Finished The Witness

Finished The Witness. Again. I mean I did the 7 lasers, down the mountain, flying elevator ending. And then I did the Final Challenge, got the last hex diagram ending. Also there’s the cave hint to find the secret hotel and weird PoV ending. And now I’ve gotten all the puzzles, so I’m at 523+135+6. I still have not found all the audio logs, so I guess one more ending to go.

One can get the 664 puzzles by finishing one of several puzzles last, but the “last” puzzle would seem to me the environmental puzzles associated with the “Secret of Psalm 46” video. Ostensibly, one would solve that last puzzle, and see that one had done 664 puzzles, and wonder if that number meant anything. I Googled it– and there’s not much (or, there’s a whole heck of a lot, because pretty much everything has been mentioned, ever, online. The internet really is almost Borges’s “Library of Babel”). But what popped up at the top is Monserrat.

664 is the area code for Monserrat, a small island in the Caribbean. Hello, island? It doesn’t have the same shape as The Witness island, or, it sort of does if you want it too badly enough- roughly oval, with a mountain on one end (actually, it’s a live volcano).

But one would have, ostensibly, just listened to a lecture that pointed out the folly of trying to find meaning in all these numbers and coincidences. Or, if not folly, the meaninglessness of such a task. And yet, in that lecture was mention of Masquerade, a book that acted as a treasure hunt for a real, actual treasure buried in a real place.

Then again, Masquerade said, in no uncertain terms, that there was treasure to be found. The Witness does not make this claim. And besides, what would one do, fly to Monserrat? If one could afford to just up and fly to Monserrat, what does one need with treasure.

Afterall, the other video lectures speak to:

  • Art as interpretation only, with science being the only discipline where reality is created (via change)
  • Giving up what you “want”
  • Recognizing that you are all that exists and where you are is the only place that exists
  • Completing a task is a kind of death
  • There is no one reality, but levels of complexity that depend on a define one another.

Taken together, this all speaks to there not being any significance to the Montserrat Coincidence. If one were to go there, to “check things out,” the trip itself would (have to) be its own reward.

We look for meaning in things, desperately, and the result is art. That’s all fine and good, and one could take a trip to Monserrat to look for meaning there. No matter what one found, one could write a book about the trip. Or make a documentary. Or post a blog of photos taken on location. The search for meaning creates meaning. There’s a seductiveness to that– back in the day when scientists were really getting fired up about quantum mechanics, they were, more or less, finding all of the stuff that they thought they would find. It was almost as if they created realities just by looking at them. Schrodinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, all of that coming into play via real-life experiments.

The Witness is a piece of art. (What else could it be). I suppose if enough people got enthused about the Monserrat Coincidence, and did something about it, reality could change. The island might see an uptick in tourism. The game’s creator might decide to go there and hide clues to the game’s sequel. But now we’re getting into the realm of will. How would you feel if you were to have come across the game a year from now, solved all 664 puzzles, looked it up, got excited, flew to Monserrat, and found a bunch of gamers there who said they did the same thing as you, found nothing, and decided to make something for people to find anyway.

A little disappointed? I would be. Not unlike when the writers of “Lost” finally admitted that they were making it up as they went along. We want there to be meaning and purpose. But at the end of the day, there is no meaning without a Creator and a Grand Design, and let’s face it, belief in a creator can only stifle curiosity.

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