Correction to the above statement: The Beginner's Guide is led by a fictionalized version of Davey Wreden, writer and creator of The Stanley Parable. Coda is not a real game developer, and this game is not a genuine act of preservation or autobiography. The Beginner's Guide is fully fictional, as far as we've heard from it's creator. This made it all the more interesting for me after playing it, given how personal it appears to Davey, who is, in fact, a real person. The game's stated purpose is for Davey to reach out to Coda, a developer he respects, that he is no longer able to reach. As you go through Coda's games, Davey continually pushes past rougher parts of the works. As you enter a maze, Davey teleports you to its solution. As you walk up a stairway that slows you to a crawl, Davey allows you to hit 'Enter' and restore your speed to normal. As a game eases into an infinite loop of conversation with an NPC, Davey forcibly cuts off the loop, forcing an 'ending' to an experience that never had one to begin with. This act of "curation" on Davey's part isn't unusual in terms of the art world, so it doesn't inherently jump out at first. But, as this process becomes more explicit - skipping through an hour-long wait in a jail cell, giving you the passcode to a lock that no player is supposed to be able to open, it becomes yet more uncomfortable, feeling the knife cutting through the games. Davey also pathologizes Coda through the games, applying great signifigance to a series of works-in-progress utilizing a comfortably decorated prison, a lamppost shining at the end of each level, a game where you fail to meet a stage director's instructions and are locked behind its curtain. Davey gives the body of Coda's work extreme scrutiny, trying to squeeze out meaning through connecting them together.
It is only in the ending, though, that the reason why our narrator has to reach out to Coda - it's because Coda cut him off, pushing him away for previously sharing the games with his friends. This game puts the player in an incredibly uncomfortable position, complicit in the continued betrayal of a game developer that Davey says he respects. In the only message we get from Coda (locked where only Davey would see it, behind multiple impossible puzzles that require manipulating the game to get past), he confirms this betrayal:
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"If there was an answer, a meaning, would it make you any happier?"
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"Would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes?""
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"Would you stop changing my games? Stop adding lampposts to them?"
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"Would you simply let them be what they are?"
This moment set in stone a lot of 'vibes' I was getting from the way the narrator and games were interacting, that things started to seem more direct than I expected. Several dialogue-heavy games push right into the subject of Coda apparently struggling with his art. This matches the narrative Davey builds about Coda, that he is an artist struggling with something immense and profound that he can only express through his art. With the revelation of the lampposts being added... how sure can we be that Davey didn't dig into other aspects, changing dialogue to make the subtext he found more explicit?
I found The Beginner's Guide to be a masterclass in explaining how we treat art, especially art from absentee or dead artists, those who will or can not explain what they meant by their works of art. I thought about "Now and Then", the song released in November of last year as "the final Beatles song", constructed from the rough demo tape made by John Lennon in 1977. Though they previously worked on 'finishing' the songin the 90s, the tape itself was too distorted for it to be used in a final mix. Once the 2020s rolled around, the surviving memebers of the band had machine learning technology used to isolate the vocals, re-dubbing the piano and including the additions made by George Harrison, who died between the sessions in the 90s and the eventual release of the song. "Now and Then" ends up being a beautiful piece, but the final result is... strange. Many called attention to the fact that the end result of the song is singificantly shorter than the original demo recorded, a bridge or two removed for brevity. Though the marketing for the song pushes the implicit narrative that this is the final statement from all four Beatles, one half of the band has zero control over how their work is presented. As we continue to dig up the works-in-progress and unreleased works of art, this question will continue to be brought up. How should we interpret what we weren't intended to see? Is it wrong to try to analyze and look into the art that the public was never supposed to see? This kind of discussion is hard to talk about, because it can only happen with something that we have in front of us - people would not be discussing the morality of releasing "Now and Then" until it actually gets released. What The Beginner's Guide does so well is in actually dramatizing this process, showing the way something can be altered through analyzation and curation. We can sense, in the end, just how different we see Coda's games because of the narration put on top of them.
After you finish The Beginner's Guide, there is an option to disable the games' narration, which seems like "the antidote" to the problems of artistic intent that we struggle with through the main playthrough. However, even without his voice, the games and our interpretation are tainted by Davey's presence, the games still altered in the same ways, and our minds still holding the idea that Coda is somehow a tortured artist (which is not explicitly denied). In the end of the game, during Coda's one explanation, Davey's narration laments that while sharing Coda's games, he felt "good about himself" in a way that other things couldn't give him. One way to interpret this game is that it's casting off the concept of finding art that we weren't supposed to see and giving it any interpretation at all. I don't think this is the case. The choice to put the role of creator and lead developer of the game as the "antagonist" who breaks these games open speaks to another direction. This game fundamentally understands why we want to dig into the works of an artist and come out with a meaning. Putting our own thoughts into something that has a direct purpose and interpretation gives us the feeling that our own lives have the same kind of direction and intent that we see in a finished product. Davey wants to look into these games because he wants to understand what's going on in Coda's head, see himself in Coda's world. When looking at an artist's body of work, we see inevitability. Rubber Soul leads into Revolver leads into Sgt. Pepper's, with an obvious throughline between them. When we listen in retrospect and understand this process, we believe that a life can have a forward progression that advances something beautiful forward - something we all want to believe about our own lives. Nothing can fix our need to see this kind of ineviability in ourselves, and so we continue to interpret and dig up anything we can find - The Beginner's Guide understands this, and so I think the game is asking the people who enjoy art to be conscious and aware of this impulse. There are a million other ways to look at this game, but this is what I happen to have taken away from it.
