So I'm guessing most people haven't seen the whole thing about the Witness that is going down in a very specific and niche corner of youtube but tldr people are responding to other people and I haven't even played the witness so I don't have any strong opinions on this specifically. But someone made a point about complexity in narratives and it made me think.
The quote which I am too lazy to write down says that a story may have a idea which is either complex or simple, and a presentation which is either complex or simple. The juxtaposition of presentation and theme in a work is something that I haven't given much thought to, but I would disagree with any interpretation that operates on this understanding. It relies on an assumption that goes something like this:
"There is an idea which a story expresses, and there is the story itself. The idea is a separate thing from the story. "
I could be annoying and cite Plato but I don't think anyone wants me to do that. But this idea of a the idea existing in a separate place, as its own unique thing, is just wrongheaded. The presentation of the story is the story itself; the ideas presented are the presentation as well. If two stories interrogate the same idea but do so in drastically different ways, then those stories are, on some level, interrogating two different ideas. Or perhaps a better way to say that statement is those two stories are interrogating one image (the way in which we perceive that idea) and their interrogation, which lies in the presentation of that image, will differ. The idea is the presentation, the presentation is the story, and so we say that any complex interrogation of a simple idea is simply an image we understand to be simple, but presented in a way that renders this image to be complex.