One of the big game journalism outfits did an hour long "Let's Play" with Jonathan Blow, where they showcased The Witness and talked about many of its design de

One of the big game journalism outfits did an hour long "Let's Play" with Jonathan Blow, where they showcased The Witness and talked about many of its design decisions. My favorite part was where Blow talks about how the puzzle idea started from an RPG-style game where you cast spells by performing gestures on-screen, where certain aspects of how you drew symbols (ie: speed, size) determined the traits of the spell cast. I always had that idea myself. However, after exploring the idea a bit, he realized that it wasn't really much fun to do elaborate gestures when what you really wanted was to merely cast "Fireball 1", which you would do a thousand times in the course of the game. What was really fun was the lore-related ways in which you could teach spells to the player, by having them find them carved as runes into the scenery and such. So he made a game about that phenomenon of "discovery" instead. I thought it was brilliant insight.