The Beginner's Guide
If you haven't played this game yet, go play it. You can get it right here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/
It'll take you about 90 minutes. Go do that now. This post assumes you've played it and spoils basically the whole experience.
---
Did you play it? Good. This is an email I wrote to the developer, immediately after playing through it:
Hi.
I just finished playing through A Beginner's Guide.
I knew nothing about it going in. I was completely sold on the fact that it was being made by you, and that was enough for me to want to pick it up and give it my time. So I did.
And for a while, I believed your story.
Early on, the story seemed genuine. I knew in the back of my mind that I couldn't implicitly trust the person responsible for something as subversive as The Stanley Parable, but everything you said was plausible. And being an independent game developer myself, the story rang true, especially when I saw the "made by a newbie with Source" levels of the game.
Although in retrospect I should've doubted anyone could be as competent as you portrayed Coda to be. No one has that level of artistic mastery when they're starting out, making terse, flawless, eloquent pieces back to back to back. The cube-headed men are way too elegant for a beginner to come up with.
But who knows? This was a curated collection, so maybe you were only showing some of the work - or you had polished away the rough edges. A lot of the pieces were believable as game jam outputs, betrayed only by the perfect invisible walls everywhere and lack of collision bugs or visual glitches.
Up to around The Tower, I believed your story. When you started speaking about yourself in really intense terms, it stretched your credibility - but everything that had come before had affected me so strongly, I wanted to believe. And at this point, I was so invested that it didn't matter if the story was truth or fiction.
---
It was a beautiful story. Gripping, and I would've been perfectly okay with it ending just before the Epilogue, leaving us hanging, uneasy and without closure. But the ending was worth it, and the track that plays as you float up into this beautiful scene was also worth it. I have been listening to that track on repeat for the past 40 minutes now, and I have no plans of stopping it.
---
First off, allow me to thank you for making the game, with all the weight that carries from one experienced game developer to another. Thank you for making all the efforts necessary for putting this experience together so I could have it. I am richer for having played through it, and I am grateful.
Next, allow me to thank you for rekindling my appreciation of games as an artistic medium. After 8 years of making games, it's easy to lose sight of why we do it. It's easy to lose sight of why we got into in the first place, and of everything that games are capable of expressing. I have toyed in the past with the idea of making an autobiographical game, of making an art game with the sole goal of expressing myself, of communicating my internal demons and traumas. Playing through ABG, I felt a strong desire to create something like it - something simple, abstract, subtle for people to puzzle over and interpret.
I've played hundreds of independent games. I've played the outputs of game jams, I've played artgames and nongames. They almost always fall flat. The games overreach and fall over due to technical incompetence - their pretense of high art quickly crushed under the weight of their own inelegance. ABG, to its credit, doesn't fall over itself. It is polished to a mirror shine, despite its pretense of roughness. My programmer instinct was yelling at me "there's no way you can string together a bunch of separate amateur games this cleanly."
With ABG, I feel you pushed the boundary of what games as art can do. I don't say this lightly or as hyperbolic praise. I mean that very concretely. For a game to dump the player in a bland, empty level, with nothing to do, only for the game to have an incredibly rich impossible-to-reach world built outside of the player's grasp - it is genius. The game is unplayable on purpose. Not through incompetence, not through a lack of time or resources, but through intent. This is a significant, rich with meaning statement, and is worthy of praise. Even more praiseworthy is the fact that you simultaneously kept this hidden external world hidden and revealed it in the same piece. The game intends for the level to be bland and empty, hiding its internal richness. For the audience to appreciate this, we must show this richness. But to show it is also to ruin the message. And you solve this paradox artfully. Bravo.
---
Being a game developer myself - a currently struggling, independent game developer, working alone, battling against depression, making a game that very few people care about, ABG felt like it was designed for me. The middle section on the struggles of creation rang especially true, and I considered each response very carefully. The writing on the wall, the lies I had to say, the reality of the ugly everyday struggle that is my work, it all spoke to something I had experienced clearly. I felt a very strong kinship with Coda, and I deeply cared about him.
The enigma that you built with Coda's character - of some misunderstood creative genius who makes it impossible to reach a room, then lovingly hand-crafts that room anyways - and creates all this without ever intending to show it to anyone - is fascinating to me. The idea that somewhere out there is some Van Gogh of game development, working alone in utter obscurity creating deeply personal art for no one's benefit - is beautiful. In this age where every single effort is publicized and copy-pasted across dozens of social media channels, just the thought of a lone creative mind, creating only for the sake of creation, is beautiful.
That reveal in The Tower makes this all the more terrifying. Coda isn't misunderstood or lonely or depressed. He doesn't want to be understood. He isn't trying to communicate something. He barely even wants to share his work at all. He has fully mastered himself, including his struggles. He is complete, in every way. He is alien to us. He doesn't need us. He's fine just doing his thing on his own in his own little corner - and by trying to help him, you've only disturbed him. Coda is completely ineffable, and our attempts to interpret his work is simply lame projection. The killer? "Will you stop adding lampposts to my games?" We tried to inject meaning where there was none.
Frankly, I could go on. I feel like I should replay through the game again. I took a screenshot of a specific moment that hit me like a ton of bricks, hoping to review it after finishing the game - sadly Windows took a screenshot of my desktop, not the game.
You've reminded me of why I make games. And I have a game to make - it'll take a million lines of code, and I'll write them one at a time. It'll be ugly and imperfect and take a very long time - but I feel the effort is worthwhile.
Thank you.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/
It'll take you about 90 minutes. Go do that now. This post assumes you've played it and spoils basically the whole experience.
---
Did you play it? Good. This is an email I wrote to the developer, immediately after playing through it:
Hi.
I just finished playing through A Beginner's Guide.
I knew nothing about it going in. I was completely sold on the fact that it was being made by you, and that was enough for me to want to pick it up and give it my time. So I did.
And for a while, I believed your story.
Early on, the story seemed genuine. I knew in the back of my mind that I couldn't implicitly trust the person responsible for something as subversive as The Stanley Parable, but everything you said was plausible. And being an independent game developer myself, the story rang true, especially when I saw the "made by a newbie with Source" levels of the game.
Although in retrospect I should've doubted anyone could be as competent as you portrayed Coda to be. No one has that level of artistic mastery when they're starting out, making terse, flawless, eloquent pieces back to back to back. The cube-headed men are way too elegant for a beginner to come up with.
But who knows? This was a curated collection, so maybe you were only showing some of the work - or you had polished away the rough edges. A lot of the pieces were believable as game jam outputs, betrayed only by the perfect invisible walls everywhere and lack of collision bugs or visual glitches.
Up to around The Tower, I believed your story. When you started speaking about yourself in really intense terms, it stretched your credibility - but everything that had come before had affected me so strongly, I wanted to believe. And at this point, I was so invested that it didn't matter if the story was truth or fiction.
---
It was a beautiful story. Gripping, and I would've been perfectly okay with it ending just before the Epilogue, leaving us hanging, uneasy and without closure. But the ending was worth it, and the track that plays as you float up into this beautiful scene was also worth it. I have been listening to that track on repeat for the past 40 minutes now, and I have no plans of stopping it.
---
First off, allow me to thank you for making the game, with all the weight that carries from one experienced game developer to another. Thank you for making all the efforts necessary for putting this experience together so I could have it. I am richer for having played through it, and I am grateful.
Next, allow me to thank you for rekindling my appreciation of games as an artistic medium. After 8 years of making games, it's easy to lose sight of why we do it. It's easy to lose sight of why we got into in the first place, and of everything that games are capable of expressing. I have toyed in the past with the idea of making an autobiographical game, of making an art game with the sole goal of expressing myself, of communicating my internal demons and traumas. Playing through ABG, I felt a strong desire to create something like it - something simple, abstract, subtle for people to puzzle over and interpret.
I've played hundreds of independent games. I've played the outputs of game jams, I've played artgames and nongames. They almost always fall flat. The games overreach and fall over due to technical incompetence - their pretense of high art quickly crushed under the weight of their own inelegance. ABG, to its credit, doesn't fall over itself. It is polished to a mirror shine, despite its pretense of roughness. My programmer instinct was yelling at me "there's no way you can string together a bunch of separate amateur games this cleanly."
With ABG, I feel you pushed the boundary of what games as art can do. I don't say this lightly or as hyperbolic praise. I mean that very concretely. For a game to dump the player in a bland, empty level, with nothing to do, only for the game to have an incredibly rich impossible-to-reach world built outside of the player's grasp - it is genius. The game is unplayable on purpose. Not through incompetence, not through a lack of time or resources, but through intent. This is a significant, rich with meaning statement, and is worthy of praise. Even more praiseworthy is the fact that you simultaneously kept this hidden external world hidden and revealed it in the same piece. The game intends for the level to be bland and empty, hiding its internal richness. For the audience to appreciate this, we must show this richness. But to show it is also to ruin the message. And you solve this paradox artfully. Bravo.
---
Being a game developer myself - a currently struggling, independent game developer, working alone, battling against depression, making a game that very few people care about, ABG felt like it was designed for me. The middle section on the struggles of creation rang especially true, and I considered each response very carefully. The writing on the wall, the lies I had to say, the reality of the ugly everyday struggle that is my work, it all spoke to something I had experienced clearly. I felt a very strong kinship with Coda, and I deeply cared about him.
The enigma that you built with Coda's character - of some misunderstood creative genius who makes it impossible to reach a room, then lovingly hand-crafts that room anyways - and creates all this without ever intending to show it to anyone - is fascinating to me. The idea that somewhere out there is some Van Gogh of game development, working alone in utter obscurity creating deeply personal art for no one's benefit - is beautiful. In this age where every single effort is publicized and copy-pasted across dozens of social media channels, just the thought of a lone creative mind, creating only for the sake of creation, is beautiful.
That reveal in The Tower makes this all the more terrifying. Coda isn't misunderstood or lonely or depressed. He doesn't want to be understood. He isn't trying to communicate something. He barely even wants to share his work at all. He has fully mastered himself, including his struggles. He is complete, in every way. He is alien to us. He doesn't need us. He's fine just doing his thing on his own in his own little corner - and by trying to help him, you've only disturbed him. Coda is completely ineffable, and our attempts to interpret his work is simply lame projection. The killer? "Will you stop adding lampposts to my games?" We tried to inject meaning where there was none.
Frankly, I could go on. I feel like I should replay through the game again. I took a screenshot of a specific moment that hit me like a ton of bricks, hoping to review it after finishing the game - sadly Windows took a screenshot of my desktop, not the game.
You've reminded me of why I make games. And I have a game to make - it'll take a million lines of code, and I'll write them one at a time. It'll be ugly and imperfect and take a very long time - but I feel the effort is worthwhile.
Thank you.
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