|
Meis posted:i like to imagine what that guy might say if he was witnessing you drawing all over him This is not a very fair interpretation of the clip at all! Admittedly the clip is framed a bit disingenuously but that's what happens when you try to summarise things. Here, I'll quote myself from the other thread. Fedule posted:I don't think Science versus Art is really the point of the Burke clip, at least, not the primary one. The point he's making is about the availability of - and ability to transfer - knowledge, and how it grants us the power to change the world. The scientists and technologists, he says, are the ones effecting change, because they're experimenting, proving, advancing what is known. This is not to say that art cannot change the world, or even that art has a lesser worth, but merely that art is primarily personal while science and technology are not only furthering direct knowledge but making it readily available and applicable. The whole thing about Yesterday, Tommorrow and You was bringing about change, figuring out how it happened, and how it can keep happening. It's not a diatribe against art, it's a clarification of art's place in the world, and science's. At the most controversial, you could say it frames technology as an accomplishment versus art as an expression (literally, "tells you more about the guy who made it than about the world"). Even that is malleable; the guy who made it is a part of the world, after all, and expression can be an achievement. JoBlow can be a bit long winded and doesn't have much sympathy for people who don't get his references but I have yet to consider him to be wrong.
|
#
¿
May 5, 2016 14:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:18 |
|
|
I cannot understand the complaint that the space quote is too long. Even beyond the various facts that it is a reading - a full reading - and therefore not suitable for abridging, that it is interesting, heartfelt, and directly relevant to context on multiple levels, that it is a good reading of a notable quote; how can its length be a problem? Are people incapable of continuing to play the game while it plays? Do people feel honour-bound to stand there, motionless, while it plays because that's what videogames - with their short, snappy soundbite-sized logs designed primarily to tell things to the player directly so as to avoid having to allude, evoke or worst of all show - have conditioned players to do? Nobody made this complaint about Metal Gear Solid V, a game which actually did kinda sorta encourage you to listen to minutes-long audio tapes in a stationary environment (though admittedly you could do some serious menu work in that space). What is the problem with a long speech?
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 02:56
|
|
|
AlphaKretin posted:I don't like how soon the game points you to the village like that. The game naturally leads you to the tutorial area, then the mirror puzzle area, and then the desert and sun temple - where the laser suddenly leads you to a central area with all these confusing new mechanics it's not immediately clear you should leave for later. Or is that meant to be the whole "Metroid with knowledge" thing? Pretty much. One of the first things you see once out of the starting area is a door with a puzzle on it that has two mechanics you don't know about yet (the dots and the coloured squares). Barely a few steps past there is the tutorial for both of those things. The village is the same concept writ larger.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2016 04:25
|
|
|
Tenebrais posted:I can never quite tell if those audio logs are meant to be the in-story creators of the island, or the actual game developers recording conversations they've had and they're really just that full of themselves. They're definitely fictional characters talking about the fictional project to create the island rather than the actual development of the game, although I imagine a few conversations from development served as inspiration for the fiction. There's various follow-up theories to this that I like a lot and one that I think is probably true based on what I know about JoBlow, but let's sit on it until we hear a few more of this batch of audiologs. Fedule fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Oct 9, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2016 01:00
|
|
|
So yeah, the unsolvable puzzle displays are just a straight up three-digit display counting down the remaining measures in the music. The first panel represents a digit using the number of squares in the shapes, the second using the number of yellow rounded squares, and the third using the number of dots. Also there really was an audiolog in the water by the gramophone...
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2016 00:39
|
|
|
Did you fuckers just call What I'm Made Of garbage Also if you observe you will now see that the "unsolvable" countdown panels you noticed earlier have now changed to solvable panels and, in fact, been solved. Fedule fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Oct 29, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 18:55
|
|
|
Watching the first few minutes of that first video was physically painful. BTW, both links go to the same video, should probably like fix that or something. Here is a video of The Secret of Psalm 46. Fedule fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Nov 2, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2016 16:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:18 |
|
|
So yeah I said at some point I'd outline some things once we were done with The Challenge. If The Witness is about anything, it could be about this: how much of enlightenment is teachable? The theme that explicitly ties all of the audio readings is Truth Seeking, as mentioned in one Einstein quote about "the society of true searchers". The quotes we've been having read to us are from people deemed to be these legendary true searchers. These people, in all their various domains of art, science, philosophy, theology, and whatever else, who determined that they would task themselves with perceiving the world, and with such clarity that they were then able to relate their findings in a way that made them compelling in and of themselves, without reference to some other assumed truth, or the invalidity of some perceived alternative; nothing but the blinding truth of the thing itself, plain to see and impossible to deny. And all of these readings are window dressing for the island, which is itself one enormous meditation on perception, on investigation, on understanding, on derivation, on connection. One enormous, elaborate, interconnected system waiting for a patient and inquisitive mind to pick it apart and learn, and in doing so learning how to learn. This might have been an answer to James Burke; this is the new manner in which change of the world can be affected, by which not only knowledge but wisdom can be imparted, the technology that will be the new hallmark of power. The island is the experience that will make you wise. It is a distillation of the universal truth. It is the process that grants perception. ...except Jonathan Blow is not that dumb, and is also incapable of making any point wrapped in less than two layers of metaphor, and so we find that all that stuff is just a decoy, and what The Witness is actually about is that of course enlightenment isn't teachable, you moron, what the gently caress did you expect?! The island is an admittedly very impressive VR experience designed by people who believe the things outlined above. It's not VR as we know it today, but more of a lucid dream induced by technology and designed by a designer. A person can enter into this experience and remain in it indefinitely, until they willingly come out. The people we hear from in the underground audiologs are the team that built this thing; driven, resourceful, reasonably well funded and evidently willing to experiment, and very, very convinced that the thing they are building is Important. Notably this could also plausibly describe Blow's studio Thekla Inc, and no doubt a number of events from the game's development inspired some of the fictional conversations of the island builders - most notably the bit about the Sagan quote. It's not made entirely clear - or rather it's not stated explicitly - what the purpose of this thing is, but it seems apparent from context that this experience is designed to be sold to people. I like this interpretation; it seems so typical of the mindset of the entertainers of the unreasonably rich. In a world where you can book a trip to space, why not sell enlightment as a videogame? It's also not clear what exactly is the status of this venture when we, the player, visit the island, but - again - it seems a reasonable supposition that we are the "real first" mentioned by the team; the first person to dive in and remain under until we choose to come out. Notably, exit seems to be conditional on learning. Taken at face value, the island experience is cyclical and neverending. Leaving requires one to learn to perceive the hidden puzzles in the environment, and either catch the one in the starting area at the start of a cycle or activate all the lasers, reach the underground, and learn how to turn the gate back on. At this point they are guided through a fancy lobby with the corporate logo plastered everywhere and read the credits, thanked for their custom, and guided out, whereupon they emerge from the simulation. ...and it becomes very apparent that the player character has been a bit hosed up by the experience. They (portrayed by Blow, incidentally) wake up dazed and confused, stumble around looking for circles and lines, fail to interact with things, wander outside, lie down, and pass out again. It's evident that they've been under for quite a while (see: piss jar), and have left it somewhat the worse off. The particularities of this are unexplored but the message is loud and clear; it didn't work. It doesn't work. It can't work. It could never have worked. We spent so long with our mind turned inwards that we forgot that all we can see that way is ourselves. We were so focused on reaching the center of the thing that we forgot to examine the layers of the thing and how we get from each to the next. We were so fixated on searching for what we wanted that we forgot what we had. We were so absorbed in some quest that it consumed us. Someone tried to put enlightment in a videogame for us to find, and forgot that putting a thing in a videogame for us to find can't be the purpose of the videogame, because the purpose of the videogame can only be the videogame itself; immersing yourself that deep for that long in a search for some elusive truth can never work out, no matter how fine a place you're looking. There's no magic nugget of purpose that justifies this thing, there can only ever be the thing itself, on its own merits, compelling without reference, undeniable. I don't think Blow thinks that The Witness is the game described in The Secret of Psalm 46 that will flash across human culture like lightning and all that, but I do think he tried deliberately to make a game that evokes awe, and I think he succeeded, a little. The island may not be as humbling a thing as the collected works of Shakespeare, but it is astonishingly well designed; a perfect marriage of form and function, of aesthetic and mechanic, of video and game if you will. An incredible amount of work went into the precise shaping and placement of a million different things to create the hidden puzzles and vignettes and other things that look purely visual but actually serve a purpose. To this day I still feel a bit of awe thinking about the puzzle on top of the mountain with the statues on top of it, with everyone's legs and feet placed just right so that the tiny amount of black and white squares and entrance and exit points produce three maddeningly precise puzzles and - how the christ did humans build that?! Is it more or less believable that one person placed everything, or that a separate puzzle designer and artist worked together? And of course, it has a fairly deep cache of secrets to discover, that seem like they ought to be meaningful, but are they, really? Or is it just that searching for them is enjoyable and finding them is rewarding? The Witness is a good videogame.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2016 02:16
|
|