The Beginner’s Guide starts with a white screen. The voiceover says,
Hi there, thank you very much for playing The Beginner’s Guide. My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I’m going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011. We’re going to look at the games made by a friend of mine named Coda.
Now these games mean a lot to me. I met Coda in early 2009 at a time when I was really struggling with some personal stuff, and his work pointed me in a very powerful direction. I found it to be a good reference point for the kinds of creative works that I wanted to make.
Then, without ceremony, we’re dropped into a world: a facsimile of a desert town, a map for the game Counterstrike. It’s Coda’s first “game,” and Davey proceeds to tell us why he thinks it’s interesting. He explains that he thinks these games tell us something about their creator. Coda stopped making games, and Davey wants to figure out why. He even provides his Gmail address and asks for feedback from players.
The Beginner’s Guide is not a traditional game. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s very much in “walking simulator” territory. However, where The Stanley Parable was all about choice in game narrative, The Beginner’s Guide offers few choices, and no real way to exert control over the narrative. It’s more about experience than participation. It’s a little bit like a short mystery.
The Narrator
Davey will continue to provide voice-over explanations throughout the entire experience, with very few breaks. He is the tour guide as we travel through Coda’s games, most of them little more than small experiments. While the player usually has freedom to go wherever they want within a given game, Davey moves the player from one game to the next. Davey chooses to occasionally skip the player past content that he deems unimportant, like a complicated maze, in order to keep the narrative flow.
He constantly explains the real-life context of his relationship with Coda at the time each game was made, and inserts his own theories about what these games tell us about Coda and his emotional state over the years they knew each other. He is ever-present, and influences the player’s interpretation of Coda’s games in both subtle and overt ways.
The Context
This opening sequence and everything that follows it is designed to put the player in a particular mindset. It’s a framing device, and it sets our expectations of Davey and Coda. After all, this is a pretty strange premise for a game. We know Davey is a real person. He really wrote The Stanley Parable. But is this the real Davey?
Is Coda a real person? Did he really make these games? That seems less likely. And what exactly does the title of the game mean?
Davey is inherently an unreliable narrator, but he goes to unusual lengths to establish credibility and realism. He sets himself up as a sort of documentarian, chronicling and presenting these games.
As The Beginner’s Guide progresses, an astute player may notice that Davey’s interpretations of Coda’s games sometimes make sense, and sometimes…don’t. He overlooks the obvious. He dismisses nuanced questions as uninteresting.
He also has a peculiar way of talking about Coda, his games, and the fact that he stopped making them. Everything comes back to Davey, how it makes him feel, how it fulfills (or fails to fulfill) his needs.
The Turn
Davey’s narration is well done, and his commentary is enough to keep the game interesting for the relatively short play time of The Beginner’s Guide. However, what makes the game interesting is the ending, and I won’t spoil that.
It’s enough to say that there is a particular sequence where it becomes clear who Davey really is, and this recontextualization of him forces the player to reevaluate everything he has said up to that point. It immediately changes the obvious interpretations of Coda’s games.
Writing in video games is still young, and it’s rare for a video game to do something clever enough in its writing that it deserves the notice of writers in other media. The Beginner’s Guide is not a perfect game, but the setup, the turn, and the execution throughout is worth noticing.
The Game
The Beginner’s Guide is a small game. It takes around two hours to complete and it’s available for $10 on Steam. Go check it out.
Words Deferred 