#thebeginnersguide

I'm a year late, but I just finished Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide. I'm glad I finally got around to it.

It's a game that makes me a little uncomfortable to talk about or try to interpret. I think it was a bold move for Wreden to share his email and invite interpretations, in a game that seems to warn of the dangers of trying to read too deeply into the mental state of the creator. I still want to say something about one particular piece of the game, though. I hope that's allowed. If not, then I guess I hope he doesn’t see this. It’ll be as if I didn’t say anything.

I think what affected me the most was the housecleaning game, and, more importantly, Wreden's line during The Tower game: “Like the housecleaning game, you know that one used to actually loop the cleaning chores and you just cleaned a house forever”. I always had difficulty suspending disbelief enough to believe that Coda was a real person, and yet in that moment I still felt a flash of sympathetic anger.

I often fall into a mental trap where I look at all the chores and tasks I have to do every day and start to feel unhappy. It's not that I have to do the dishes today, or laundry tomorrow, or meet a friend for lunch the next day, or go to work this weekend, or any of the other millions of monotonous tasks. It's that I have to keep on doing those things, over and over, until I eventually am too old and frail to do so.

That's what most of my life has been. Repeatedly doing mundane tasks. My way of dealing with it has alternated between hiding from responsibilities, and constant pursuit of growth and change... as if someday I could reach some height that those mundane tasks could all be left behind. Maybe if I collected enough money, or enough friends, or enough fans, maybe if I reached towards perfection, somehow that could take away all the sad and boring parts of life. More, more, more. No manner of cautionary tale seems sufficient to dissuade me. The only way to be happy is to escape.

Here's where I start making assumptions about Wreden's work: it seems to me like Coda managed to do the impossible. He found some way to find happiness and peace in just focusing on the task at hand, rather than striving for some kind of goal. It's a state of mind that I have managed to find for moments, or days, or even weeks at a time.

But like Wreden says... it has to end. I can only be happy with where I am for so long, before I have to focus once again on where I'm going. I can forget about it for a while, but sooner or later something will remind me that it still feels like something is missing in my life. Like maybe asking myself ‘Is this fun to you?’, and not being able to summon the strength to answer.

As mentioned, I had difficulty viewing The Beginner’s Guide literally. Maybe that’s to protect myself from the thought that a talented game developer could also be a shitty person at times. But whether it’s a dramatized tale of someone Wreden truly accidentally wronged or a story of self sabotage, it’s really hard to not be upset by Wreden’s unwillingness to let anyone, himself or otherwise, stay in the peaceful space. Because maybe there really is a way to be happy without a lamppost, and if someone finds it, I think we should let them stay there for as long as possible, even if we can’t understand how they could be happy without something to work towards.

But as we know, that says more about me than him.

Thank you for the beautiful game.

WARNING - There are some mild spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide in this post. Read with caution! The Beginner’s Guide has certainly thrown everyone for a loop since its release. Many pieces on it have been somewhat vague at best, mostly due to the almost paradoxical message it communicates. At its core though, I believe the Beginners Guide to be an exploration of how we value ourselves and those around us. Something that concerns both the creator and the consumer.

Value is a fairly complex concept. It’s used to define what is most important to us, and to other people. It helps us compare, contrast, calculate and ascertain. The value we place on each other, ourselves, and our creations is at the core of the dialogue within the frame of the Beginner’s Guide. It’s clear the stance of valuing one’s self through the eyes of others is one the Beginner’s Guide is trying to drive home, going so far as to call it a ‘disease’ of some kind. And while the narrator certainly comes to this conclusion, I believe the piece’s ultimate goal is to directly ask the player: what do you value?

While the game may appear to revolve around a personal story, the final scenes reveal the Beginner’s Guide to be more about self-reflection. As the player moves through the last few levels, it gives them time to contemplate the piece as a whole. The seemingly never-ending maze within the final moment of the game serves as a meditation on the ideas at play, on their depth and complexity, ideas that encompass both genres and mediums alike.

We would like to think that we don’t take any outside opinion when it comes to valuing ourselves, but this would be untrue. Humans are built to observe their social environment, and make judgements based on those surroundings. As such, we always seek confirmation from our peers as a survival technique. When I finished the Beginner’s Guide, I was, as the narrator puts it, almost in a state of illness. I saw myself pawing over my multitude of attempts at approval. Not even specifically from my peers, but from everyone.

‘The Stanley Parable’ developer’s new game launches in two days

We know just a few things for certain about Davey Wreden's follow-up to The Stanley Parable: It's called The Beginner's Guide It's a "narrative video game" for PC and Mac It launches on October 1st Aside from a few equally vague screenshots,…

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