Adventures in Solitude: On Myst and The Witness
Today, the first episode of Tevis Thompson’s new podcast, Close Playing, went up. On it, he and I discuss The Witness.

Playing The Witness, I thought a lot about Myst, a game which The Witness is clearly referencing in its island setting.

Myst was a godsend for me in 1994. I was carrying around excruciating feelings of gender dysphoria that I had no idea how to cope with and that made all my interactions with my peers feel fraught with layers of posturing and performance. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had already made their way onto my family’s PC, but as excited as I was by the innovations they represented, I was alienated by their repeated insistence on casting me as grizzled, grimacing dudes for whom victory meant blasting a bloody path through hundreds of enemies.


I already felt that I looked far too much like these characters in real life. Neither them nor the violent worlds they inhabited offered an appealing escape from the suffocating circumstances of my daily existence.
Myst was extraordinary to me at the time because of how much it wasn’t Wolfenstein or Doom. The game’s conceit, established in its opening…
…is that you stumble upon a book, and that this book transports you into the world of the game. Once there, you find not hellish landscapes and grotesque cyberdemons but a beautiful island inhabited by…nobody. Filled with details to admire and study, meanings to deduce. And no mirrors. No grimacing male face staring back at me. I could be myself. I could inhabit myself in a way that I could not anywhere else. Here I was smart. Here I was capable. Most of all, here I was free. It was a reprieve from an existence in which I was constantly reminded that I had to be something I am not.
But that was 22 years ago. Myst and The Witness may take place on islands, but I am not one. I went into The Witness hoping to rediscover some of that same pleasant feeling of solitude that I found on Myst’s shores, but I can’t go back. That’s not what I need anymore. The solitude, pleasant at first, quickly took on the savage bite of loneliness. Isolation. Where once I loved being alone on an island, delving deep into my own mind to solve its mysteries, now I yearned for someone to play the game with. Someone to explore that island with me and work with me to solve its mysteries together.
Of course I believe that travels alone can be essential. They have been essential for me. And I know that people who spend their entire young lives living with and for others sometimes fling themselves into marriages and careers without ever taking the time to step back and figure out who it is they really are and what it is they really want, and sometimes they look back and lament their own lack of perspective.
But I think the value of such solitary experiences lies in taking what you learned and bringing it back into the inherently rough and messy stuff of human interaction, fumbling for better, truer connections with ourselves and others. Certainly this was the point of my transition. And this was ultimately what was missing from The Witness for me. The human element.
The game doesn’t just strive to create a pleasant sense of solitude. In its audio diaries, I felt that it extolled the virtues of a perspective grounded in distance and detachment. And to be sure, there is much wisdom in the text of these diaries, coming as they do from people such as Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, but they feel clumsily grafted on to The Witness as a way of imbuing the game with secondhand meaning, as if it lacks the confidence to make meaning on its own terms and in its own way. It never closes the circle, taking this wisdom and applying it to anything approximating real human experience.
As a result, it feels bloodless, sterile. The island is the environmental equivalent of an overproduced pop song with the humanity drained out of it. Everything is placed too perfectly to be the work of a creator who inspires the kind of awe and wonder that some of the audio diaries refer to in their considerations of god or nature.
I wish The Witness were a little messier. More human. Less removed. But maybe there’s a lesson in it being the way it is: Despite what I may have once thought, I’m never really going to find what I’m looking for on a lonely island.
(Listen to my discussion of The Witness with Tevis Thompson.)
Notes
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