Design Principles

There is a strong evidence that the various areas in the island have been designed around some clear principles or themes, and that these principles affect:

* the design of the puzzles (notably, the design of the rules associated to some symbols),
* the architectural features and usage of the place,
* the patterns of navigation in that place,
* the environmental puzzles, perspective tricks and audio logs in that place.

# Identifying the Design Principles

These design principles are sometime obvious. For instance, the Symmetry Island area has been designed around the concept of symmetry. On the other hand, identifying these principles is sometime complex and requires to pay close attention to small details and to explicitly search for such principles. Even when the principles seem obvious, such attention is required to understand the full extent of the use of the principles and variants in the realizations of these principles. Identifying the design principles can therefore be considered as a high-level kind of puzzle, which uses different types of clues (an important one being the white flowers).

# Evidence for the existence of Design Principles

## Ideas in the puzzles

* Jon Blow saying “The spirit of this game is that the puzzles are about things” (at 18'17" in the Giant Bomb video).

## Ideas in buildings and landscape architecture

* Luis Antonio saying "Each area has a theme and we build the biome to speak about that theme."

## Same ideas in puzzles and architecture and landscape

* Luis Antonio saying “Each area in the island reflects the themes of the puzzles they are about, and the Symmetry Island for me, is one of the most clear examples of this, where you can feel it in the building and landscape architecture.”

* Jon Blow saying “We nailed down the architecture for a couple of areas (…) in a way where the architecture and the puzzle ideas have synergy” and “the architects suggested an idea for that location. (…) This one sparked an idea for how to make the structural properties resonate with the puzzle theme, and when I built even just a rough-draft of the building, I found the result to be strong.”

## From ideas to puzzles

* On the witness blog, there is a conversation in the comments of this post (03/27/2012). It starts with a question: “It sounds like […] you have done a good job connecting somewhat abstract puzzles to a deeper meaning. Concepts like communication and systems appear to be non-verbally discussed through game play (from what I am inferring). Have you found it challenging to connect more abstract puzzles to a central theme or did that sort of form naturally?” And JB answers “The way it worked here is that the puzzles came from certain deeper ideas. The deeper ideas existed first, not the abstract puzzles. So the abstract puzzles are an expression of that and can’t help but point back at it.” In another comment, he adds “It may help to clarify that when I say core idea, I am not meaning something like, ‘This is a game about loneliness, how do I find gameplay about loneliness?’ That is a very stereotypical thing and at some point I am not sure how valuable or interesting that is. The kind of thing I have in mind when I say core idea is probably more subtle than that, but also bigger; and such a core idea quickly provides basic questions that you could then easily see how to set up a simple gameplay system to answer.”

## From puzzles to the world

* Jon Blow saying “The puzzles are not just arbitrary challenges; they’re about ideas. The ideas start out being relatively abstract ideas that are a little bit mathematical, but they eventually start to be ideas that are about space and time and the relationship of objects in space. And to talk about those things, you need a world.”

## Identifying the Design Principles as the main goal of the game?

* Although we cannot say how much of it is from Blow's comments on the game or from the journalist's own interpretation, there is this quote from Kirk Hamilton: “Blow didn't show me how the game ends; to do that would be to rob the experience of much of its meaning. The catharsis provided by The Witness' finale won't be due to some character-based revelation or some epic boss encounter. Its catharsis will come from a culmination of the design ideas put forth and explored in the game leading up to that point.” (3/15/2012).

## Others

* Specific evidence also exist for some principles, such as the similitude between the progression in the world and puzzle mechanisms.