Witnessing

A star at dawn;
A bubble in a stream;
A flash of lighting in a summer cloud;
A flickering lamp,
A phantom,
and a dream.

If you're not playing The Witness, or if you're not to a certain point in it, those words won't mean anything. And if you haven't known me for a while, you might find it odd that I'd blog about a video game. I sure do like puzzles, though, and I've been waiting for years now to see what the creator of Braid would do with a Myst-like "explore an island" puzzle platform. This game, The Witness, along with (hopefully) The Doors of Stone, has in fact been one of the things I've been most anticipating this year.

I think heisenbug and I are 40-50 hours of gameplay into it; we've achieved many things, and are in a sort of mopping-up phase that may yet take a while and teach us new skills. And there are more things I love about it than I can easily cover here... we could start with its respect for the player's intelligence, and its supreme confidence (it contains some long animations and video clips, and assumes these are worth your time). But there are also the puzzles, which are innovative and wordless and almost always tough-but-fair; the art, which is everywhere and deep and surely full of references I haven't gotten; the oh so androgynous shadow of the player-character; the way that, like life, it rewards covering and re-covering the same ground with more experienced eyes.

I'm not alone in this feeling. Here's someone else going hyperbolic along the same lines: while there certainly are moments of epiphany along the way, The Witness focuses on the gradual movement towards a better understanding, rather than some fantastic crescendo ending in an instant of complete clarity.... The Witness is teaching me something new. It’s teaching me something about patience, about accepting the unknown, about stepping away from a problem and coming back with a clear mind. I am learning to focus on the journey, on the moment as it is in the moment, rather than what it may become.

This is Art.

As the same post discusses, all this comes through more in the gameplay than in the straightforwardly philosophical audio and video clips to be found on the island. After bashing your head against a particularly tricky puzzle for hours, only to come back after a night of sleep and solve it in one try, it’s impossible to ignore the emotional gravity of an audio log that urges you to “stop looking for what you want.". And certain other aspects of the game reward looking, just looking... again, again, from different perspectives, not staying too rigid in what you think must be right.

Though I'm mildly afraid of sounding crazy here, I think this is a game that might teach people a better way to live. It's also the most fun I've had with a game since Portal 2, and in certain other ways since Myst before it. If you're not playing it yet, I highly recommend it.

So much adulting is silverware.

Can you handle another silverware-related post? I did some adulting today and found out that my silverware pattern is the discontinued but plentiful Royal Flute, by Oneida. Here are alllllll the pieces you don't care about.

Turns out that I own eight of those weird serving pieces, new, still in plastic wrappers, along with four iced tea spoons and five salad forks. It makes me feel guilty, wondering exactly how much my mother spent on the wedding present that got us all these (along with the forks, knives and spoons we use all the time). And it also made me write to replacements.com to get a quote on them, because we are really not using that giant fork. Or the tiny fork. Or the... I guess it's a "master butter knife".

Is this a thing that used to be a big thing but isn't even a thing, now -- being able to host a huge dinner party and having everything all matchy-match?

Anyway, I also bought four more dinner knives from Etsy, because we always run out of knives before anything else and they were cheap.