Game Review: The Beginner's Guide

From one angle, The Beginner’s Guide is easy to dismiss as flat and obvious— but, like a prism, the more you look at it, the more you begin to perceive the depth beyond the surface, the way the light of your understanding is endlessly refracted and distorted by its three-dimensional structure. The distorting facets here are metafictional—or, perhaps more accurately—metagamic, through which the game complicates the boundaries between real and artificial, authentic and contrived, playable and nonplayable. In doing so, it uniquely unsettles and reframes the player’s conventional mode of engaging with games and understanding their creator, in addition to displaying a surprising way in which video games can generate player choice and deliberation in narratives.

Released in 2015 by Davey Wreden, The Beginner’s Guide takes the form of a series of short, abstract, and often incomplete games strung together by the narration of Davey himself. These games, Davey tells you, were created between 2008 and 2011 by his friend Coda, an enigmatic and withdrawn designer who Davey wants to encourage to continue his work. Each constituting a “chapter” in Davey narration, they range from a charmingly unfinished and glitchy first-person shooter to a vast virtual space filled with countless notes ostensibly left by other players. As you play through Coda’s oeuvre, Davey analyzes the motifs and themes he sees in the games, which he understands to be a psychological reflection of their troubled and brilliant creator. “I want to see past the games themselves,” he tells the player. “I want to see who this human being really is.”

From the outset, there are two gamic levels the player navigates: the game they bought from Steam, The Beginner’s Guide itself (henceforth TBG); the second consists of Coda’s work, the “subgames” of TBG, which itself doesn’t feel like a game so much as a mesh between biographical account and participatory art gallery. This framing of the subgames in a larger narrative, in addition to the way Davey directly addresses the player, draws attention to their status as video games and the virtual way the player engages with them in a way that harkens to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt.[1] While this does generate a critical and reflective distance between player and subgame, it simultaneously generates a sense of intimate connection to TGB as a whole: these games don’t occur in a “magic circle” outside of life,[2] but rather within and significantly interconnected to life, playing out in relation to three real people: player, Davey, and Coda. In this way, by emphasizing rather than obscuring their virtual qualities, both Coda’s games and the way we engage with them feel surprisingly real and personal.

(NOTE: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT REST OF REVIEW)

The unconventional two-level structure of TGB opens up a peculiar ethical dimension as the player continues, as their in-game actions, although virtual, are explicitly the player’s own, not some in-game persona, and the games they move through are grounded in relation to other people. Over time, an unease begins to slowly creep into the affective experience of the game. Davey’s interpretations and, more worrisome, his modifications to the games feel increasingly imposing, confining, and self-serving. It starts out more innocuously. Progression in Coda’s work at times requires a frustrating degree of tedium. In one early chapter, you make your way up a set of stairs leading to the top of a blocky tower, but the higher you climb the slower you move until your movement is practically nonexistent. Here, however, Davey thankfully informs you that he’s modified the game so when you press “enter,” you will return to normal speed. Following his directions, you reach the top with ease. These moments of encouraged cheating involve shifts in the types of difficulty described by Professor Jagoda.[3] While Davey’s modifications diminish the mechanical difficulty that Coda designed into his games and his incessant analysis waters down the experience of interpretive difficulty, the growing sense of uneasiness substantially augments the affective difficulty of playing TGB itself as Davey makes the player complicit in contorting the game into something more playable and understandable. In contrast to the initial sense of closeness, this uneasiness distances the player from Davey, generating space for the player’s own deliberation and choice concerning how to proceed. Now, this may not seem like much of a choice: either progress in accordance with Davey’s modification or go through such excruciatingly tedious experiences as waiting for an hour before leaving a prison cell or making your way through an invisible maze with walls you can’t touch. Too, this choice is, within the game, useless: there are no substantial designed consequences to choosing to depart from Davey’s morally questionable guidance (although, if you do complete the invisible maze, he does emit a stunned “Damn…”). Further still, the player is likely to skip Coda’s obtuse mechanics anyway, regardless of the ethical implications. I certainly did. Yet the choice to do so is significant because it feels real and personal to the player due to the reframing of in-game action and thus weighs on their own conscience like any ethical dilemma in life. Accordingly, these choices invoke a profound level of reflection as the player considers which game to progress in, Coda’s more artistically authentic games or Davey’s more playable ones; they are forced to reconsider an unexamined tendency towards easy, guided experiences and answers and how to relate ethically to the designer of the world they move through. By locating the significance of the choice in the player rather than in in-game consequences, TGB exemplifies a unique way to navigate the tension between player choice and strong narrative that Jenkins describes.[4]

But wait! There is one more layer of complexity that can't go unmentioned. Simultaneous to the slow, unsettling realization that Davey might be doing something egregious, is a second one—that the overarching narrative is fictional. Davey’s increasingly apparent parasitic obsession with Coda and the revelation that Davey has modified the games far more than originally thought contributes to this developing disbelief, further destabilizing any solid notion of what is real and artificial that the player might have developed prior. Both Coda and Davey-the-narrator regressing into fictionality, a third figure begins to enter into the player’s awareness, someone rendered totally impenetrable and invisible by the relentless obfuscation of intent and meaning through the meta-qualities of the game: not Coda, not Davey-the-narrator, but Davey-the-designer. As it becomes increasingly unclear the extent to which the games are Coda’s or Davey-the-narrator’s there is a sense in which The Beginner’s Guide can be read as a dramatization of two conflicting creative impulses: one embodied by Coda, towards authentic and personally meaningful creation, and the other by Davey, towards external validation, to make one’s creations sensical and understandable and coherent and playable. Yet rather than elucidating a definite understanding of what Davey-the-designer might have genuinely intended behind all this, understanding the game in this way only makes clear how inaccessible, muddled, and conflicted the intent of the designer is. Ending the game, I was left with only an awed respect for the incomprehensibility at the heart of both games and their designers. Rather than working to “see past” the games we play, parsing through what counts real and artificial, or immerse ourselves so far as to lose track of them, The Beginner’s Guide invites us to instead play with deliberate respect for games as they are.

[1] see https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/glossary/distancing-effect/

[2] Myers, David. "The Video Game Aesthetic Play as Form." In The Video Game Theory Reader 2, 47-49. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2009.

[3] Jagoda, Patrick. "On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect." Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 199-233. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/699585.

[4] Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." September 21, 2015.

Images sourced from The Beginner’s Guide Steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/The_Beginners_Guide/

A last note: because of the length limit, there was a LOT I wasn’t able to include, so if anyone is interested in/has played TGB and wants to talk about it, let me know!