The Beginner’s Guide stands as a unique and thought-provoking project within the gaming landscape. At its core, it presents itself as a curated collection of small games and game concepts designed by a developer known as Coda, guided by the narration of Davey Wreden, the curator. However, The Beginner’s Guide game aims for more than just being a simple anthology. It weaves a metanarrative, exploring the complex relationship between the narrator and both the presented games and their elusive creator.
This game delves into compelling themes such as the subjective interpretation of games and art, the potential sources of satisfaction and frustration inherent in creative endeavors like game development, and the intricate, often ambiguous connection between an artwork and its creator. In these aspects, The Beginner’s Guide game deserves recognition. It boldly pushes the boundaries of what a game can be, employing an experimental approach that has resonated fruitfully across various artistic mediums, particularly in the evolution of literature over the last two centuries and throughout the history of film.
However, alongside its merits, The Beginner’s Guide game also invites critical examination. Articulating the central point of critique without revealing crucial plot details proves challenging. Therefore, a spoiler warning is necessary: this analysis will necessarily discuss plot elements of The Beginner’s Guide game. Readers who wish to experience the game unspoiled are advised to refrain from reading further until after playing.
For clarity in this discussion, it’s essential to distinguish between two entities named ‘Davey Wreden.’ To differentiate them, ‘Wreden’ will refer to the actual individual who wrote, directed, and co-designed The Beginner’s Guide game. Conversely, ‘Davey’ will denote the fictional character serving as the narrator within The Beginner’s Guide game. While Wreden and Davey share biographical similarities—both are game developers from California with the same name and voice—it is crucial to remember that Wreden is a real person, while Davey is a fictional construct. This distinction is paramount as we delve deeper into the analysis of The Beginner’s Guide game.
Unpacking the Content of The Beginner’s Guide Game
The Beginner’s Guide game operates as a work of metafiction within the realm of gaming, narrating the evolving relationship between two game developers, Davey and Coda. The gameplay itself involves players navigating a series of minimally interactive games, prototypes, and modifications purportedly created by Coda, all while Davey provides ongoing commentary, context, and interpretive guidance.
Some of these presented games appear unfinished or unrefined, yet they consistently share common design elements. These recurring features include abrupt shifts between realistic and abstract level design, transitions involving floating upwards or falling downwards between areas, sudden incorporations of mazes or labyrinthine structures, concealed or inaccessible zones, rudimentary dialogue systems employing cube-headed mannequin characters, extended periods of slowed movement or timers requiring significant real-time passage for progression, a recurring puzzle motif based around navigating pairs of doors, visual cues involving a lamp post and a sequence of three dots, and recurring segments of confinement behind bars or glass.
As the narrative of The Beginner’s Guide game progresses, Davey proposes an initial psychological interpretation of Coda’s game collection. He suggests that these games reflect Coda’s increasing isolation and growing disillusionment with the creative process. This interpretation selectively emphasizes certain game elements, such as the door puzzles, confinement themes, and dialogue systems, while largely overlooking or allowing the player to bypass time-sink mechanics and labyrinthine sections. Davey’s subjective approach to interpretation extends to dismissing entire games as meaningless or created purely for “weirdness’ sake,” showcasing a biased perspective shaping his analysis.
Davey’s analysis goes beyond mere interpretation of the games; he persistently maps his psychological readings of the games onto Coda’s own psychology. He believes he is gaining deep and sometimes concerning insights into Coda’s mental state. When Coda’s games exhibit elements of comfort and pleasantness, Davey interprets this as a period of Coda’s well-being. Conversely, games that appear restrictive or pessimistic are construed as reflections of Coda’s struggles.
Davey consistently conflates art and artist, even implying interpretive significance to the perceived time Coda spent developing each game. The narrative reaches a critical juncture when Davey, convinced that his interpretations have offered him a glimpse into the mind of an isolated and creatively unfulfilled individual, shares Coda’s games with a wider audience seeking appreciation. While the games are indeed appreciated, Coda reacts negatively to this unauthorized sharing, feeling deeply betrayed by Davey’s actions.
Following this breach of trust, Coda withdraws entirely from communication with Davey. He later sends Davey a single, final game. This last game from Coda presents a tower navigation puzzle, reminiscent of M.C. Escher’s architectural paradoxes, filled with absurd and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. When Davey modifies the game to bypass these obstacles, the player encounters a series of text boxes directly addressing Davey. These messages accuse Davey of misinterpreting Coda’s games, of altering them to fit his own preferences for clear objectives, resolutions, and meanings, and of sharing Coda’s work without his consent. Ultimately, Coda requests that Davey cease all contact.
The game concludes with the player navigating a series of levels stylistically similar to Coda’s games, but notably not attributed to him and lacking the chronological release markers of previous games. Given the chronological presentation and the explicit statement that the tower game is Coda’s last, it is canonically suggested that these final levels are not Coda’s creation. As the player progresses through these levels, Davey delivers an increasingly impassioned monologue expressing his lack of understanding of Coda. He questions the possibility of truly understanding any artist through their work and grapples with the motivation for creating art without seeking external validation, a validation he himself confesses to constantly crave.
The Beginner’s Guide game culminates in a more elaborate iteration of a seemingly accidental glitch from an earlier game. The player guides their character into a vertical beam of energy, ascending away from what is now revealed to be a vast, seemingly infinite labyrinth below. Davey and Coda are absent. Only the player’s interpretation of their experience remains, leaving a sense of ambiguity and open-ended reflection.
A Critical Perspective on The Beginner’s Guide Game
Overall, The Beginner’s Guide game is a commendable endeavor in creating artistic game-based fiction. Its exploration of themes concerning the relationship between art interpretation and the reality of artists, alongside examining diverse motivations driving creative individuals, tackles engaging topics. These themes, while prevalent in literature and film over the past century, are still relatively uncommon in the realm of video games.
Unfortunately, the theoretical strengths of The Beginner’s Guide game diminish as the game progresses. Certain writing choices in Davey’s narration undermine the exploration of these themes by introducing narrative incoherence. Before players can fully engage with the potential meaning or emotional resonance of the presented games, Davey’s commentary, and the Davey-Coda relationship, they are confronted with the undeniable fact that everything depicted was meticulously designed to appear and function precisely as presented.
The game’s ostensibly non-fictional narrative is transparently constructed. Wreden is telling a story about events that almost certainly did not occur in the way depicted. Even before the game’s credits roll, it becomes highly probable that Wreden himself was significantly, if not exclusively, involved in designing the games attributed to Coda. While segments like the self-phone-call and journalist crowds might suggest Coda could be a past version of Davey, this interpretation is contradicted by Davey’s desperate attempts to reconnect with Coda and encourage him to resume game development. This desperation is illogical if Coda were simply Davey’s past self, especially given that both Davey and Wreden were involved in the successful development of The Stanley Parable in 2013.
The game appears to genuinely believe in the consistency and believability of its narrative, and its thematic communication relies on this misplaced self-assurance. It’s crucial to clarify that the critique presented here is not a complaint about the game’s fictional nature itself, which is likely evident to most players.
The central criticism focuses on the flawed writing of this fiction, which hinders the player’s suspension of disbelief—a necessary element for immersive storytelling. This problem stems from the simultaneous obviousness of the fictional construct and the incoherence within its narrative details. To illustrate these writing flaws, a different chronological walkthrough of The Beginner’s Guide game will be presented, highlighting the progression of moments that actively erode the player’s ability to believe in the described reality.
From the initial levels of The Beginner’s Guide game, cracks begin to appear in its metanarrative. As soon as the game’s premise as an anthology of another developer’s work is introduced, practical questions arise that disrupt its believability.
Game anthologies are not unprecedented. Collections of early works from developers like Edmund McMillen and Zach Barth exist under titles like The Basement Collection and ZACH-LIKE. However, critically, these collections are owned and distributed by the creators themselves. In The Beginner’s Guide game, we are told Coda has ceased making games, and Davey aims to showcase Coda’s work to encourage his return to development.
As an audience, we intuitively understand this narrative is incomplete. For The Beginner’s Guide game to exist as a collection of Coda’s games, one of three scenarios must be true: Coda willingly granted Wreden permission, implying Coda’s involvement or at least consent; Coda was unaware and did not grant permission, making the collection potentially illegal and unlikely to be commercially available; or Coda is deceased, allowing Wreden to acquire rights from his estate, which would mean Davey is misleadingly presenting his motivations. Given that The Beginner’s Guide game is commercially available, the second option is impossible. Therefore, Coda must either be complicit or deceased.
Wreden might attempt to circumvent this issue by initially showcasing a custom Counter-Strike map, which is inherently distributable, and then avoiding clarification on the legal status of subsequent creations until the later reveal that the collection is unauthorized. However, this silence is unconvincing, especially since the game is readily available for purchase.
Consequently, the player is almost immediately aware that Davey’s narrative is either entirely fabricated or so misleading as to render it untrustworthy. The question then becomes the extent of this fabrication: Is Coda aware and accepting of the distribution, making him less enigmatic than portrayed? Is Coda deceased, with the collection serving as a memorial, revealing his death as a later twist? Or does Coda not exist at all, with the project being a creation of Wreden or Everything Unlimited, perhaps inspired by the metafictional style of Jorge Luis Borges?
The latter scenario, “baby’s first Borges,” proves to be the closest to the truth, unintentionally revealed throughout the game’s climax and ending.
The narrative begins to unravel subtly as Davey expresses increasing concern for Coda’s well-being. Davey correctly observes that the dialogue within Coda’s games increasingly focuses on dissatisfaction with creative work, particularly game development. It’s understandable that a friend might be concerned about Coda’s mental state or creative productivity.
However, for The Beginner’s Guide game to depict Davey playing numerous such games without ever directly addressing these concerns with his ‘friend Coda’ is illogical. What kind of friendship is depicted? Did they ever communicate after their initial meeting, or did Coda simply and silently send Davey game after game for years for inexplicable reasons? Even Coda’s participation in a public game jam contradicts his portrayed character of isolation and withdrawal.
These character inconsistencies are minor distractions. The narrative truly begins to fall apart when Davey decides to share Coda’s games. This act, we are told, is the culmination of Coda’s quiet frustrations with Davey, leading to his complete withdrawal.
This narrative point immediately undermines the very existence of The Beginner’s Guide game. The game itself is fundamentally Davey sharing Coda’s work with the player. This premise is constant throughout the player experience. Therefore, when the narrative explicitly states Coda’s strong objection to his work being shared, the game’s existence becomes inexplicable within its own logic. The only possible conclusion is that Davey is remarkably unintelligent, believing that repeating the action that initially angered Coda—but on a larger, potentially illegal scale—would somehow mend their relationship.
Davey attempts to address this contradiction during his final monologue, exclaiming:
I know that I did an awful thing. And I’m doing it again right now! Like, I’m—I’m showing people your work, but I can’t stop myself from doing it! That’s how badly I need to—feel something again. Like I’m an addict! There has to be something wrong with me!
Even if this emotional outburst is taken seriously as an attempt to address the logical flaw, it fails to justify how The Beginner’s Guide game could exist and continue to exist if it were as presented. If it is not as presented, the player must question its true nature. The game provides an answer by presenting two levels in Coda’s style after his ‘last game,’ strongly implying they are not Coda’s creation. This suggests fabrication, a deliberate falsehood.
Just as Everything Unlimited likely crafted the final levels to mirror Coda’s style, providing a symbolic culmination with the ascending player and labyrinth, it becomes more probable that they created the entire game, rather than it being the genuine work of Wreden’s troubled friend.
If Coda is a fabrication, then the presented art, its interpretation, and the artist are not separate entities. They are all unified. However, a story about Davey creating games and then explaining their supposed deep meanings is a less compelling exploration of art interpretation than the game superficially attempts. In this light, it risks becoming an exercise in self-indulgence. A museum-like anthology that misrepresents the origins of its content cannot be trusted to offer genuine insights into game developer motivations. It becomes either a trivial narrative about a flawed friend named Davey, or a meta-metanarrative about broken player immersion and failed metafiction.
Potential Rebuttals and Suggestions for Improvement in The Beginner’s Guide Game
A characteristic of ironic metafiction, as employed by Wreden, is its inherent defense against critiques like this. It’s easy to imagine Wreden anticipating this analysis, interpreting it as a forced search for specific meaning and a desire to alter the work to align with that meaning—paralleling Davey’s actions within the game. However, the core complaint isn’t about the presence or absence of a specific meaning. It concerns narrative incoherence—fundamental inconsistencies that cannot be logically reconciled, even considering the narrator’s unreliability. If helpful, one could temporarily disregard the metafictional aspect and imagine the game beginning with “Once Upon a Time in California.”
Regarding meaning, themes like the unknowability of an artist through their art and the examination of diverse motivations are acknowledged. This interpretive direction is pursued out of a principle of charity, assuming the best intentions and strongest arguments from the creator. In a game discussing the unreliable connection between developer intent and game elements, could these perceived writing flaws be intentional? It’s plausible that the game is about the breakdown of metafiction under scrutiny, though this contradicts the genre’s potential for coherence. There’s no reason to dismiss this interpretation, and for players noticing the narrative contrivances and plot holes, this may indeed be the game’s unintended message. However, this interpretation is less compelling than the initially suggested themes.
To claim the game is about failed metafiction, despite evidence suggesting otherwise, is to give it the benefit of the doubt. It assumes the game aims for deeper themes but falls short due to solvable narrative issues. These narrative problems are not insurmountable. With further script revisions, Wreden could likely enhance coherence. Rather than drastic changes, consider refining existing elements to improve narrative flow.
To illustrate, imagine a version where the Coda game collection is discovered on a found flash drive, akin to Vivian Maier’s photography acquired at auctions and later popularized. An extensive search yields no trace of Coda. The Beginner’s Guide game then becomes Davey’s desperate attempt to locate a potentially talented and troubled individual.
A stone pathway within a game jam level in The Beginner’s Guide game, representing the game’s blend of realistic and abstract environments and the journey of discovery central to the narrative.
This scenario removes the illogical element of Davey never communicating with Coda except through games, as they wouldn’t be friends. It also resolves the absurdity of Davey sharing the games against Coda’s explicit wishes. Legal objections become less problematic; Davey could acknowledge lacking ownership, understanding of software licenses, and justify wide distribution as a necessary, albeit legally questionable, method to find the creator.
The focus on Davey’s interpretations and their relevance to the developer’s reality could be retained, while removing the nonsensical idea that Davey seeks validation by sharing another’s work. Similarly, the examination of motivations for creating and discarding art could remain, eliminating the implausible notion that Davey, possessing Coda’s contact information, resorts to illegal game distribution instead of direct apology.
The primary drawback of this hypothetical change is the continued issue of Everything Unlimited profiting from The Beginner’s Guide game. However, this problem exists in the current narrative as well, making it a neutral factor. This is just one potential alteration; other minor changes, such as Coda being deceased or a younger Davey, could also improve the game’s narrative coherence while preserving its thematic intentions.
Ultimately, we must return to the game as it exists. As Davey states, “I think we should talk about his games for what they are, rather than what they’re not.” Despite potential, the final text lacks compelling consistency.
Conclusion: Evaluating The Beginner’s Guide Game
Superficially, this analysis might resemble the critique of Transistor, which similarly faulted narrative execution despite thematic promise. In that case, Transistor was still recommended for its strengths beyond story. However, The Beginner’s Guide game offers less beyond its narrative. Only a few game concepts within it stand alone as worthwhile experiences. Its metafiction execution is flawed, leaving little to recommend beyond its story.
Despite addressing serious themes like depression, lost motivation, and subjective art interpretation, the narrative’s emotional resonance is limited to the most gullible players, due to its frequent and clumsy undermining of its own metanarrative. Given the story’s integral role in the experience, this critique extends to The Beginner’s Guide game in its entirety.
Concluding definitively is difficult. The Beginner’s Guide game has immense thematic potential, even if its execution is only arguably competent. It is certainly not as overrated as The Stanley Parable, which suffers from similar execution issues and unfunny comedy. The Beginner’s Guide game is a step forward for Wreden’s experimentation with gaming forms and contexts to foster relevant discussions. It has, arguably due to a lack of comparable works, generated significant discussion.
While ultimately falling short, The Beginner’s Guide game is a valuable creation. It generates strong interest in Wreden’s future projects, suggesting that he could build upon his past endeavors to achieve truly impactful work.
