The Trip to Sacramento
[Ahead be spoilers — it would be better to play The Beginner’s Guide, watch A Cock and Bull Story and Exit Through the Gift Shop, and read some Flann O’Brien first.]
One of my go-to explanations when I’m called to talk about modernist art, which to be fair is a thing I call upon myself to do more than anyone externally does, is that modernism views the artwork as a machine to process the viewer. As a part of this the modernist creator will tend to hold back from telling the consumer of the artwork what they should be feeling directly, substituting the mechanics of art for any explicative diagesis and recruiting the narrator as a double agent just as likely to be working for the writer as they are the reader. The most striking thing about new game The Beginner’s Guide is how explicit it makes this in its text; the creator is shown to be a machine for generating content and the narrator a self-serving liar. The spaces between them are a hostile land, the location of conflict between the two in which the player is left to transform themselves, to be processed and emerge with a new understanding of themselves.
As modernist art goes The Beginner’s Guide is strikingly beautiful and very nearly avoids all of the usual pitfalls of video games that make inroads into the form. In truth, the worst mistakes are ones which suggest the need for a stronger editorial hand, rather than a misunderstanding or misapprehension of how to achieve what was being aimed for, as well as a few moments of inability to escape completely from what is expected of a game. Very specifically, the final 30 seconds or so I felt undermined a beautifully set up moment of power, substituting in an ending that maybe felt more generic and ‘acceptable’. What could have been a final implication of the player was instead allowed to be the most walking sim of walking sim endings: as the sad man, filled with regrets, is allowed the freedom to at last rise above the world he has and absolve himself of the guilt and complicity demanded by his actions.
The implication of the player, and specifically the player-critic, is key to The Beginner’s Guide; so key in fact that, as Brendan Keogh says it isn’t actually worth our while analysing as it is what the game is, very openly, about. But what is interesting therefore is the response of the very people implicated. Laura Hudson felt ‘furious and sick’ after her first playthrough, Cara Ellison was struck by the knowledge that the game was ‘about me and for me’ and Keogh finds himself somewhat stuck as despite his job being analysis he doesn’t ‘want to fall in the trap of analysing Wreden himself.’ These are people deeply invested, both personally and professionally in playing and writing about games and their responses to the game are nuanced and informative and deep because of this connection but also heavily informed by it as well. I’ve seen a number of people on twitter express similar anger about the game, and similar sadness too; people for whom the game hit squarely home.
And yet I was, as someone who normally (intentionally, as I view my own criticism at least on this blog as an artistic form of engagement with the art that I consume) reads into and freights games with more expressionist weight than they might be intended to bear, surprised to find that I did not feel implicated in any major way myself. Or rather, I could see the accusation that was being levelled at me, but did not feel that it was any different from the accusation that I would level at myself already. But then, we all have our moments of revelation when it comes to art and I like to hope that there are younger people playing The Beginner’s Guide now for whom it will be as formative as reading Iain Banks’ Complicity and Consider Phlebas were for me. Our relationship with art is necessarily a temporal one, and we can only ever be the person we are at the time that we engage with a given work. The point I suppose that I am making is that I have for a long time now felt complicit in the violence enacted by the viewer on the creator of a work of art. I can neither be, personally, angry or sad at The Beginner’s Guide, even as I can and do love it for what it is because I cannot but see it as yet another morsel in an endless stream of creations that I will cannibalise as I have always and will always do. And this is neither a failure or a success on either of our parts, but merely what is and what is between us as we meet at this specific point on our journeys as creator, creation and consumer.
In her piece Ellison points to the long history of games similar to The Beginner’s Guide, and that as well leads into my own surprise that this particular game appears to have hit so many people so hard. There are a few of the usual answers here: when things are said by a white man they become universal in a way that they are not allowed to be from the mouths of other creators; the game itself uses the language of the first person shooter to talk, which is a privileged language in the current games-space; and not least is the fact that it is explicit in its condemnation of the player. This last is where I personally felt a stronger editorial hand would have helped immeasurably, as the game is far too often far too worried that you won’t pick up what it is trying to say unless it tells you. Wonderful moments of tension are sometimes undercut as the voice-over slips from the character Davey Wreden’s needy YouTube let’s player into the creator Davey Wreden just making sure we’re all at the same point in the narrative arc before moving on.
It’s a subtle thing but it makes clear the fact that games are new to this form. The Beginner’s Guide shares structural elements with two films in particular which I think are worth exploring. The first is Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, which similarly involves a fake artist used as a way of commenting on the work of a real artist, and Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story which involves public figures playing characters who happen to share their name and aspects of their personality and background. While it took me until almost the end of Exit to realise that Mr Brainwash was not a real person, that he had not created the works he was supposed to have, I was clear from the very beginning that Coda had either never existed or certainly never made the items attributed to him. This is not a failure per se, one doesn’t read Flann O’Brien and complain that Dermot Trellis (O’Brien’s writer-within-a-writer) is a fiction, but it is unclear entirely what The Beginner’s Guide is going for. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a trick, it implicates the viewer in the same way that it implicates its characters by leading them through the same journey while O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds is a confidence that implicates the reader by drawing them in close to the writer. The Beginner’s Guide vacillates between the two of these in a way that points towards a new mode of modernism that might just suit games as well as those two suit films and novels respectively.
The other film I referenced was A Cock and Bull Story, which is itself an attempt to film the unfilmable novel The Life and Opinions of Tritram Shandy, Gentleman, which is itself a pioneer of many of the techniques used in The Beginner’s Guide. Just as Tristram Shandy was full of references intended for the small audience Sterne envisaged when he wrote it — there are jokes that you would have to have lived in the same village as him to have got — A Cock and Bull Story, and its semi-sequel the television series The Trip, require a knowledge and understanding and an investment in British light entertainment TV of the Late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Once you know who these creators are and who they are perceived to be in the conversations that surround their work then suddenly the implication of viewer complicity in casting them as the characters that they are presented as in those conversations takes on the weight that it is intended to take. We can vicariously enjoy the character Steve Coogan’s womanising in The Trip because it is what we assume he really is like, while the actor Steve Coogan can accuse us for exactly the same assumption and both are absolutely valid parts of the creative contract. And for me, this creative contract is at the core of The Beginner’s Guide, which creates a space between the character Davey Wreden and the game developer Davey Wreden and asks the player who is invested in both to navigate it. And to emerge a different person.
