The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner's Guide

How does a story say something? And when we say "this story says something," what exactly do we mean? And, when it happens, how do we recognize that the story says something? These are the questions I found myself pondering in the weeks after I played The Beginner's Guide, a strange metatextual juggernaut of an indie game from the creator of The Stanley Parable. It is a project that does not break the fourth wall but is apparently built without it. I'll show you what I mean. Davey: Hello. My name is Davey Wreden. I wrote The Stanley Parable. Thank you very much for playing The Beginner's Guide.

Let's look at the games created by a friend of mine named Coda. Innuendo Studios: Our narrator, Davey, flat out tells us how the game should be interpreted, which is to say, it's not. This is a walking tour of a series of little art games by his friend Coda's, and Davey will tell us as we play what he thinks they mean. The only interpretation that needs to be done must be done by Davey. and what he wants to say, he means clearly. Davey: I want us to look beyond the games themselves. I want to know who this human being really is.

And that's exactly what we're going to do here. Innuendo Studios: Now, the core of Davey's conceit is that to fully understand the Coda games you need Davey. These games were created by Coda for his own enjoyment, not for public consumption, so to really "get" them requires both the perspective of the player and the designer. During the game, Davey makes walls transparent to reveal architecture that is built but that the player would normally never see, and allows the player to enter rooms that he would not normally have access to. Other times, Davey takes you to the end of a maze or opens a door that shouldn't be opened for an hour, because, in his opinion, you can get the idea "I'm supposed to wait" or "there's a maze." . "without experiencing the tedium of those things.

These jumps and elisions are things that Coda himself might do while testing the games. What the player comes to understand in the end is that Davey has, in fact, been making modifications much more Not only is he making the games playable or more understandable, but, from his perspective, he is making them more coherent and those alterations that he did not admit to us. For example, he has been placing these optimistic streetlights at the end of the levels. because he feels like they SHOULD be there. His thinking is that he understands what Coda intended to do and is making the games "more themselves." But that means making a lot of assumptions about what Coda meant and what Coda wants. discovers that Davey has been sharing altered versions of his games with other people, creates one last game just for Davey, and then abandons game design entirely And that last game can't be played without Davey's meddling;

It has an invisible maze, a combination that you must brute force, and a door that never opens unless you alter the game code. And after all that, Davey, who has completely failed Coda's test, is faced with exactly what he has been looking for; a message from the game creator. Davey: I'm the reason you stopped making games, right? It's because of what I did. I poisoned him for you. Innuendo Studios: What Davey has done is turned Coda into a symbol of a brilliant but tortured

artist

, and Coda is no longer interested in being a symbol. Davey has been treating the occasional darker themes in the Coda games as a "problem" that he needs to "fix," and Davey isn't really analyzing these games to better understand Coda, but for his own gratification.

Analyzing Coda games and explaining them to other people makes Davey feel creative in a way that his own work doesn't; in a way he imagines Coda feels all the time. Davey: I was showing your work though. It was... I felt GOOD about myself. Finally, for a moment, while I had that, I liked it. Innuendo Studios: Now, I'm not here just to describe the Beginner's Guide to you, I have a little more purpose than that, but the Beginner's Guide is central to what we're here to discuss, and let's continue to clarify. a few things. This video, what you're watching right now, is based on two assumptions: The first assumption is that everything I just told you about The Beginner's Guide is not real.

There is actually no game designer named Coda, and Davey didn't actually steal the games from him or sell them on Steam. Narrator Davey is a fictional character created by the real-life Davey Wreden, and you know what, for convenience. We are going to delimit between them. We'll call the fictional narrator Davey The Narrator and the flesh-and-blood game designer Davey Prime. The second assumption is that at the end of the game the player must realize that none of that is true. That understanding is part of the text; There is still a fourth wall. So in case you thought a game couldn't get more meta than The Stanley Parable, this one is SUPER META.

In much of the critical discussion surrounding The Beginner's Guide, Coda is a sticking point, because even if people agree that it's not real (and not everyone does), they often start asking, "Is it real?" OK, but to what extent is it not real?" People are starting to wonder if this is a fictional account of something that really happened. In the wake of the unexpected success of The Stanley Parable, Davey Prime published a fairly eloquent blog about depression and self-doubt, sentiments that were echoed very directly in the dialogue of Davey The Narrator. So around that time Davey Prime developed an unhealthy relationship with another game designer, whose creativity he envied?

Did he betray his trust? And did he channel that experience into his next game? And, if so, who were they? But at the end of the day the only thing really at stake in that line of inquiry is "what kind of asshole Davey Prime is or isn't?" The other prevailing theory is that "Coda" is simply Davey Prime talking to his younger self and these "debates" about authenticity tend to cloud any discussion about, if we just accept that the game is fiction and move on, what the The game has to say. And that may be because what the Beginner's Guide is trying to say is so fucking slippery.

Because the game is so meta, it's SUPER META! Which made me wonder every time I tried to engage how meta my engagement should be. For example, Davey The Narrator clearly suffers from imposter syndrome. The game is from his perspective, so my reflex is to identify with that anxiety. But at the end of the game, it not only becomes clear that he has done something really bad, but that he is a fictional character. So my next question is: "Does Davey Prime want me to question the fact that he reflexively identifies with me as a shitty person as long as I have a pain that I recognize and control my point of view?" and then, OR: "Does Davey Prime want me to question the fact that I asked myself that question and then projected that intention onto him?" and then OR: "Does Davey Prime want me to question the fact that I asked myself THAT question and then projected THAT intention onto him?" and so on.

We knew Davey The Narrator's intentions, but we don't know Davey Prime's. Anything the game might say can also be a meditation on the fact that you think the game is saying that. So is this a story where conversations about how real the content isn't real have largely overtaken any meaningful discussion about what it actually has to say? Or is it one with so many layers of metatextuality and ironic distancing that it could be said to be about nothing but itself? Well, I think at the end of the day the game has at least one concrete thing to say, but before we can talk about it we need a framework to talk about it and build that framework (and maybe you saw this coming) We'll have to become goal.

WAY meta. Let's talk about the fundamental nature of storytelling. But before that we're going to talk about the fundamental nature of authorship, and before that we're going to talk about the fundamental nature of language. Also, for some reason we're going to spoil the ending of The Sopranos, so don't say I didn't warn you SUPER META. Let us begin. Let's start with a word. Like "tree." Chances are if I say the word tree, you know what I'm talking about. Let's say I want to talk to you about a specific tree, like, for example, the one in the front yard of the house I grew up in.

What can I tell you about it? Well, I can tell you it was big. When I was a child, my arm span could only cover about a quarter of the trunk, and the county required us to prune it at least once because the branches were touching power lines. I can tell you what the bark felt like when you touched it; Did it have this kind of ribbed pattern, almost like tire tracks? But it was rougher and felt almost brittle, like if you ran your palm through it you'd almost expect the bark to come off in clumps like dirt.

I can tell you about the leaves, how they were a darker green than most other trees. in the area, almost round but with a sharp point at the end; how they were soft and waxy on top but collected dust on the bottom that he compulsively wiped away with his thumb. What I can't do is take my experience of this tree and transmit it telepathically to your brain, so I'm using language. I am breaking that experience down into its constituent elements (colors, textures, images, sensations), translating them into words, and giving you the words, so that you can translate them into your own set of sensations and try to piece together what it is. in my head.

Now, for this to work, a certain similarity between us is required. Not only that you, you know, speak English and your vocabulary is such that you understand most of the words that I'm using, but also that you have common experiences; that you know what a dark green color looks like, what tire tracks feel like, how far off the ground power lines are. And since the lived experience you associate with those words will never be identical to mine, math won't give you exactly the same thing it gave me. The reality is that the tree in your head will be different from mine, and since you also cannot telepathically transmit your tree to my head so that I can compare it with mine, we can know that they are different. but we really don't know /how/.

Now imagine that instead of talking about my experience with a tree, I'm talking about much more subjective experiences, like pain, doubt, or love, and you'll see what I mean. Inside each brain there are thoughts in a native language spoken by a single person, and to speak and be heard is to move from a private language to a shared code and then to another private language. The translation is always imperfect. The fact that human beings can communicate is something amazing. I mean, depending on how evocative you are with the language, I can get you pretty close, but ultimately, communication always settles for "good enough." A big takeaway here is that what you have in your head is yours, or is it something of ours?

I provided the blueprint, you supplied the materials, so in a sense we did it together, but since we built it in your head and I'll never be able to see it, you're the one who keeps it. The point here is that all communication is collaborative. Even when I'm the only one speaking, together we find meaning. In his book "About Writing," author and essayist Samuel R. Delany describes the act of reading a story this way: "As much as we, as readers, get lost in a novel or story, fiction itself It is an experience in the order of memory, not in the order of actual occurrence.

It seems that the writer is telling you a story, but what he is really doing is using words to evoke a series of micro-memories of your own experience that are mixed together, join together and connect in your mind in an order that the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. That false memory is what a story is when our conversation is a fantastic story read. from the page or screen of your Kindle, rather than an anecdote casually shared with a friend, there are several important differences between them: A: you and I generally know that what I say is not true and B: that I am no longer there; in the room.

We are not two normal people talking, I am an author and you are... the audience. This change changes our responsibilities to each other. All meaning is (still) collaborative, but when the author is not physically present, or when he is present but cannot "leave character" as in theater, performing arts, or public readings, then the creation of that meaning has a different "division of labor." If a dialogue is part interpretation and part conversation, a book is all interpretation. You can't ask me what I mean. All the information you will get is in the book or occasional supplementary material.

So your role is a little more like that of a detective; you take what you know from the text, or what you think you know, and essentially construct a theory of meaning: if this means this, and this means this, then this... probably means this? The text may seem clear to you,confusing or self-contradictory, but in any case you extract all the meaning you can from it and... that's it. That's as true as anything you can find. What goes on in your head always belongs to you, but doubly so in the case of fiction. For example, if someone says "I think Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy" and someone says "I think not," there is an objective truth to the matter.

One of these people is necessarily wrong. But if someone says "I think Tony dies at the end of The Sopranos" and someone else says "I think he lives," there is no objective truth. What the end of The Sopranos means to you isn't up to anyone else because Tony Soprano isn't real. What does not happen explicitly within the text cannot be proven, only theorized. I mean, okay, if someone says "I think Tony reveals his true nature and takes on the role of the new Dalai Lama," that's... un. ...unsound theory, but just because some theories are bullshit doesn't mean any of them are correct, there are just different subjective degrees to which they are meaningful, so if much of the "work" of creating meaning falls on over you.

As an audience member, how much does the author matter? For example, if David Chase (and I would never actually do this) comes out and says "Tony completely dies at the end of The Sopranos," what are you supposed to do? With that information you just solved the Tony Soprano case? On the one hand, knowing the writer's intentions is certainly great information for his theory, and maybe that will resolve some of the confusing parts, but on the other hand, Screw this guy! He wasn't even there! If I didn't want you to theorize, I would have put what happened to Tony on the screen.

He can't step in now and decide what it all means. Plus, people go back and add to finished stories all the time. If David Chase starts thinking tomorrow "oh, um, what if Tony didn't die and moved to another city and had a different name?" or "What if I started writing a new backstory for him? Oh, that's interesting." so he can do that. He gets to change the end of it. It is fiction, it is malleable. That's why we get to the "Is Tony dead?" debate. "Is Deckard a replicant?" "Is Jar-Jar a Sith Lord?" The point is, when we say "what it means to you isn't up to anyone else," in many ways that includes the author.

Reading a book is not a dialogue. With rare exceptions, the author doesn't even know you exist. By design, you must do your performance without them. But! But... we cannot say that an author is totally irrelevant either. For example, if someone handed you a page from Hamlet written purely by chance by a chimpanzee at a typewriter, would you try to interpret it the same way you would? The same page written by Shakespeare? If you knew it was an animal that randomly hits keys, would you wonder what it means besides reflecting on its sheer statistical improbability? Look, we try to give meaning to something when we know it has meaning.

The meaning of Hamlet may no longer belong to Shakespeare, but it is Shakespeare's existence that provokes the effort of interpretation. You see, the meaning of a work is an answer to the question "why does this exist?" If someone achieved it they had to have a reason; anything from “I wanted to change the world” to “I wanted to make money” to “I was bored.” Not all of those are great answers, but they are answers. An interpretation is not so much about learning the "correct" answers as it is about reflecting on which answers might be correct. When people gather around a campfire to tell scary stories, but before the story begins, everyone is just one person.

But once the story begins, one person becomes the narrator and everyone else becomes the audience, and if the narrator is good, then being the audience is easy. Perhaps you are familiar with the term “suspension of disbelief”? When the narrator tells the story, he pretends it is true, and while the audience listens, he pretends to believe it; and we often (though not always) consider a story well told if we can effectively suspend our disbelief: if it is told in such a way that it is easy to pretend it is real. Of course, you never actually believe the story, the roles of narrator and audience are just functions of the text.

In some sort of unacknowledged metatextual layer, they are characters in the story: the people who believe. Which makes us all, sitting around the campfire, in a sense, actors. The point I'm getting at here is that conversation we've been talking about? The one that gets super complicated when it's a story instead of a simple anecdote told face to face? In reality, the stories are even more complicated because they are not conversations between two real people, they are conversations between two fictional people who serve as representatives of real people. A story may be the product of one person or many individuals, but we, as readers, hear the story told with a "voice" of the author.

We could say that the voice is the voice of the narrator (and when I say narrator I am not referring to the voice-over narration in the theatrical production of Blade Runner or anything similar, I am referring to the mode of expression that has been considered by the author to be the "correct way" to tell this story). And that voice not only tells the story, it tells you how to listen. This is easier to detect when done wrong. For example, think about a horror movie where something happens that you realize was /supposed/ to make you jump... but it doesn't.

Or a comedy where you can say that a joke was /supposed/ to make you laugh-- Woman in clip: Oh my God, is that a hanging nail? Innuendo Studios: --but it's not like that; where you can say that a plot point shouldn't seem contrived-- Man in clip: I think I know what's causing this Man in close-up: Do you know? first man again: It's the plants! innuendo Studios: --but he really does. A poor narrator is an actor who gets his lines wrong or, if you prefer, a good narrator is a dancer who knows how to lead. "So, wait," I hear you ask, "I thought you said a minute ago that a story is a conversation between a person and a text message.

Now you're saying it's between these two fake people? Which one is it?" Well... a little bit of both. When we say that the reader has to construct the meaning for themselves, it is really about the entire meaning: the images, the themes, the symbolism, the sights, the sounds, the smells, and also the narrator and the audience. Person A may have put it all there, but person B still has to build it and no two readers will do it the same way. You may hear voices from similar authors, but they won't be exactly the same because the people listening to them are different people.

Surely you and a friend have read the same book and come away thinking profoundly different things about the author. People have different experiences and different tastes, so they construct different meanings, which means they assume different narrators as the voice behind the story and assume the roles of different audiences. Comparing your reading of the material to friends or critics is often a game of asking "so... who did this make you?" Well, putting it all together, this is how you tell a story: a person (we'll call them the author) has something on their mind that they want to express.

They break that something down into its constituent elements that can then be communicated and they translate those elements into a language. Maybe it's the language of the images, the game mechanics, or the camera angles; We will use the example of a book and we will use words. Then the words go into the book and the book spreads. Someone else (we'll call them the reader) reads the book and turns the words into their own set of feelings, images and sensations, and tries to put it all together. As they do so (and make sense of it) they imagine why the author would have put these words in This order, what they would have wanted to say with this story.

That imagined author, whom we call "the narrator." Then, the reader wonders how the imagined author would want them to react. meaning of the work from the imagined conversation between these two people. Skillfully, and hopefully, the narrator comes at least close to the voice the author intended to assume and the audience is someone the reader feels comfortable with. That's our whole conversation. It's lovely, isn't it? All of this is done so thoughtfully that we often don't even realize we're doing it. The intended meaning and interpretation are simply the inevitable side effects. often (let's be clear) wonderfully enriching of such a complex mode of communication.

Now, what is it that I think the Beginner's Guide has to say specifically? "Do not confuse the narrator with the author." Taking it from the top: The Beginner's Guide begins with a literal narrator telling us what, if we didn't know it at the beginning, it's pretty easy to verify that the game is the product of an independent developer named Davey Wreden, who created The Stanley. Parable. The voice we hear is also that of Davey Wreden, who made The Stanley Parable, he even gives us a legitimate email address. Davey: You can email me at

davey

wreden

@gmail.com Innuendo Studios: This invites us to proceed assuming that the author and the narrator are one and the same.

There is still no reason to assume otherwise. Davey The Narrator, from the beginning, makes it clear that he too accepts this premise, that the author and the narrator are the same person. This is the basis of his analysis. Davey: This is what I like about all the Coda games. I mean, it's not that they are all fascinating as games, but that they will all give us access to their creator. Innuendo Studios: And for the first few games, even if you use his readings to write a Coda narrative, they're pretty defensible reads. But as he progresses, it seems more and more that his narrative begins to impose itself on the readings, and not the other way around.

Coda has several prison games, which Davey The Narrator interprets as evidence that Coda feels stuck in a creative rut. For Davey The Narrator, a prison can only be a trap that stops progress, because that fits with his nascent narrative of Coda's restless need to move forward and seek validation. That's what he sees. He doesn't think that, perhaps, for Coda, a prison is a quiet contemplative space to be alone with his thoughts; something he might have thought of if he hadn't skipped the hour he was supposed to spend on one earlier. Similarly, there is a game where players emerge from a dark night into a warmly lit house to happily attend to menial tasks.

Then the sequence ends abruptly and the players have no choice but to move towards the exit, because, as Davey the Storyteller tells us, Davey: You can't stay in the dark space for long, you just can't, you have to. . to keep moving. That's how you stay alive. Innuendo Studios: But it turns out this is another of Davey's mods. As far as Coda is concerned, you might as well have cleaned a nice house forever. Then the games become as Davey sees them. The way some readers ignore parts of the text to fit one of their favorite theories about the author is literalized here by changes to the game code.

Anything that doesn't fit is ignored. Most players will find this repeating three-dot pattern going unnoticed until the end, because Davey The Narrator can't figure out why it's there. His narrative about needing to be understood does not allow for an element that should not be understood, or that may not mean anything at all. To some extent, his assumption that the Coda games can tell us who Coda is is correct. Coda games can't help but reveal something about the person who created them. As the saying goes, “every painting is a self-portrait,” and likewise, every story is a memory.

But what Davey The Narrator doesn't and can't know for sure is WHAT the games reveal. He believes that Coda is unhappy and that showing his games to other people will solve the problem. Davey: I took them to people he knew and trusted, asked their opinion and the best thing is that they really loved their games. Can you see why I felt this was the right thing to do? Because that's what I always feel like I need: to be told that my work is good! That I'm good. When someone really connects with something I've done, when they see themselves purely in my work, nothing feels better.

And I have to give that same feeling to my friend! Innuendo Studios: Yes, for Davey The Narrator, games are about a restless need to move forward that collides with a desire for validation, fair enough. But is it just a coincidence that this narrative perfectly reflects his own insecurities? The end game is where that narrative becomes unsustainable. This game could not have been created by the Coda that Davey The Storyteller has imagined. Davey: I remember. It's June 2011. I'm playing this for the first time, and as I play I'm thinking, "I don't know this person. I have no idea who he is." Innuendo Studios: For players of The Beginner's Guide, this moment, in which WEWe realize that the voice we have been hearing throughout the game is not real, it is more nebulous.

For some, this happens near the end or shortly after finishing the game. Others assume the story could turn out to be fictional, and others are still unconvinced to this day that they are not the same person, the irony of which I hope is not lost on them. The game leaves us to realize what Davey The Narrator realizes: that the narrator is not a person, just a concept. The translation of thought to work and thought is, once again, always imperfect. We participate in the construction of meaning, so we never really know how much of what we see in the game comes from the author and how much comes from us.

I could venture to guess that, after the success of The Stanley Parable, Davey Prime had many thoughts and feelings about wanting validation through one's work, and those ideas may have contributed to his creation of The Beginner's Guide, but I have to stop me with that word "may." At this end of the conversation I have a secure footing, but this way? I know I don't know anything. I only have what I think. Any of my assumptions could turn out to be false, even the initial two. I'm extremely sure they won't, but they could. The important questions are simply: "Are the assumptions you make plausible?" and "Do they help you understand the text?" What the Beginner's Guide is NOT is a condemnation of readers hypothesizing about the author's intentions, but rather an analysis of the necessity and inherent limitations of doing so.

The Coda games, with their repeated motifs and developing art style, ASK to be read in the context of each other, just as The Beginner's Guide ASKS to be read in the context of Davey Wreden's real life. The Stanley Parable. and that shitty depressing blog. It is perfectly legitimate (in fact, sometimes downright critical) to use the author to read the book. But the road only goes in one direction. The book is not used to read the author. Beginning to impose your conception of the narrator on the flesh-and-blood human being who made the text not only diverts attention from the text itself and limits your ability to fully engage with it, but, the game suggests, it can be painful and psychologically painful. harmful to that human being.

That's what Davey The Narrator did to Coda, and it comes across as a betrayal. This is a common and, in my opinion, often frustrating way to criticize the media. I've seen people line up Quentin Tarantino's works to "prove" that he made Inglourious Basterds because he hates his own audience. I've seen people line up David O. Russell's works to "prove" that his tastes haven't changed, but that he is consciously choosing to make Oscar bait instead of his former authorial work. Never mind critics' intense fixation on the "secret motivations" behind any feminist or anti-racist media. And the only thing I can ask myself in these cases is: to what end?

Why is so much effort put into understanding a person the reviewer will never meet and whose motivations they will never truly know? If Tarantino hates his audience, he loves his audience, he wants to buy his audience a milkshake, isn't Inglourious Basterds the same 154 minutes? Davey The Narrator follows Coda games with the belief that building a narrative about the author is the primary purpose of consuming his work. The Beginner's Guide itself presents this opinion to reject it. The guy who does this turns out to be the villain. But all that aside, the truth is that, while he was playing it, The Beginner's Guide wasn't about storytelling or the nature of authorship.

For me, that's what it's about now, after some time thinking about it. After all, meaning is malleable. Laura Mandanas read the game as a feminist look at how creepy guys violate boundaries, Liz Ryerson read it as Davey Prime trying, and ultimately failing, to engage with his own privilege, and Robert Yang reflected on what might drive a person to create a game as a message to another person and wonders if he himself is Coda. There is no authoritative reading, mine certainly isn't, but even when these readings contradict each other, they can all be true, in their own way.

The only question is: "to what extent do we find them significant?" While I was playing it, The Beginner's Guide was, for me, about the disappointment of a relationship. Look, I once had a friendship like Davey The Narrator and Coda, at least before the whole horrible betrayal part. That friendship was very close and ended very badly. While I was playing it, it was a game about how sometimes

artist

s involve their creativity in their relationships and start needing other people to be creative in a very specific way in order to be happy; about how unintentionally cruel it can be to hold another person responsible for your sense of self-worth.

This was a long time ago, and what surprised me about The Beginner's Guide was that it brought a lot of those old feelings to light. For a game with so many layers of irony, I had a very emotional reaction. Many people did it. And I can't help but wonder: did real-life Davey Wreden's friendship fail like mine did? And... honestly... who cares? At that time, that's what the game meant to me. I can take it with me. That's mine. And in case it's not obvious, it gave me a lot to think about. Anyway, throughout this video I've been avoiding terminologies like "signifier" and "enoncè", but what I've been saying about "language", "authors" and "narrators" is "semiotics", "death of the author ". " and "enunciation theory." Most of what I have said applies not only to stories, but to any creative work that needs interpretation.

My discussion of critical theory is not entirely exhaustive, and perhaps not All the academics agree with the way I'm mixing these schools of thought, but if you want to read more about any of this, there are some references at the end of that part, and also check out De Saussure, Barthes, and Foucault. Casetti, which means... wait. If I had to end with a final thought, I guess it would be this: the next time you hear someone wonder out loud "Can games ever be art?" fact that I just spent half an hour making sense of all this.

See you in the funny papers.