Dear Player: The Beginner’s Guide to Everything

Play The Beginner’s Guide. Really now. Stop reading and play Beginner’s Guide. That’s all I needed to say. But for those of you’ve already experienced it, here’s a lot of stuff that I don’t need to say, but (with some regrets) I really want to. What follows is spoiler-tastic, and makes no concessions, to, well, anything – this game is truly one of the greats, a masterpiece, and I want to get to the point: this is a game about almost everything.

The Beginner’s Guide: it’s a game about power, intimacy and privacy; it’s a ‘narrative’ game that unpick’s the basic assumptions of ‘narrative’; it’s a complex dialogue on mental health and the problems of inter-personal understanding; it’s the death of the author; it’s the death of the player; it questions the fabric of gaming while throwing the player into a series of brilliant game concepts in quick succession – each of which deserving of an essay in its own right. Heck, it’s even about love, and hopefully someone’s already written a queer reading of it. Heck, I’m head-over-heels in love with this game, and each of its game sketches (which stand as deserving games in their own right).

To appreciate this, we need to look at the big picture and contend with the artifice of the game’s structure. When I refer to Davey and Coda, unless stated otherwise, I am referring to them as characters as they appear to the player of the game. The Guide poses as a curated and narrated series of games nominally made by another party in chronological order. ‘Coda’ is a fiction, and we can assume ‘he’ could stand for a variety of things – Coda is the maker of The Beginner’s Guide, Coda is a failed relationship, Coda is an estranged friend, Coda is a rejection of end points, of ‘coda’s per se. Coda is a construct which demonstrates the inaccessibility of the intention/artist/author behind an artwork/text/game. As ‘Dave’ our narrator tries to deduce more about Coda through his games, the more we realise that the maker cannot be ‘known’, and that instead we learn more about what Dave thinks of himself than what he can ‘discover’ about someone else.

Contrary to Dave’s first thesis, the player finds out that games are rich, alien things, that give no access to the mind of their creator, that give no meaning beyond the one we write upon them. ‘Dave’, initially a surrogate/analogue for the player’s pov, struggles with the idea that games can be unplayable, that games don’t need endings, that games don’t ‘need’, and can in essence never be known. He mods games to give narrative structure to that which actively resists it. At first he argues we should take the games for what they are, not what they might have been or what the author might have wanted, but in his anxiety Dave projects, infers, speculates and alters. His reading of ‘coda’s games actively changes them. He adds endings and reveals what is hidden.

Let’s think about this. He adds endings to games (e.g. the cleaning game, a zen-like meditation his character doesn’t seem to appreciate), but he also hates games with endings (he opens doors left right and centre). He wants, if we are to try and resolve this contradiction, to ‘progress’ in games which deny the player that through either endless deferral or premature curtailment and frustrating obstacles. The cost of his attempts to ‘read’ another person through their work is his complete alienation from this person. He falls in love with his idea of someone, which of course is more than a little ironic. Berating Coda for trying to have a conversation with himself, he in turn performs the same manoeuvre, trying and failing to talk to a person he doesn’t understand and only causing pain as a result. The ‘real’ Dave invents coda and struggles to talk to his invention ‘Talking to oneself’ is also seemingly a central aspect of games themselves – our relationship with the automaton – in playing single-player games we have a conversation in which we are the only party aware of it. We talk ‘with’ ourselves, as in the phone box at the end of prison levels. ‘Dave’s struggle is the struggle of both the game designer trying to understand his creation, and the player trying to dialogue with the game world.

But it would be crude to say this game is a guide to living with oneself, that ‘Dave’ just has some issues which he projects, and that by the end there is some catharsis where he learns to love himself or some other trite conclusion. By the end Dave still cannot imagine self-worth without someone to talk to – its “inconceivable” to him. He may crudely reduce meaningful human contact to praise on the one hand, but he also seems to want meaningful contact with ‘Coda’ more than anything – he sees him as a deeply rich human being, and his tragedy is that his love is unreciprocated. There is some truth to Dave’s argument: you can’t cure loneliness by talking to yourself. In playing a game, however, we neither really talk to the game’s maker (who is absent/ineffable) or simply ourselves. We are talking to a game. We are talking to a ‘thing’. And that’s okay. What Dave doesn’t understand is that games are not a means to an end (health, meaning, validation), but a process worth itself. Every impression we make leaves an impression on ourselves. In both making and playing games we are ‘doing’ something, performatively – exploring, reflecting, learning and growing.

Dave cannot ‘know’ Coda, but he can play their games. We cannot know ‘Dave’, who is not the ‘real’ dave but a character who leaves us without so much as a complete sentence for a goodbye. We all project, and empathy is fucking problematic, but games give us great environments in which to pause and think. In a game we can see doors we cannot open, but also unknown unknowns. We can see ourselves from a distance, and also respect that we are limited in what we can know, what we can do. Games are both part of us and something else, like everything we have a relationship to. We work with them and they become part of our dreams and conversations. Like an infinite maze, or a meditative labyrinth, games are alien – their rich ‘otherness’ is both inherently meaningless, but also potentially infinitely meaning-ful. They are a moment of shared being, nothing more and nothing less.

To paraphrase a ‘cheesy’ observation from The Beginner’s Guide: Games are like souls, you take care of them and they take care of you, but you don’t own them or know them any more than they do you. All that I’ve said here is a text for a game which is very much its own explanation and explanandum – my reading is likely as woeful a misreading as Davey’s. The game doesn’t ‘need’ what I’ve written. Play the game again – stop reading and play.

Play The Beginner’s Guide. Really now. Stop reading and play Beginner’s Guide. That’s all I needed to say.

But for those of you’ve already experienced it, here’s a lot of stuff that I don’t need to say, but really want to. What follows is spoiler-tastic, and makes no concessions, to, well, anything – this game is truly one of the greats, a masterpiece, and I want to get to the point: this is a game about almost everything.

The Beginner’s Guide: it’s a game about power, intimacy and privacy; it’s a ‘narrative’ game that unpick’s the basic assumptions of ‘narrative’; it’s a complex dialogue on mental health and the problems of inter-personal understanding; it’s the death of the author; it’s the death of the player; it questions the fabric of gaming while throwing the player into a series of brilliant game concepts in quick succession – each of which deserving of an essay in its own right. Heck, it’s even about love, and hopefully someone’s already written a queer reading of it. Heck, I’m head-over-heels in love with this game, and each of its game sketches (which stand as deserving games in their own right).

To appreciate this, we need to look at the big picture and contend with the artifice of the game’s structure. When I refer to Davey and Coda, unless stated otherwise, I am referring to them as characters as they appear to the player of the game. The Guide poses as a curated and narrated series of games nominally made by another party in chronological order. ‘Coda’ is a fiction, and we can assume ‘he’ could stand for a variety of things – Coda is the maker The Beginner’s Guide, Coda is a failed relationship, Coda is an estranged friend, Coda is a rejection of end points, of ‘coda’s per se. Coda is a construct which demonstrates the inaccessibility of the intention/artist/author behind an artwork/text/game. As ‘Dave’ our narrator tries to deduce more about Coda through his games, the more we realise that the maker cannot be ‘known’, and that instead we learn more about what Dave thinks of himself than what he can ‘discover’ about someone else.

Contrary to Dave’s first thesis, the player finds out that games are rich, alien things, that give no access to the mind of their creator, that give no meaning beyond the one we write upon them. ‘Dave’, initially a surrogate/analogue for the player’s pov, struggles with the idea that games can be unplayable, that games don’t need endings, that games don’t ‘need’, and can in essence never be known. He mods games to give narrative structure to that which actively resists it. At first he argues we should take the games for what they are, not what they might have been or what the author might have wanted, but in his anxiety Dave projects, infers, speculates and alters. His reading of ‘coda’s games actively changes them. He adds endings and reveals what is hidden.

Let’s think about this. He adds endings to games (e.g. the cleaning game, a zen-like meditation his character doesn’t seem to appreciate), but he also hates games with endings (he opens doors left right and centre). He wants, if we are to try and resolve this contradiction, to ‘progress’ in games which deny the player that through either endless deferral or premature curtailment and frustrating obstacles. The cost of his attempts to ‘read’ another person through their work is his complete alienation from this person. He falls in love with his idea of someone, which of course is more than a little ironic. Berating Coda for trying to have a conversation with himself, he in turn performs the same manoeuvre, trying and failing to talk to a person he doesn’t understand and only causing pain as a result. The ‘real’ Dave invents coda and struggles to talk to his invention ‘Talking to oneself’ is also seemingly a central aspect of games themselves – our relationship with the automaton – in playing single-player games we have a conversation in which we are the only party aware of it. We talk ‘with’ ourselves, as in the phone box at the end of prison levels. ‘Dave’s struggle is the struggle of both the game designer trying to understand his creation, and the player trying to dialogue with the game world.

But it would be crude to say this game is a guide to living with oneself, that ‘Dave’ just has some issues which he projects, and that by the end there is some catharsis where he learns to love himself or some other trite conclusion. By the end Dave still cannot imagine self-worth without someone to talk to – its “inconceivable” to him. He may crudely reduce meaningful human contact to praise on the one hand, but he also seems to meaningful contact with ‘Coda’ more than anything – he sees him as a deeply rich human being, and his tragedy is that his love is unreciprocated. There is some truth to Dave’s argument: you can’t cure loneliness by talking to yourself. In playing a game, however, we neither really talk to the game’s maker (who is absent/ineffable) or simply ourselves. We are talking to a game. We are talking to a ‘thing’. And that’s okay. What Dave doesn’t understand is that games are not a means to an end (health, meaning, validation), but a process worth itself. Every impression we make leaves an impression on ourselves. In both making and playing games we are ‘doing’ something, performatively – exploring, reflecting, learning and growing.

Dave cannot ‘know’ Coda, but he can play their games. We cannot know ‘Dave’, who is not the ‘real’ dave but a character who leaves us without so much as a complete sentence for a goodbye. We all project, and empathy is fucking problematic, but games give us great environments in which to pause and think. In a game we can see doors we cannot open, but also unknown unknowns. We can see ourselves from a distance, and also respect that we are limited in what we can know, what we can do. Games are both part of us and something else, like everything we have a relationship to. We work with them and they become part of our dreams and conversations. Like an infinite maze, or a meditative labyrinth, games are alien – their rich ‘otherness’ is both inherently meaningless, but also potentially infinitely meaning-ful. They are a moment of shared being, nothing more and nothing less.

To paraphrase a ‘cheesy’ observation from The Beginner’s Guide: Games are like souls, you take care of them and they take care of you, but you don’t own them or know them any more than they do you. All that I’ve said here is a text for a game which is very much its own explanation and explanandum – my reading is likely as woeful a misreading as Davey’s. The game doesn’t ‘need’ what I’ve written. Play the game again – stop reading and play.

Merlin Seller