In 2011, Davey Wreden and his friends made an Indy game called The Stanley Parable. It was a cute little art game that delved into territory about the nature of games, the nature of adult life, and asked questions like "Is there ever actually real 'choice' in games that present choices?" "Is being happy mutually exclusive from being interesting?" and "Why is there an achievement for not playing the game for 5 freaking years?" The main idea was that you (playing Stanely) are being narrated as you move through an abandoned office building. Very near the beginning of the game, you are presented with two open doors, and the Narrator describes how you walk through the door on your left. Things start to get odd if you instead choose to go through the door on your right. It had a killer script that reminds one of the deep cutting riffs of GLaDOS from Portal, and I really liked it. While I highly recommend you play it yourself (it's like 10$ on Steam), there are plenty of people who have recorded themselves playing it on youtube, and they can be found here.
But I'm here to talk to you about the game he put together after that, released in 2015. It's called The Beginner's Guide. If you want to play the game for yourself, it is also 10$ on steam, and well worth it, but from here on down is going to be Spoilers.
This game is a much more personal experience, as Davey Wreden is in fact voicing himself as a narrator for the game, but not in a goofy, mind games role like Stanley Parable, more like an overarching Director's Commentary. He tells the player that they are going to play a series of games made between 2008 and 2011, created by someone he refers to as Coda, and all the while he will provide color commentary on how he thinks each game affected Coda's creative process and what he thinks each game says about the creator. At first, its basic, a Counterstrike Mod and a corridor shooter, but Davey says that they still have something special about them that would develop into themes as Coda made more games. The Counterstrike level has obvious fingerprints of a human designer, like floating crates and huge mono-colored blobs that don't seem to do much. The corridor shooter is pretty blase, by Davey's description, and while you are given a gun with bullets, there are no enemies and you have no extra ammo. Davey ponders if this was just unfinished or if Coda actually wanted it like this, but then quickly reiterates that he has no clue what it could mean. At the end of the level, a woman on the intercom tells the player that they need to step into the blue lightning in order to stop the bad thing from happening, classic game tropes 101. But Davey says that when Coda first tried it, a very peculiar glitch happened. When walking into the light, instead of the player blacking out and the game ending, the player camera instead began to slowly rise up, phasing through the ceiling and looking back at the entire level from a bird's eye view. It was kind of a beautiful miracle, and that's what Davey says made Coda want to try and make more experimental games. It then just continues, talking about games that have really odd mechanics that could have a metaphor, how some games are Coda trying out different directions, and so on. Some time or another, Coda finds the symbol of a Lamp Post to be particularly meaningful, and it is now found at the end of almost every one of these games.
There's a section where Coda has been working on a game that uses a prison as it's main focus, and Coda tries nearly a dozen different iterations to try and get it right. Davey interprets this as Coda trying to express feeling trapped, that Coda's feelings can really only be expressed through games, since every time Davey tried to talk to Coda about the process after meeting at a variety of developer conferences, the only answers he got was while the games were being made, and then after a game was finished, Coda promptly abandoned them. As time goes on, the games become more and more avant garde, and more and more about Coda talking directly to the camera, all the while taking longer and longer to complete each one. Davey saw this as a desperate cry for help, and then thought that maybe, just maybe, if he showed off Coda's games to the internet at large, then maybe it would help. And then when the overwhelmingly positive feed back started to come in for Coda's games, Davey felt amazing, that he was able to do something for somebody else and give Coda validation, and be reminded that making games was supposed to be about fun, like it was at the beginning. Then, after thousands of these emails offering praise, Coda made one last game and emailed it to Davey. It was cold, detached, almost resentful of the player. With unsolvable puzzles, invisible mazes, and a 8 digit code that had no hint as to what it was. Davey uses Debug mode to get the player past all of these obstacles, and then when you finally get to the top of a very long and windy staircase, you see a message. Directly from Coda to Davey.
It says, "Thank you for your interest in my games. Please don't contact me again."
And you walk forward and you find more.
"Sometimes I thought I was just making games for you."
"If you think that me making games about prisons makes me broken, then that says a lot more about you than about me."
"Running out of ideas doesn't make me depressed, it's just a low point in the creative process."
"Please stop putting Lamp Posts at the end of my games."
"I get physically ill when I'm around you."
"I do hope that someday it finally clicks, that I can get through to you. But if it does, if you can finally figure out what all of this means"
"Don't say anything."
And then Coda disappears off the face of the internet. No more games, nothing. Just Davey, alone with his guilt. He wanted so desperately to find a human connection through games, to find validation for himself. He thought he had found someone who had a continuity to their life, to their work that he thought he could never have, but some of that continuity was just in his head. Coda was just a person, like anybody else, and that the games were just a creative outlet. But when Davey poked and prodded for more, for what the meanings were and what the intent was, it actually made Coda resent making them. It made it as though the games were being made for Davey to discover the mystery, instead of just being a game. That's why Davey made the Beginner's Guide, to try and publicly apologize and maybe reach out, and maybe Coda would make games again. But then, that might be Davey completely missing the point. Again.
Now, chances are good that this is, in fact, fictitious. Especially since putting somebody's work on Steam without permission and at a cost is very illegal. But, does that actually matter? You may have noticed that I didn't use any gender pronouns when describing Coda. That's because I noticed something odd when I saw it for the first time. Davey keeps referring to Coda as He throughout the entire game, but almost every time non-specific gendered pronouns show up in the actual games, they are always She. In the final iteration of the prison level, after you finish talking to your past self, you see a woman in the cell. The voice over the intercom in the second game Coda ever made is that of a woman. Davey has told the player that he has met Coda in person on several occasions, and that makes us want to trust who he says Coda is, but by the end of the game it's hard to trust anything Davey says.
Something that struck a chord with me after seeing this was the idea that many, many people, especially young people like myself, are obsessed with Authorial Intent. People asking a content creator what they were meaning, or what's something about the story that didn't make it into the final version, or what did it symbolize. Some of the more Avant Garde Auteurs get off on it, like a joke made about the filmmaker Tarsem by the Nostalgia Critic. (A little animated cartoon of Tarsem jumps up and down and screams "ASK ME WHAT IT MEANS!" over and over.) But for some artists, it can be kind of invasive. When I hear people ask content creators at conventions what they mean, it feels like they aren't asking because they want to understand the work better, it feels like they're asking so they can squeeze just the slightest bit more information out so that they can have the big scoop for all the relevant threads and blogs. There's a song on the Commentary! track for Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog by Joss Whedon that goes into this kind of Scorched Earth style of artist worship.
I'd like to take a moment to look at the "Death of the Author" theory of criticism. Mostly, it's used to discuss media as a separate entity from the person who made it, and whatever the author's intent was, it can and should be viewed on it's own merits. This can be seen as either surgical, wanting to remove the author from a work so that it can transcend them (see H. P. Lovecraft), or as encouraging, that authorial intent or allegory is a form of domination, and that its better to let people see themselves in the work and apply their own lives to it (See J.R.R. Tolkien). In this game, it is proposed that the only way to get to know a creator is through their work. You can't interact with them in any meaningful way, so they might as well be dead. You have to find little details from stranded corners from their works in order to find out who they really are, and when you cant find the pieces you're looking for, you tend to, well, fill in the gaps with what you do know. But something that a wise person once said, I don't remember originally who, "You are Not your work." When you create, yes, a part of you stays with it, but it's not all of who you are. That's why this kind of artist worship is almost as destructive as paying no attention to the artist at all.
For a long time, I felt that the first way of looking at the theory, of paying no heed to the author, was OK. A while ago, a friend and I watched the documentary Jodorowski's Dune, where it described how this crazy Argentinian filmmaker tried and failed to get an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune off the ground that collected some of the most talented, influential people of the 1970s, in the years between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. Something my friend took great issue with was the fact that the only person on the entire crew to have actually read the book was the Director and the Producer. Everybody else, the Artists, the storyboarders, the special effects people, just did as they were told and, as far as they knew, Dune was what Jodorowski told them it was. My friend likened this to a Death Cult, a point I strongly disagree on, but I wasn't as bothered by the fact that they took some extreme liberties with the source material as much as I probably should have been. (Jodorowski even described in the documentary that he felt like he was raping the book in order to get the story he wanted.) Now, seeing how going so far in order to make somebodies work fit your world view can, indeed, be very, very harmful to the person who made it, I think I understand more what my friend meant when he said he would have no respect for the film if it ever got made because of how little respect it had for those who wrote and read the book. I still believe that something beautiful could have been made from it, and I believe that every artist trying to tell a story has the right to do so, even if it does so by standing on the bones of other artists, but now I also know that doing so can cause harm.
I am very familiar with Davey's anxiety. I know that I feel better when I try to make other people feel better, even if they don't need or want it. It's that desire, that need for a human connection, wherever you can find it, that is the root of much of human nature. If you can find it, you follow it. If you can't have it, you reject and antagonize everything about it. If it's offered and you can't trust it, you retreat inwards. It is offered for the chance that it can be shared back with you. It is refused because you don't feel like it can be shared.
The Beginner's Guide is both a how-to guide for what to look for when you're trying to start out making games, a celebration of artists, and a cautionary tale about how you can love something and still completely miss the point of it. I hope you get the chance to play it for yourselves, because it has some very important feels to share.
Thanks for reading! I think I'll be posting a lot more frequently for a while.
At the risk of missing the point ;~) , I really enjoy reading your essays because I feel like it gives me a little more insight into you.
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