 Entering the fortress for the first time, you are greeted to a duality. One side of the island seems impersonal in its constitution. A series of mazes framed by generic hedges, but the other portrays human drama through the use of a multitude of statues. What is the meaning of this, you ask yourself, and the inferences begin. On the side of humanity, the puzzle panels you are now acquainted with dictate your path through a physical maze. The solution is generated in the abstract and then expressed in reality. But simply, the panels represent our mind, our thoughts, our theories, and sometimes this corresponds to reality. It unlocks pathways both literal and metaphorical. Could this have to do with how human theories of science, art, and philosophy can map onto reality that we can impose order onto the world? On the other side though, it is the environment itself that dictates your path through. The hedges frame the solution to the puzzle that exists at Labyrinth's end. Are we constrained by our environment then, is knowledge framed by a context that isn't different to human affairs? Are we not shepherds of our own agency, simply beholden to the forces around us like rats in a cage? When another human impulse, comparison, foists itself upon you as you waver between both sides, there is an inkling of meaning starting to manifest, something about the duality between being determined and imposing our will. Getting to the top of the fortress crystallizes this further. On the side of humanity, the puzzle is disconnected from the events that transpired. It's an arbitrary puzzle. Whereas the other side, there is a history, a path dependence. You must retrace your steps. Choose which side to solve. It doesn't matter though. They are both pointing to the same destination. Meaning is multifarious, especially in games. Meaning can come from mechanics, the rules of play. Meaning can come from dynamics, how we play. And meaning can come from aesthetics, why we play. Puzzles mostly have simple rules, and the aesthetics they invoke are always about Eureka in some form or the other. But when these are connected by how we solve them, the dynamics, and by a fictional context, something interesting happens. Here is the famous 9.4 puzzle. Draw four lines through nine dots without leaving the paper. To solve it, break free of the box. What's the meaning? Thinking outside the box. Where does it come from? How you solved it? Thinking outside the box is a concept that has cultural weight though. There is an isomorphism between the dynamics of the puzzle and an idea that transcends the very rules that enable it. Hence, the fictional context of a puzzle is equally as important. The witness encodes its meanings through a combination of visuals, texts, and environmental storytelling, not to mention actual video as well. The monastery wants to show us how the divide between panel and environment is nonsensical. We can perceive reality directly, of direct phenomenological experience, as meditative practitioners claim we can. Of the non-existent binary between us and nature. The aiching was used as a form of divination, but mathematicians have also used puzzles to frame conundrums of abstract valence. Marcel D'Anessi traces this in his book, The Puzzle Instinct. The sheer variety of puzzles in their meaning is a combination of how and where, how we solve it, but also where it is being solved. Take another duality Frank Lantz proposed between the arts and the sciences, reason and emotion. Games are supposedly on the bridge between these two domains. Let's take the puzzles of Space Ken, a programming game by Zach Tronex. What is the meaning here? You have to take inputs, put them through a series of transformations, and create outputs on the right side of the screen, where you have to ensure a series of instructions properly completes the task of collecting, combining and placing elements. There is a fictional layer where working a chemical manufacturing plant, but the chemicals are somewhat irrelevant though. Zach Tronex puzzles are fascinating in that they have multiple solutions. What are the meanings of these puzzles then? They exist in the mechanics of the interconnected system devised by the creator. These puzzles are mechanical. Let's take a more emotionally ingrained puzzle from the game Eco. At one point in the game, you have to leave Yoda behind to keep a door open. But this is a terrifying thing because she is effectively your health bar. You go to the next room, urgent in your pace to get back to her. Halfway through, you can check on her. She's fine. Relieved, you continue. But when you return, she is not there. The shadow thingies have gotten her. Anxiety and fear turn into calmness which turned into panic. The meaning of this puzzle is emotional, as are most puzzles in the game. They are meant to reinforce your mutual dependency and walk you through a beve of emotions. These puzzles are aesthetic. Designing each of these was different as well. Zachtronics create systems and then curate these systems by working backwards from unique solutions. For me, the way to invoke subtractive design, he starts from the emotion and then the puzzle is instrumental towards communicating this theme. And Jonathan Blow has an exploratory philosophy. He creates rules and explores their emergent meanings. He lets the puzzle express its own meaning. There is a game that seems to be the forgotten child of all these experiences. The Talos principle is a first person puzzler like the witness. Tries to have an aesthetic valence like eco and has a series of components that connect to one another in the vein of a Zachtronics game. A jammer functions like a remote key, but you can place them on boxes, just as you can reflectors. And then of course there are the time puzzles where you have to record yourself using these things for your own use. It's an interconnected system, but it also has philosophical aspirations like the witness. There seems to be a disconnect though. The puzzles seem to have nothing to do with the theme. They are only vaguely connected to the idea of revelation. Looking at the design of the game, this becomes apparent. The mechanics were left over bits from other games, jumbled together into interesting puzzles. Later, narrative designers added an intriguing story about AI and singularity and humanity and all that. But this was done at a separate time. There are great puzzles, great dynamics, and great aesthetics. But they are hardly speaking to one another. However, Baba is you is brilliant despite its sheepish theme. And hardly anyone who played the witness even understood what was going on. Well maybe that's just it. Maybe in a culture that values science and reason, the process of inquiry itself becomes the aesthetic. There need be no symbolic utility to the invocation of puzzles. Symbols are just that, symbols. Computers are built out of ones and zeroes, a syntax that generates computation. But semantics, that's the fuzziness of human endeavors. It introduces ambiguity. Surely we must eliminate all that is messy. We must construct a system of discrete rules that explains everything. We are after all searching for that one theory that explains all of reality. But the joy of human affairs lies in this fuzziness, in ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unknown. Let's take humor. Can we make funny puzzles? Blow was asked this question that a talk he gave about Italo Calvino of all places, and his response was vague. However, I present this to you. What is a riddle if not a funny puzzle? But how is this humor communicated? How is a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side, humorous in any way? It is funny because of the aesthetics layer. There is a clash of symbols at an emergent level, not simply beholden to its unruly substrate. The other side the chicken was crossing to is both the literal other side and the other side that being, you know, death. It's by reveling in the silliness of language's double meaning that generates the humor. Charles Saunders Pierce pointed this out as well. There is aha, you know, the aesthetics of revelation, but also, aha, the aesthetics of humor that is equally as revelatory. Archimedes supposedly shouted Eureka when displacement dawned on him, running naked through the streets. Whether true or not, this story is now a new category. We will coin aha. It is an interplay between aesthetics and mechanics when puzzles are funny. In their book, The Humor Code, the authors argue that what makes something funny is that it is a benign violation. Humor comes from the zone of uncertainty where things that don't belong suddenly enter. Humor is inherently provocative, as tricksters will tell you, and it is mediated by mischief. And where does laughter and humor express itself most popably? Why in play, of course. The aesthetics of insightful thinking and humor come from the same mental machinery. The sciences and the humanities can unite in play. Conveying humor through a puzzle seems hard, though, but it is possible. In Untitled Goose Game, a puzzle requires you to get a gardener to hit his own finger. You see him hitting a sign, have the ability to honk. So what do you do? Well, you distract him, of course. You intervene at the most inopportune time. The solution to the puzzle was also a punchline. The puzzle is both funny and revelatory. Tricksters can morph into animals for this very reason. They're agents of mischief. They're bound by a mandate to play. The witness did have some funny puzzles, like this one where a cell phone rings, obscuring your ability to hear the birdsong that is the solution to the puzzle. It's funny, both because it's utterly random, but also because having a mundane utility like a cell phone in a game about philosophical profundity is kind of absurd. Puzzles are seen as a cipher into our own minds. They are a way for us to examine ourselves in thought. In some sense, the puzzles in the Talos principle were a Turing test. They were testing an AI's faculty for reason. But is this sufficient for sentience? AI will always beat us at games of rules and subdomains, of syntactical manipulation. Chess is a puzzle game, but a game not worth playing against AI. But our humanity, our advantage, comes with the fuzziness of emotions, humor, culture, and expression. The riddle of the Sphinx was a marker of intelligence, but the riddles of Alice in Wonderland are funny. Humor, according to evolutionary theorists, is a form of signaling. It allows us to show us how smart we are in the recombination of conceptual categories, of units of meaning. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician who tried to aestheticize the paradoxes of math using fiction. These ideas clearly resonate. Thinkers like Douglas Hofstadter think that it is in this faculty of the blending of analogies and categories that human creativity and ingenuity truly lies. Symbolic manipulation will only get us so far. Puzzles need to become funnier. To break free of the rules of rule rigidification, we need to break out of our existing categories. That's how Newton and Einstein revolutionized science. Newton saw an apple falling and analogized that to the movement of the moon. Newtonian mechanics was born. Einstein saw space and time as intertwined into a fabric that binds us all. Relativity was bred. Puzzles need to stop being syntactical and start interfacing with the aesthetics of conceptual revelation. We need to unite the mechanical with the aesthetic, science with the humanities, spacechem with untitled goose game. And so we come back to the witness and the divide between two sides of an island, deconstructing the false dichotomy between both requires both be seen as valid. We are beholden to the laws that govern reality, but we are also capable of being creative and transformative, unveiling those very rules and then playing with them. The meaning of puzzles change by culture and creed, by our words and deeds. They are truly puzzling.