Critical Play: The Beginner’s Guide
For this week’s critical play, I wanted to talk about something I played a few years ago, but I has occupied a space in my mind ever since: The Beginner’s Guide. (I’ll try to be somewhat vague about spoilers, but you’ve been warned).
The Beginner’s Guide is ostensibly a collection of walking simulator type experiences created by the developer’s friend, Coda. The developer narrates over the experience as you play through his friend’s works, one after another, all in order to answer one simple question: why did Coda stop making games?
In this way, The Beginner’s Guide becomes an exploration of the character of Coda through the works he created. As the Beginner’s guide progresses, the player is likely to latch onto a few recurring symbols in Coda’s works, such as a lamppost and a door puzzle, in order to piece some meaning together. However, it becomes more and more apparent as The Beginner’s Guide goes on that our narrator is unreliable, and that this developer has actually added these recurring elements to Coda’s games in order to create meaning where there was none. The story is then changed from an exploration of solely Coda’s character to an exploration of the relationship between Coda and the developer of The Beginner’s Guide himself. While the game started as an exploration of Coda through his work, it ends as an exploration of the developer of The Beginner’s Guide through his work.
Obviously the character of Coda isn’t real, and this is all a purely fictional story concocted by the developer, but the element of metacommentary on the connection between an artist and their work, as well as the sometimes fruitless attempt to find meaning in that work, adds an extra layer to proceedings that wouldn’t be there if the Beginner’s Guide was simply a book about Coda’s life. By structuring this narrative as a mystery told from within Coda’s works, The Beginner’s Guide allows the player to explore the character of Coda and the narrator via their own experience. Moreover, the shifting perception the player has as they uncover more of the mystery allows them to look at the narrative through multiple perspectives, both as an exploration of Coda and of the developer himself.
