The Beginner's Guide is hard to talk about. How do you even begin talking about a game like this when I don't even know if I can even call it a game? Do you talk about it linearly, level by level even if the same themes keeps on repeating itself? Or do you talk about it from the perspective of someone who already knows where this story will end up. Are we even allowed to talk about this game at all? My first attempt at writing this page was fine, but it didn't feel right, so here I am again, staring at a blank page.
If you haven't watched or played The Beginner's Guide, please do that first. This is an expereince you can't regain and I would hate to take that away from anyone. This page is not spoiler-free and meant for those who have already experienced the game fully, maybe even at least twice.
A lot of my interpretation of this game is also affected by the many video essays I have watched so yes, there will be similarities but I may also gloss over common themes and interpretations that are already mentioned in these videos and instead focus on specific examples of these themes. Here are some of the video essays I enjoy. I may not agree with what they say fully, but they are fun and entertaining videos nonetheless.
The Artist is Absent by Innuendo Studios was the first video essay I've ever watched for this game and it's also one that I enjoy immensely. It's considered an OG in the community and it's a pretty well loved one that goes into the idea of how language shapes a story and how a person's experience can change the meaning they derive from the same singular story. It's helped me fall in love with writing again.
The Beginner's Guide: A Needlessly Thorough Analysis by WhaleMilk is a slightly more recent one (still 2 years old at this point). While this video takes inspiration and discusses similar topics with 'The Artist is Absent', it also takes the time explore further into every single game level. It's a fun watch and its always enjoyable to see what other people infer from the game.
For the purpose of this website, we are also taking the stance that The Beginner's Guide is a fictional game written by Davey Wreden and nothing I say about Davey the character is referring to the actual person. Now that that's out of the way, lets dig into my favourite game
What does it actually mean to separate an art from an artist? These days, people talk about it alot. Maybe the creator for a massive franchise turns out to be a terrible person who uses their platfom to make the lives of those who are already suffering, even worse. So you enjoy the art instead, and pretend the artist doesn't exist. Except, the artist's bigotry and discrimination is still in the art, the world building, the character's choices and decisions, and even the plot of the art still holds aspects of the creator's hatred and discrimination. But if the art always holds a part of the artist, then what does this separation even mean?
In The Beginner's Guide, you follow Davey the narrator as he talks about the games Coda, his friend, had made as Davey analyses the games and tells you what he thinks these games say about Coda as a person. Then you realise everything he has said, or at least a majority, is wrong. This whole time, Davey's has been projecting his own emotions and the role that his brain has decided Coda plays, stretching the truth to make sure his analysis matches the plot even though we never got to hear from Coda at all until the moment we find out how wrong Davey is.
The art holds part of the artist, there will always be aspects of Coda in the games he makes but we cannot use the games to tell who Coda is as a person. That's the separation. A story where a character has gone through abuse doesn't immediately make it a story about abuse. A story about abuse does not make the writer an abuser or someone who was abused. Again and again, the lines get blurred and Davey is there to further encourage this by suggesting his own ideas of what each game says about Coda.
We see this in many of the games but during the first few levels, everything Davey says sounds logical, it makes sense so we agree with him, we take what he says as truth because he's the expert, the only person who actually got to talk to Coda. Then, we get to notes.
Notes is like the word vomit you find on the walls of a public toilet. Happy thoughts, sad thoughts, dumb thoughts just all sprawled out around what seems to be a giant cave. And maybe some of these notes were Coda's genuine thoughts and feelings. Maybe they were all just words from different personas Coda came up with for this game. We don't know which ones if any really tells us who Coda is, and that's what we're trying to do right? That's what Davey is talking to us about in the background. Is Davey right? Is Coda lonely? Oh a message about not being understood, maybe thats how Coda really feels?
As arguably the 'Main Theme' of The Beginner's Guide, Davey and as a result, the player's inability to separate the art from the artist is something that comes up again and again throughout the games. I won't be mentioning every single game but let's talk about the Prison Games for a second.
'It's just weird for weirdness sake' is a line that Davey says towards the end of the second prison game and that line always sticks to me because it throws me off. All this time, Davey has been talking about the meanings behind these games, what the different decisions could mean about how Coda feels and what Coda is like as a person.
Davey has set himself as the narrator, the person who knows the most about whats happening, the one explaining everything to us and for him to just turn and say oh, this game doesn't really communicate anything just felt wrong because something not making sense to Davey, who wasn't even the one to develop or write these games, doesn't make them meaningless to Coda, who had always made the games for himself.
Except then we go back to the idea of lonely thoughts versus loneliness. A game with a couple lonely thoughts are easy to sell as a game about loneliness so thats what Davey sells to us and himself. So, what do you do when what a game is saying doesn't fit in the plot you came up with? What if the game is just Coda talking about the illusion of choice that games sometimes gives players?
At the end of The Beginner's Guide, Coda talks about how Davey's influence has made him doubt his own creations and that maybe, he has added solutions to his games just to appease Davey which is devastating because each of Coda's games has always felt so personal. When you refuse to let a game exist on its own terms and have its own meaning outside of what you can analyse of its creator, your opinion can not only affect how others interacts with this game, but how others interact with this creator and how this creator interacts with their own art.