“Most things in the world are broken,” noted RAD Game Tools owner Jeff Roberts in a 2013 vodcast with programmer Casey Muratori. Roberts was talking about the busted, often unusable state of technology in our every day lives. You’ve probably seen examples of this when you’ve simply tried to install
When I played a demo version of The Witness at a Sony event in 2013, I was offered two approaches: 1) I could be lead through a basic tutorial of the way the game’s puzzle systems work, or 2) I could be left to wander around the island landscape and discover it at my whim. I chose the latter option,
There are all sorts of studies floating around about the human attention span, and usually about how it’s getting shorter. I’ve heard my fair share of anecdotes over the years from teachers, supervisors, and fellow artists about how long an average audience member is willing to engage with a piece o
I love Soulja Boy almost as much as Soulja Boy loves videogames. He was supposed to disappear after 2007’s “Crank That”—a misogynist dance anthem that was embraced, largely, sarcastically—but instead he hit the gas, beefing like crazy, flirting with major-label pop, and then dissolving in a haze of
A series of opaque circles flicker around a crudely rendered pool table like digital fireflies. As you choose your shot, a program simulates the aftermath, allowing brief insights into the future before you’ve even decided what to do. The game is Oracle Billiards, named after, and partly inspired by
Even the release date for The Witness is puzzling at first. It pops up at the end of the announcement trailer like this: “0126 • 2016.” It took a good 10 seconds for my brain to realize it said January 26th 2016. We have another four months to wait for it. We’ve already waited six years since Jonat
Just as photographs generally look good with a black and white filter, no matter the subject matter, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that stripping a game of its textures almost always produces a cool effect. One of the artists working on The Witness seems to agree—she was able to produce th
Add corporate watermarks to the ever-growing catalogue of stuff that Jonathan Blow has publicly hated on on Twitter, along with achievements and those despicable Sony smart-wigs. But let’s back up. It seems watchers are being presented with a Ubisoft logo in the lower right corner of the screen whe
The Witness has remained shrouded in mystery since Jonathan Blow disdainfully revealed it a Sony conference last year. We’ve heard peeps here and there: Blow has been referring to the gameplay as pattern recognition; writer Tom Bissell was brought on and soon left the project; they hired a professio
The Witness—Jonathan Blow’s Myst-like puzzler that set on a deserted island that is, yes, professionally landscaped—will be playable in virtual reality, the Braid-creator posted on his blog. But it wouldn’t be a Blow post without a dash of vitriol: Last year I was pessimistic about VR systems in the
Modern console features that pop up while you play are unbearable, or at least that’s what Jon Blow thinks. This is the takeaway from the brain behind Braid’s Twitter feed, which recently erupted with a flurry of posts like this one: And this one: You’re probably thinking that you can conveniently t
