pretentiousness” that people accuse Jonathan Blow of.

Because when you look at a game like The Witness, it’s hard to argue that Jonathan Blow doesn’t have a wide base of knowledge. The audio logs and voice overs The Witness tosses your way bring up lines of inquiry that are certainly worth pursuing. Is a well-meaning but negligent ship owner morally culpable for a wreck he could have prevented? What does travelling to space do to shift your perspective on national boundaries?

These are all interesting ideas, but it’s important to remember that none of them are actually coming from Jonathan Blow and the rest of the dev team at Thekla. The Witness just presents these ideas for your consideration. You’re expected to put the pieces together yourself. The thing that keeps nagging me about The Witness is that, for all of these audio logs and their fascinating outside perspectives, The Witness is a work that feels fundamentally afraid of having any ideas of its own.

And I genuinely don’t mean that in the sense that this game is uninspired or uncreative, just that there’s a certain uneasy defensiveness in the way that The Witness gets its message across, always decentering its own perspectives and contradicting its previous arguments for the sake of its meditation on perspective. The Witness is a game that wants to make you think, that’s pretty clear. But think about what? And in what way? On the island of The Witness, those are concerns for you, the player, not for the game.

Profiling a tech art PhD program the University of Washington, The Stranger’s Jen Graves wrote:

“When we say of a work of art, ‘I didn’t get it,’ we don’t mean only that we didn’t understand it but literally that we didn’t receive it. It didn’t cross over to where we are. It left us just as it found us, on our own.”

And when we talk about our feelings on a piece of art, that line of communication is so, so key. It’s what we mean when we say that a work “spoke to us.” The work used some medium, some language — whether that’s sculpture, or oil pastels, or the Source engine — it used that medium to communicate something to us. And when a work of art doesn’t communicate anything in particular, we get left with an empty feeling. It’s an empty feeling that we find hard to describe, but the fact remains: we know it when we see it.

The Witness seems like it genuinely doesn’t give a shit about crossing that boundary, that infinite divide between the game and the person playing it.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t any communication going on — I appreciated the game’s commitment to teaching the mechanics of its puzzles entirely nonverbally, and The Witness did a great job at stimulating that “aha!” moment when things start to click and you’ve intuited the next set of rules to help you move on. The Witness establishes a base language of communication with the player through mechanics: within the panel puzzles there are concrete rules like tetris blocks need to be enclosed in a certain area, blocks of the same color need to be separated, etc.

There’s also the secondary goal of the environmental puzzles, where circles hidden throughout the Island’s landscape can become line puzzles when viewed from the correct perspective. As I played, these circles started to catch my eye — always giving me pause and making me take a moment to see if I could view the puzzle from a location that would allow me to solve it.

Establishing a grammar for communication is so important to allow any work to be able to cohere into something, but then for all of its work developing its symbolic language, The Witness ultimately doesn’t seem to be invested in doing anything with this language.

Like take the secret ending:

You go into an elevator which resets you back into the area where you started. You come out, you notice that the sun forms one of those line puzzles, so you solve it, and a secret room opens up! You walk through the secret room into a resort area overlooking the island which becomes a cave, which becomes an area that appears to defy the laws of physics until finally… you wake up lying in a virtuality reality simulator. This person, who is I assume supposed to be you the player (never mind that the hairy arms and body type of the POV holder sort of code this person as a white man), this person gets up and starts to poke around their home, bewildered by everything around them. At one point, they pick up a circular cracker and start holding it around, trying to make it line up with the environment. The game is still with them!

Wow! Look how much you, the player, have been affected by this game! You’re even starting to see the world differently! You’re noticing patterns where none exist!

And then it ends. And that ‘gotcha’ moment is sort of all it has to say.

The Witness spends 25 or more hours carefully working with you to establish a visual language, but then rather than using that language to communicate anything in particular, the game’s final moments seem to just point out the fact that it’s managed to affect you in this vague way and leaves it at that.

Throughout The Witness, I couldn’t shake this feeling that this was a work that desperately wanted to prove that it was capable of communicating with me, but at the same time it didn’t seem as if it was invested in actually communicating anything in particular.

Jonathan Blow even said as much in an interview with The Guardian that compared Jonathan Blow to “a kind of Thomas Pynchon of gaming:”

“Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t holding your hand the whole way through to make sure you understood every paragraph. It’s exploring things it thinks are interesting, and if you can keep up, great.”

Which is fine. That’s the kind of art that interests Jonathan Blow and that’s the way Jonathan Blow wants to make art. I’m not here to say the way Jonathan Blow makes art is the wrong way to make art.

It’s not that I gained nothing from playing The Witness. It’s that The Witness is a game that doesn’t give a shit about whether or not I gain anything from it.

The Witness feels like the video game equivalent of a friend who invites you to a party and then declines to introduce you to anyone there. You might still meet interesting people, but at the end of the night, you’re left with a weird sour taste in your mouth. I had a good time, but I can’t shake the feeling my friend doesn’t give a shit about me.

And walking around the island listening to another Albert Einstein voiceover, that thought kept repeating in my head:

This feels pretentious.