Edge - April 2016

Dispatches
perspective
steven poole
trigger happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Illustration kaeru.com.ar
W
hat is a puzzle? The etymology of
the word itself is puzzling. The
Oxford English Dictionary
suggests possible derivations from earlier
European words about being bewildered
when trying to choose. And in English, the
state of being puzzled is, from the late 16th
century, that of being confused or at a loss.
This is how videogames often try to make us
feel, hopefully in a pleasurable way. And they
do this by being filled with puzzles.
Yet a puzzle, in modern English, has the
sense of something rather trivial. It’s
something that’s both difficult and pointless.
A puzzle isn’t as serious as a ‘problem’,
something a serious intellectual might
worthily attack. Ludwig Wittgenstein
reputedly said there were no real problems in
philosophy, only puzzles. And in the language
of chess books there’s an evident hierarchy of
seriousness from chess puzzles (which are
for juniors or beginners), to problems (for the
seasoned player), to studies (the most elegant
and artistic problems).
But in games, we don’t talk of problems
or studies; only puzzles. And this little word
is used for a bewildering variety of ways the
game might challenge the player. You might
have to work out how a giant, eldritch
machine spread through several rooms is
supposed to work. Or you might have to find
the right keycard to open a door. Perhaps
you’ll have to roll a heavy ball through a
booby-trapped maze, or just slide some
virtual tiles around to complete an image. A
puzzle can be a grand challenge of many
interlocking deductions and physical actions,
or it can be a connect-the-pipes minigame.
Connect-the-pipes minigames, as it
happens, are the basis for the hundreds of
puzzles in Jonathan Blow’s The Witness. And
this extraordinary game, with its lovely
echoing cabins, surreally hypersaturated
island flora, and its glorious buildings and
structures, is not just a game filled with
puzzles. It’s about solving puzzles, and also
about learning and teaching. It concentrates
How pleasant to play a
game with no lengthy
backtracking, no unskippable
FMV, no repetitive grinding
on one of the most apparently trivial and
familiar kinds of videogame puzzle and
expands its possibilities relentlessly, to an
almost hallucinogenic degree.
The game teaches the player, wordlessly
and quite brilliantly, how to play it. As the
simple maze puzzles at the beginning ramify
relentlessly with new twists, the fanatically
systematic way in which this is done reminds
me of nothing so much as the procedures of
learning a musical instrument, or of
developing a musical theme in composition.
When you’re learning to play the piano, you
first begin playing scales with both hands in
parallel. Later, you’re introduced to ‘contrary
motion’, in which the left hand goes down
the keyboard while the right hand
simultaneously goes up the keyboard, before
they reverse direction and meet again in the
middle. It is freakily difficult at first. And so
is the moment when Blow introduces
contrary motion to his puzzles, with two
paths snaking around the maze in opposite
directions at once. Other variations are
introduced by manipulations through mirror
inversion or rotational symmetry, just as
with the serialist technique of generating
new tone rows in modernist composition.
Each set of puzzles is also a tiny parable
of the learning process. When a novel rule is
introduced – either within the puzzle, or
somehow outside it – you’re urged through
the same micro-narrative of hypothesistesting,
failure, and the eventual tremendous
satisfaction of the “Aha!” moment.
Challenged, monstrously yet benignly, you
end up challenging yourself anyway. Sure,
you can often stumble through a puzzle by
trial and error. But the pleasure is far greater
when you’ve stared it down and constructed
the correct solution in your head first.
The Witness is brilliant and mesmerising,
and oddly mentally refreshing. How pleasant
to play a game with no lengthy backtracking,
no unskippable FMV, no repetitive grinding.
But it’s fair to ask what it all adds up to. Yes,
one may admire its disdain for superficial
originality, combined with its deep
originality in the almost philosophical
devotion to exploring the ramifications of
pathfinding challenges. But in music, or in
writing, or whatever difficult thing you like
to do away from the console, there are
endless puzzles every day in the service of
something greater. Is The Witness anything
more than a kind of giant animated
compendium of sudoko puzzles? What does
it all mean? It’s in provoking that question,
perhaps, that its cunning artistry lies.
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from
Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net
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