Video games have a unique artistic potential. For music, for plays, for books, they have typically been seen as extensions of the other. "All art aspires to the condition of music" because music was seen as the most experiential of the forms, unperturbed by the various structures and limitations placed on theatre and literature. Film, arguably, held the position upon it's realisation to challenge music. Where music was pure audio - and open to experimentation with the lack of a defined structure outside of time - film could occupy the same unstructured space in both audio AND visual.

The 20th century saw many revolutions in film. We went from live orchestra accompaniment to the evolution of the talkie. From the musicals of the immediate talkie era to surrealism of Fellini, Tarkovsky, right through to present day Lynch. True experimentation with the audio visual medium that arguably continues. Animation could be seen as a route to unlocking it, the merging of it with live action giving further potential. Some might argue the opposite, but the argument exists both ways and that is the point.

We pay extra to see live orchestra accompaniments now. To relive those early revolutionary days of film. Maybe that is the sign of some kind of limit being approached.

Video games are the great new medium of the 21st century. We are, in the 2010s and 2020s, in a similar manner to film in the 1910s and 1920s. Great works that stand the test of time are barely now being created. They are incredible compared to Pong and Tetris yes, but they are still starting points for games as art. Something like Baldurs Gate could be seen as something like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. But this is in the sense of narrative, scope, in becoming to film what film became to theatre. For gaming to become what film is to film, we have to go more foundationally.

Games are not experiential like film and music. Games are experience itself. They are fictional, yes, but so too is the daily experience of you and me. When you use your computer, you are using rocks with lightning passing through it. What makes it a computer is your experience of it. It only exists in your head, and the head of those who agree with you. The words on this screen become words only through your experience, otherwise it is light and plastic. Light and plastic, too, are simply arbitary groupings of real phenomena that help us further describe the world. What you go through in life is not reality itself but reality through a lense of fiction. With art, we create further fictions. With gaming, we can create the true experience of existing through them.

The Witness strips gaming down to this core fundamental. A simple circle and line, oft repeating, in various forms and puzzles. It is no mistake that it begins with simple puzzles on a screen - and make no mistake, this is not where the challenges end.

That is what The Witness is about. Not Tao Buddhism or anything like that, at it's core it is about the fundamental potential of video games as an art form - and it is it's own best example.

Yes, the art style is great. Yes, the atmosphere is brilliant. Yes, the challenges themselves - as they must - are fantastically inventive. But this is not what The Witness brings to the table that is new. Plenty of games challenge the greatest works of film, theatre, literature, music, and art itself in these aspects. The Witness attempts to warp your perception of reality itself in a simple manner, committed to with astonishing deliberateness, and in doing so unlock your view of gaming's potential to do just the same. If all experience is fiction, then the fictions you experience in gaming have the unique potential to carry through with you even after you stop playing.

In this, gaming can truly be life changing.

I do not know if video games will ever reach this potential. If they do, The Witness will be looked back on as the pioneer that started it all.

Have you ever seen a solar eclipse?