The Witness

[jakonovski]

Spoiler obsession is making communication about this game fail. It's ridiculous. The game has nothing rightfully spoilable apart from secret locations.

This is especially bad with reviewers, who start sounding like snake oilsmen.

[Lakov_Sanite]

1. Puzzles are my thing.
2. I love this game.
3. It was worth the money to me.

[Margalis]

Wish you guys could see how people in the industry are talking about it. "Masterpiece" is the most frequent word. Near universal admiration. Maybe that's because we're the target demo, I dunno. :)

I really can't stand it when people say "people in the industry" when they mean "my buddies in the industry." It's like when Rami says he knows "every indie developer" when he actually knows less than 1% of them.

The Witness takes zero motor skills, hand eye coordination or ability of any kind, it makes you feel smart and accomplished while playing, it has some philosophical mumbo-jumbo bullshit 'story' bits, etc. Yes, it is basically designed to appeal to a certain segment of the industry. The segment that would have a nervous breakdown if thrown into a MOBA.

Spoiler obsession is making communication about this game fail

As you say, there really isn't that much to spoil.

I suspect a lot of critics don't want to say that "it's a really good puzzle game" because that comes off like "it's JUST a really good puzzle game." So instead they pretend like there are vast spoilery secrets. Spoiler: you do a bunch of puzzles, then you do a bunch more, and that's the game.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Funny enough I also play league of legends.

[Mandella]

Where did you get that impression?

From Jonathan Blow himself. According to multiple interviews and his own Twitter feed "there will be puzzles 99% of all the Wittness players won't be able to complete".

He might as well have said that he is smarter than the people buying his games.

Wait what? How do you get that implication from that quote? Since the process of making puzzles is highly different than the process of solving puzzles there is no intelligence comparison that can be made between the maker and solver, nor does that quote make him sound like he was trying to.

Put it another way, you might as well have just said, "That Jonathan Blow, he thinks he's so smart!" *sniff*

This game just sounds like it appeals to a certain gamer demographic, and that is just fine. But games like that are always going to pick up bad reviews from people who maybe *thought* they were in that demographic, or who think "fun" is some universal standard that must the be same across all activities, (as in, the game is a failure if it does not have something for everyone).

If actual puzzle gamers are buying this in quantity enough to make a profit, then success!

[Rasix]

Based on everything I've read and heard here, I'd really need a demo for this.  Even $5 is too much to pay for something that'll potentially make me yack or be unplayable due to my colorblindness.  I miss demos.

Or: I'm not really a puzzle gamer.  I'd never had bought Portal if it was a stand alone, but I did like that enough to buy Portal 2 at launch. 

Wish you guys could see how people in the industry are talking about it. "Masterpiece" is the most frequent word. Near universal admiration. Maybe that's because we're the target demo, I dunno. :)

Yikes.  This is possibly the snootiest thing you've ever said here. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's a video game version of oscar-bait which means critics will cream themselves over it but it can still be good, which I think it is.  This is more the revenant than it is concussion.

[patience]

It isn't just a puzzle game it's an exploration game. I will rarely call this game fun but it is deep. It's easily one of the best designed open world games. If you like examining game mechanics this game is sort of for you. If you like exploring a tightly tuned world this game is definitely for you. If you like open world gameplay then The Witness can be a revelation on how much better they could be. Too bad for the Witness it came out after the Witcher but that's Blow's team's fault for taking 8 years.

[Hoax]

From this thread I'm 100% sure I wouldn't play this game if they installed it onto my steam while I slept for free and it had steam trading cards.

"all the industry insiders love it"

Is that ever said about a legitimately fun to play game? Its always indie wankery, zero gameplay substance having, "clever systems" game, clever systems being code for unfun shit.

[Raph]

I really can't stand it when people say "people in the industry" when they mean "my buddies in the industry." It's like when Rami says he knows "every indie developer" when he actually knows less than 1% of them.

Yikes.  This is possibly the snootiest thing you've ever said here. 

Is that ever said about a legitimately fun to play game? Its always indie wankery, zero gameplay substance having, "clever systems" game, clever systems being code for unfun shit.

"People in the industry" doesn't mean "all people in the industry" or even "a majority of people in the industry." And yes, people who make games for a living *do* tend to have somewhat different tastes. It's not snooty, it's actually quite often a handicap. It's a desperation for stuff that's fresh, most of the time. Yes, cleverness, yes sometimes wankery. On the other hand, devs buzzed about Guitar Hero when gamers were skeptical of a dedicated peripheral, and about Journey, and about plenty of other stuff that had pretty great popular resonance.

FWIW, the admiration I see in my circles tends to be around the smoothness of how the puzzle language unfolds, the level design around them, and the way in which changes are rung on it all, all the way up to how


It's not universal praise, for sure. Those who dislike it tend to cite the controls (movement speed and turn rate), the disabling of prior panels when you screw up, the fact that it is, in the end, a series of puzzles, and the fairly diffuse nature of the story... not much different from what you guys are saying. And ofc, everyone cimplains about the motion sickness thing.

[Hoax]

Oh yeah Raph, I totally get what you are saying. Whenever movie insiders are ultra pumped about some movie (that is often somehow about or an allegory for making movies) its almost never actually an enjoyable watch.

I bet if I ever listened to anything theater people said it'd be even worse.

I'm not blaming you or them for liking what they like, just pointing out that this game seems to prove that point pretty well. Touche on the Guitar Hero thing if that's how it went. There is def fun to be had there.

Journey... is basically exactly what I'm talking about.

[lamaros]

I'm not really sure what is that novel about cleverly presented puzzles. Are the puzzles themselves amazing? I find that hard to believe, given human being love puzzles and have been making them for thousands of years. Is it the expression?

Ultimately I'm not going to by this because it sounds like an aesthetic or craft appreciation as much as anything else. I'm not paying $40 for that. I don't care how much it cost to make, or how clever it might seem to someone in the industry; if it doesn't all come through in my experience of the game I'm not interested. I'm not a journo or academic or professional, I don't have money for industry novelty, my gaming money is for games I like to play.

(I do own a few board games that would fit into this area, but I find the design and craft of boardgames interesting, as it's something I have dabbled in).

If there is something genuinely special about this game, for those playing it, it's not being communicated in a way that is getting through. It just sounds like hipster noise, with a price-tag to match.

[Merusk]

Eisenmann is a brilliant Architect, as is Ghery. All our buildings should look like the DAAP extension and the MIT Stata Building who were complex, engaging and took things in brilliant new directions, challenging modern ideas of building and design. If you don't believe that their value far exceeded the minor quibbles about usability and maintenance, then you clearly aren't cultured enough to get it.

Sometimes a thing that is appreciated by the industry is also garbage to the rest of the world because it fails to meet base requirements. It's the nature of "Ivory Tower" defenses to dismiss such criticisms because the industry in question DESPERATELY wants something new.

Being aware of the criticisms and shortcomings of something while also acknowledging them doesn't diminish the final product or its breakthroughs. It helps by letting people know you're not going to make the same mistakes if you cite the as an inspiration AND lets users know, "Yeah, this was a problem but it's not why <object> was great."

Throwing up lame defenses like, "But it cost so much!" Bush league and invites criticisms like, "Well <x> company did far more in <y> with less cash and fewer resources. Guess you suck at your job."

[Lakov_Sanite]

If you like puzzle exploration games, you'll like this.  If you don't, you won't.  Might be worth $20 to you not $40 but you'll like this game.

[Margalis]

Light spoilers I guess:


It's also worth pointing out that Blow has a weird cult of personality around him, and that certainly plays into the praise, at least in some circles. He has a reputation and so people look to validate it by finding good stuff in his games.

Look at a guy like Jason Rohrer. He had a reputation for making great games, he kept putting out crap, and people kept trying to claim that his crap was gold. No matter how simple, inane, or just poorly crafted his games were (for fuck's sake a recent one is just a shitty online checkers-type-thing with betting!) people would write breathless pieces about how he was some sort of crazy interesting hippy genius.

People only woke up to the fact that his game are crap after he made 3 or 4 crap ones in a row, and made a bunch of weird sexist statements and turned out to be a retrograde caveman rather than an enlightened hippy.

Now Blow's games are much better than Rohrers, but the same principle applies. To some degree you can say the same about Molyneux. People had to pretend that clicking on cubes was interesting, simply because he was involved.

In general video game people, meaning both press and devs /academics, are terrible at critical evaluation in the moment. You have to wait a minimum of 6 months for honest evaluations.

[lamaros]

If you like puzzle exploration games, you'll like this.  If you don't, you won't.  Might be worth $20 to you not $40 but you'll like this game.

I like good puzzles. I'm not sure what a "puzzle exploration" is as a genre though.

I don't really care how tweely the puzzles are presented if they're ultimately not interesting puzzles. There are plenty of very interesting puzzles you can tackle for free; if you want me to pay $40 for them you need more than "with hollywood voice recording".

If ultimately you're just providing puzzles you're asking for a lot of money for the bells and whistles at $40 ($55 AUD, given the current exchange rate). Meanwhile I paid ~AUD$55 for XCOM2.

[Raph]

Look at a guy like Jason Rohrer. He had a reputation for making great games, he kept putting out crap, and people kept trying to claim that his crap was gold. No matter how simple, inane, or just poorly crafted his games were (for fuck's sake a recent one is just a shitty online checkers-type-thing with betting!) people would write breathless pieces about how he was some sort of crazy interesting hippy genius.

People only woke up to the fact that his game are crap after he made 3 or 4 crap ones in a row, and made a bunch of weird sexist statements and turned out to be a retrograde caveman rather than an enlightened hippy.

I think thati's a misinformed take on Jason Rohrer. Disclaimer: I know him.

Passage was revolutionary in its time. Sleep is Death was a fairly fun two-player storytelling experiment. The "online-checkers-type-thing," Cordial Minuet, is a surprisingly deep head to head game that was probably sunk by its ties to real money. And the "weird statements" were political controversy over his game The Castle Doctrine and the very real backstory behind it (see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/197707/The_strange_sad_anxiety_of_Jason_Rohrers_The_Castle_Doctrine.php).

[lamaros]

You're not helping yourself - or The Witness - here Raph.

[Margalis]

I don't think it's really contestable that there is a weird cult of personality around Blow, given pieces like this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/308928/ . And the fact that so much writing about his games is as much or more about him than the games themselves. Even criticisms of his games often read more like personal criticism and invective than criticism of the work.

I'll leave the Rohrer stuff because he's your pal, beyond pointing out that when you say I'm misinformed what you mean is that you disagree.

I think it's very fair to say that video game hot takes are often way off for a variety of reasons, and that people proclaiming "masterpiece" on Twitter two days after release is not particularly meaningful. The same can be said in other mediums, though games do seem particularly vulnerable to hype and expectations. In general I'm very skeptical of instant reaction culture, which is often much more about the person doing the reacting than the work itself.

As far as the game itself, I think it's one of those "if you think you'll like it you'll like it" games. Which sounds tautological but really isn't.

[Jeff Kelly]

A masterpiece is a masterpiece if it has stood the test of time i.e if it has managed to stay relevant, is still able to inspire and if it is still part of the 'cultural consciousness' decades or even centuries after it was made.

Industry insiders are not the best judges of lasting cultural impact or even quality. This has probably always been the case but thanks to the fact that we can archive media we can now go back and check what has made the most buzz around its release and during awards seasons and what people today still remember and talk about. There's also a difference between something that is very very well crafted and conceptualized and what is palatable. Ulysses is objectively a very well written and crafted book where an author implemented a few very high brow concepts in a very well crafted way. I can appreciate the effort in executing that concepts well on an abstract level but I have never heard of anyone ever that considers it his or her favorite book.

Sometimes its just 'art for the sake of art' which I can appreciate (as an amateur musician my musical tastes are as weird) and I think appeals to 'industry insiders' often tasked with the equivalent of writing copy for advertising campaigns but this game has been yet another example of a game that is almost feverishly praised by developers and writers yet seems to fail to connect with the general audience. The ones who buy games and don't get it via review codes.

We've had quite a few games this last two or three years where this has been the case and this concerns me a lot. For one because it shows that the creators and curators are more and more getting out of touch with their audience. Secondly because it perpetuates the supid idea that great art is inscrutable and can only be appreciated by the initiated when the opposite is the case. Great art connects with all people.

[schild]

Wish you guys could see how people in the industry are talking about it. "Masterpiece" is the most frequent word. Near universal admiration. Maybe that's because we're the target demo, I dunno. :)

That's because nobody has worse taste than people in the industry.

Nobody.

[Nija]

That's because nobody has worse taste than people in the industry.

Nobody.

What about people who post on on the official forum for a MMO?

[schild]

That's because nobody has worse taste than people in the industry.

Nobody.

What about people who post on on the official forum for a MMO?

I thought it was proven those aren't people but rather semi-sentient blobs of rendered chicken fat.

I'd have to dig up the article on Gamasutra or Insert Credit or Jezebel.

[lamaros]

Jeff you make some horrible arguments. Many people like Ulysses and it is a classic.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If you like puzzle exploration games, you'll like this.  If you don't, you won't.  Might be worth $20 to you not $40 but you'll like this game.

I like good puzzles. I'm not sure what a "puzzle exploration" is as a genre though.

I don't really care how tweely the puzzles are presented if they're ultimately not interesting puzzles. There are plenty of very interesting puzzles you can tackle for free; if you want me to pay $40 for them you need more than "with hollywood voice recording".

If ultimately you're just providing puzzles you're asking for a lot of money for the bells and whistles at $40 ($55 AUD, given the current exchange rate). Meanwhile I paid ~AUD$55 for XCOM2.

I definitely recommend you get this on a steam sale.  I personally wouldn't call this a $40 game, $20 easily but even saying that I don't feel like I wasted my money.  When I say puzzle exploration I mean the environment is a heavy part or the puzzles themselves.  Without giving too much away which angle you stand at or what is around you can directly influence how something is solved.

[Jeff Kelly]

Jeff you make some horrible arguments. Many people like Ulysses and it is a classic.

I never said anything different. I agree, Ulysses is a classic. I never met anyone who said it was his or her favorite book though.

[lamaros]

Jeff you make some horrible arguments. Many people like Ulysses and it is a classic.

I never said anything different. I agree, Ulysses is a classic. I never met anyone who said it was his or her favorite book though.

How many people have you met and asked what their favourite book is? Your experience isn't really a meaningful point. Moreover it's somewhat contrary to the argument you seem to be trying to argue about The Witness.

[Margalis]

https://medium.com/@JoeKllr/misunderstanding-489fd4ff3b6a#.tvd8gchbx

I don't 100% agree, either with this or the linked "Lulu Blue" piece (not capitalizing things isn't edgy, it's just annoying! And the digression about reactionary politics is just daft), but I would say that this is more right than wrong.

I would also point out that these are also as much about Blow as they are the game itself. It's very hard to separate talk of his games from talk of him and people's personal opinion of him.

[lamaros]

It's not hard to not talk about him if you're not in the gaming media echo chamber, but then, those who aren't in there don't really care to talk about it in a way that attracts attention.

Reminds me that I recently got linked to PCGAMER's 50 most important games of all time, which was mildly interesting and subject to the usual issues people have with these kinds of lists, up until it obviously got to the part in the timeline when the bright sparks somehow thought it would be clever to add in titles like Spelunky ("as being one of the first games to establish Roguelikes as a thing") and Broken Age ("Changed the way games could be financed in a flash, and over the next several years gave fans a more detailed look at the process and challenges of game development than ever before").

Most of these people talking publicly about such things like they matter are just idiot kids, or industry vets/groupies with no perspective.

Also Raph, Budget wise: UO was over 18 years ago. Budgets aren't relevant to consumer experience anyhow, but even if they're an interesting analytical point, inflation is a thing (or did it cost that much?).

Edit: Can anyone actually link some of the interesting bits in The Witness? My youtubing so far has just shown people labouring over simple stuff.

[Raph]

https://medium.com/@JoeKllr/misunderstanding-489fd4ff3b6a#.tvd8gchbx

I don't 100% agree, either with this or the linked "Lulu Blue" piece (not capitalizing things isn't edgy, it's just annoying! And the digression about reactionary politics is just daft), but I would say that this is more right than wrong.

tl;dr generalized fairly polite rant.

"...when the same game is propounding that this search for patterns and rules is more noble, more honest, more truthful than self expression, my eyebows end up wandering to the top of my skull. Jonathan Blow may mean no harm, but the ideology his games are steeped in is far from harmless."

Bleah. Talk about a cultural gap here. It is one that led to all the "what's a game" crap a while back, it's one that fed into the GG mess, and one that continues to divide things, and it's a stupid gap. All the arguments over whether objective truth is more harmful or less truthful than subjectivity, or assertions that self expression is noble... it's all basically good old Two Cultures writ small. That paragraph could be inverted in its assertions and hopefully our collective eyebrows would still climb.

Not to bring up Rohrer again (not "a pal" by the way -- we've traded some emails and met twice) -- but this same sort of political over-layering is what turned discussion of Castle Doctrine into a debate on gun control, animal cruelty, and patriarchy (and for that matter, just to go in the other direction, turned discussion of Gone Home into a referendum on gameness, systemic depth, and the supposed insider industry bias towards specific sorts of stories).

On the one hand, it's nice that discussions like that can even exist around games, regardless of which side you come down on. Gives academics and critics a niche, improves leigitmacy and defensibility of the medium to the wider world, etc. On the other hand, it's also a game in which to score points, in a lot of ways, and we need to be careful not to take it too seriously.

Koller's piece is indies eating their own; not that long ago, Jon was an exemplar of the indie world, and he's still an active supporter of it to this day, both from a financial point of view as a member of Indiefund, but also as someone who has been helping "indie" happen for over a decade. But today a lot of the younger indies are fighting The Man, and Jon is now The Man.

Similar essays like Daphne's (someone I ALSO know -- the essay is linked at the bottom of Lulu Blue's) elide the fact that perhaps Witness is personal expression for Jon to the same degree that the games of self expression, like, say Anna Anthropy's Ohmygod Are You Alright, are grappling with "patterns and rules" on a different level. It's all the same thing.

Jon rubs a lot of people wrong. He's opinionated, blunt, almost Manichaean in how he talks about issues. But so's Schild ("nobody has worse taste than people in the industry"). People just have different tolerances for that depending on where they sit and whether or not the black and white take validates their existing worldview.

I don't know whether The Witness is an *important* game. What's novel about well-presented puzzles is simply "craftsmanship." That's what gets jaded devs excited: seeing something that hasn't been done, seeing something hard to do done well. Not just fun -- how the fun was made. It's why devs often get as excited over a Prune or a Guild of Dungeoneering as over a Witcher 3. Given how much players complain about buggy choppy or incomplete gameplay or lack of innovation, I think players by and large share the same value. Put another way, the fact that many of you don't see The Witness as remarkable *is* what's remarkable; to a lot of devs, it looks like a triple somersault with a half twist and perfect 10s, and you're commenting on the lack of a splash.

That doesn't mean it's for you, in the sense that it is to your taste. Tastes vary. Denigrating the aesthetic that admires the craft in Journey or the way it pulled off multiplayer engagement by reducing communication channels, or the effective narrative it provided without using text, or the surprising emotional resonance it achieved, is just being snobbish in a different way.

My original question was around the perception of VALUE, and not even because of this game per se. (lamaros asked about inflation -- in today's dollars, UO would be in the $10-12m range). Budgets are ABSOLUTELY relevant to consumer experience. Sadly, they're strongly DETERMINATIVE of it. Fun costs money, because it costs iteration time. Experience costs money, because art costs money. And frankly, marketing costs money, and a huge part of whether you ever get to have the fun is driven by the marketing because fun games vanish without a trace every day because they don't have marketing budgets.

The equation is simple: a game of a given scope must have a certain price point or engage in specific business practices, or it won't exist. There is no arguing with this cold logic. Further, the market as a whole is experiencing strong downwards pricing pressure, and the idea that a game that cost this much money cannot price at a point where it can recoup is actively dangerous to games. Put another way: if you don't think that games like this can or should price at this price point, you probably won't be happy at $20 when the average price is $10, or at $3 when it's 99 cents. We have seen it happen in other markets. It'll happen with PC too.

And then you won't get games like The Witness. Or really, any games that aren't either massive AAA blockbusters or tiny mobile games with exploitative business models.

As far as top games lists... most best games lists voted on players seem to always only have games from the last five years in them. That PC Gamer list was pretty good. Spelunky was indeed important, in terms of the effect it had within the industry. Broken Age as a game wasn't what mattered, it WAS its funding method, which has completely reshaped the games development landscape for good or ill. And the list was also crap because it didn't have M.U.L.E. on it. :)

It's not "no perspective." It's "a different perspective," and different perspectives are good.

[Jeff Kelly]

Well crafted != fun and the corollary is also true fun != well crafted.

If you want to talk about the craft behind the witness I'm all for it. Don't simply assume though that what an insider thinks is interesting or well made is also appealing to a layperson or is indeed any indication of overall quality. I like Stockhausen's work and I can appreciate a lot of stuff from the prog rock era. I can also break down to you just how intricately composed and well crafted the oieces are and just how much thought went into some of those high concept albums. I also know that it has limited appeal outside of the realm of amateur or professional musicians.

Also Schild is not operating in any sort of official capacity and he's also not responsible for PR. Blow can communicate however he wants to if he's OK with it, he doesn't need you white knighting him. He also should be (and probably is) aware that it is a difference if you are a "normal guy" flapping his gums on a forum or if you are on a PR tour to drum up enthusiasm for your latest game you expect to sell for $40.

[Jeff Kelly]

I also really utterly despise the deflective "it's not for you, man!" argument people always end up using when the discussion doesn't go their way. That's just patronizing and elitist snobbery.

[edit] an in that particular case it doesn't even seem to be true since it apparently sold quite well

[Raph]

Well crafted != fun and the corollary is also true fun != well crafted.

Correct! I didn't argue to the contrary, though.

If you want to talk about the craft behind the witness I'm all for it. Don't simply assume though that what an insider thinks is interesting or well made is also appealing to a layperson or is indeed any indication of overall quality. I like Stockhausen's work and I can appreciate a lot of stuff from the prog rock era. I can also break down to you just how intricately composed and well crafted the oieces are and just how much thought went into some of those high concept albums. I also know that it has limited appeal outside of the realm of amateur or professional musicians.

That's why I said I said maybe devs were the target demo. With a wink, to indicate that I was kinda joking.

Seriously -- I completely agree (and went thru my own prog rock phase). Look, my personal tastes in *playing* games is fairly populist, actually. I'm way way more likely to finish the last Tomb Raider game than The Witness. And I regularly make the point to artsy devs that "pop is hard."

Also Schild is not operating in any sort of official capacity and he's also not responsible for PR. Blow can communicate however he wants to if he's OK with it, he doesn't need you white knighting him. He also should be (and probably is) aware that it is a difference if you are a "normal guy" flapping his gums on a forum or if you are on a PR tour to drum up enthusiasm for your latest game you expect to sell for $40.

Very true. On the other hand, controversy drives attention, and any attention is valuable and powerful. Knowing Jon, I don't think he's doing this as a persona for marketing purposes, but I do think that his actual persona is pretty effective at getting attention.

I also really utterly despise the deflective "it's not for you, man!" argument people always end up using when the discussion doesn't go their way. That's just patronizing and elitist snobbery.

I agree it's often used in that way. But it can also mean "you are outside the target audience" (that's a real thing, after all) and it can also mean "we all like different things." That's why I explicitly said "in the sense that it isn't to your taste."

[lamaros]

I have nothing against people wanting to read anything in to anything, life is political. That doesn't mean sometimes they'll read stuff that isn't interesting, or over-reach or project their own issues. All that is by the by and nothing to do with this game being 'good' or not.

What has The Witness does that is remarkable? Myst was an average game for me, but it did something much more remarkable for games than The Witness could ever do.

This is a genuine question. I've watched a few videos of the game and it looks pretty boring. So maybe I haven't seen the good bits. If that's the case someone point me at them.

[Jeff Kelly]

I get that I'm not the target audience but that's not what I'm on about.

This game is a treatise on communication and 'language'. About the epistemiological limits of knowledge, about the limits of language, grammar and semantics and about how semantics are created by iterating on and layering abstract concepts in a way that lets people derive meaning from what is essentially meaningless. The whole "puzzle language" is an attempt to communicate ideas and concepts that get more and more complex and abstract as you internalize them and they are used ultimately to teach you something about the game world/the island.

According to Blow himself he spent eight years trying to come up with semantics and a sort of language and to hone the concept.

My arguement is not that it is a bad game or a game that I didn't like but that he ultimately failed in his attempt. For example he spent all of this time thinking about language and semantics and how you can derive concrete meaning from abstract concepts and yet it never occurred to him that people with auditive or visual impairments exist that might not be able to hear or see in the same way as him. How good can his attempt at meta-language construction ultimately be if he failed to take something so simple into account?

The game assumes alot about its target audience. Cultural canon, societal norms, how a culture communicates concepts. How people of that culture process them. How people explore the game's state space. How visual concepts are presented (The concept of a tree presented in the game for example is a computer science model of a tree).

That would be OK if it was just a puzzle game but it isn't it is a high concept exploration of a high concept idea that fails at basic level stuff because the developer is so far up his own ass that he doesn't even know that other people's failure to understand his concepts might not be an indication of their intelligence or lack thereof but an indication that the language and communcation principles he designed might not be as sound as he thinks.