The Beginner’s Guide is a game created by The Stanley Parable creator, Davey Wreden. The Stanley Parable, originally a free mod for Half-Life 2, is a comedic walking simulator that criticized decision-making skills in video games. The Beginner’s Guide is an entirely different beast. On Steam, The Beginner’s Guide has the description:
The Beginner’s Guide is a narrative video game from Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand.
The game can be purchased on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/The_Beginners_Guide/
Or watched in a playthrough:
The actual gameplay takes you, level by level, through games that the narrator’s friend, Coda, made. The narrator searches for symbolism in the games, but reveals that the reason he and Coda no longer speak is because the narrator actively searched for meaning and reassurance within Coda’s games.
In the beginning, the games are simple: a map for Counter-Strike, a partially-developed game called Escape from Whisper. Then the games become a lot more abstract: A game where you can only walk backward, with a narrative about living in the past, a game where the gameplay involves being locked in a jail cell for an hour in real time, a game where a student and teacher reveal their insecurities to an empty lecture hall.
As the game is played, the narrator reveals the a source of conflict between him and Coda is that the narrator kept pressing Coda to assign meaning to his games, while Coda denied there ever being any. The narrator shared the games with other people without Coda’s consent, and Coda stopped speaking to him. It’s a concept that’s easier to actually experience rather than having it explained, so I recommend playing it yourself, but I’ll explain everything you need to know for this article.
The game is obviously fiction, but I want to suspend my disbelief to talk about it. I’m going to pretend that Coda is real, and out there, and I’m going to talk about the repercussions if he were.
Whether the games actually had meaning is unknown. They were all desolate, lonely worlds, but Coda’s insistence that they weren’t reflective of himself implies that the part of him that made the game wanted to remain private. If that’s the case, was the mistake that the narrator was searching for answers that Coda wasn’t willing to give, or was it that the narrator was searching for answers that never existed?
The game doesn’t give us any answers. Not really. In fact, playing it makes me feel, once again, like that kid in English class: slamming my fists on my desk and ranting Not everything has meaning! Stop making me look for it! But I also feel like that student in a college lit class, highlighting the great American classics thinking, Yes! I’ve Found it! When, really, the answer could be anything.
Tyler Wide, a critic for PCgamer.com described, “The metaphors are blunt—a social anxiety theater, a literal creative machine—and Wreden’s narration becomes overbearing and utterly on the nose.”
He’s right. One of the games is a tall staircase that slows your speed as your ascend. At the end of the crawl, there is simply a room full of game ideas; it’s an escalation to anti-climax; a struggle to achieve the basics.
In fact, the metaphors are so on the nose that they make me want to find a meaning other than the obvious. They make me want to prove that there is no meaning. They make me want to prove that the meaning is there, and deep, and ready to be picked apart. So I did.
This is my interpretation of The Beginner’s Guide:
Maybe this game isn’t about coping with something you don’t understand, like the description says. Maybe it’s not about trying to decode the greater mysteries in life: our own mental labyrinths. Maybe it’s just a game about nothing, and that’s all it really needs to be.
I had an English teacher who had a vendetta against high school’s abuse of annotating. Her argument was that it just made students dislike reading even more, and it drove a rift between them and the literature. Maybe this is the same thing.
In finding meaning, the narrator is going against Coda’s wishes, but he’s also separating himself from the games themselves by trying to force a theme onto it that the game might not have. By pushing Coda away, he is also pushing away any parts of the art that could have meant something to him.
He could have found comfort in the shared insecurities in the Lecture game, where both the student and Professor are hiding their own low self-esteem. He could have used the inherent loneliness of all the games to feel more connected with the creator, because the feeling is relatable.
Looking at art as a puzzle to be solved means overlooking the meaning the art could have to you. Trying to find the “right answer” is doing a chore, not appreciating, and it takes away an opportunity to learn something about yourself.
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