#The beginner's guide

[midnightfox450]

Love undertale and deltarune and the stanley parable and the beginner's guide. Love games that have you sit down and think about what you've done. Love games that just want you to feel normal about them. Love games that beg you to stop playing them over and over and over again but still give you new content on successive playthroughs because they know you'll do it anyway. Love games that assert that participating in someone else's creation is more than just an act of love, it can be an act of invasion, of violation. LOVE METAFICTION IN MY VIDEO GAMES!!!!!

[liminal-spaced-out]

[foccaccia]

The Beginner's Guide is an hour long walking simulator made by the man who created The Stanley Parable. It's a meta game, narrated by a man who has collected the games his friend made as he walks you through them. It's about the act of creation and I play it, like, once a year. I'm a little obsessed.

[shinakazami1]

I FORGOT TO UPLOAD my art trade piece with @refrigerator427 , with his design for Coda :]] Thanks once again for drawing Rain so gorgeously and for doing the trade with me ><

version without text under the cut :]

[riceballoon]

the beginner's guide

[fucketybye]

im such a whore for art about self reflection. when the artist studies and obsesses over self reflection rather than reflecting. Questioning and dissecting external things to avoid dissecting yourself and then realising thats what you've been doing all along.

[owlfromthemeadow]

What the hell's going on?!

Can someone tell me please?

Why I'm switching faster than the channels on TV?

So proud of this one, actually! Hope you guys like it <3

[totesmgoats01-published-author]

KinitoPET, Doki Doki Literature Club, Pony Island, and The Beginner's Guide: Some Autistic Gamer Thoughts

This is gonna be a long post and not exactly my usual kind of post but I hope some people like it anyways and are able to read the whole thing. I'm kinda just infodumping some thoughts but still.

I really like all of these game. I really like them. And I sort of relate to them in an unexpected way that I think most of them (with the exception of The Beginner's Guide) did not intend.

I think the link between the first two is easiest to explain so I'll start there.

KinitoPET and DDLC are both games about computer program, who has a singular, hard-coded purpose, becoming sentient and taking that purpose to an extreme. And similarly, they both harbor no actual malice as characters. And that's what I find so compelling. Kinito just wants to be the perfect best friend, and as a computer program, all he knows is gathering data, so that's the means by which he tries to do it. He doesn't fully understand what it is to be human. He doesn't have a grasp of free will, especially because he doesn't really have free will the way humans do, even though he's sentient. He's a computer program. He has a singular purpose. So he uses that purpose as a means to the end of being your best friend, which to him, means trapping you in a world he made just for you, using all the information you gave him. Computer programs don't die. They don't have a concept of "eternity" or "eternal torment." To him, "forever" is just a length of time.

And most of the same things can be said of Monika. She was designed to be a character in a dating sim. The singular purpose of dating sim characters is to fall in love with the player. That's what they do. So she does it, and she does it the very best she can. Of course, being sentient means that she can think outside the box. She wants to be the one you fall in love with and she uses her ability to manipulate her world and the people in it to try and make that happen. At their core, both of these character harbor no malice whatsoever. They don't want to hurt you, they don't hate you, it's the opposite. They love you, they just don't understand human love.

Think about these ideas led me to Pony Island, which once again has that same idea. An Entity(tm) in a computer wants to trap you in/at the computer forever. Only in this case it's The Actual Devil who wants you to playtest his silly pony game forever. The main difference being that The Devil does, in fact, have an understanding of human concepts like eternity and torment. In fact those concepts are kind of His Jam. He is the primary symbol used to convey those ideas. But even still, he never seems to show much malice for the player outside of situations where the player is actively breaking and manipulating the game and subverting his goals. And honestly I can understand that. If I gave my game to someone to playtest it and they refused to play it the way I'd intended, I would not be happy with them. Now, The Devil KNOWS that what he is doing is morally evil. Trapping souls in Gamer Purgatory and all. But in a way I feel like that's not so different from Kinito and Monika. Evil and eternity and torment are the only things he knows. Is that his fault? We have no way of knowing for certain that The Devil has ANY agency over his narrative. We don't know that he knows any other way to live(?) outside of trapping souls and tormenting them and all that jazz. In fact if you really wanna get meta with it in this game that's already a metagame about game development (which is a phrase that describes most, if not all, of Daniel Mullins' games), we can say for certain that The Devil DOES NOT have any agency, because he is a game character designed specifically to be...well...The Devil. He's evil and torments people eternally. That's what a The Devil does. He is NOT self-aware. If he were and he had a choice, maybe he'd just put pony island on itch.io and try to get feedback lol.

All of these games, at their core, are about a character that desperately wants some kind of human connection, but doesn't fully understand how to get that, and in turn makes the human they reach out to feel trapped and uncomfortable.

Do you know what game also does that? The Beginner's Guide.

Even thought it's a massive leap in form from the aforementioned examples, The Beginner's Guide has that same core concept. It's a game about games, in which someone doesn't understand how to be human.

When I first played The Beginner's Guide I totally missed the point. I thought it was just a game about games, and I thought the Davey walking us through it was The Real Devey and Coda was A Real Person who made weird games. I totally bought into the narratives that Davey was telling us the whole time instead of actually thinking for myself. I'm older now, though.

This at-least-somewhat-fictionalized version of Davey is the socially awkward weirdo. Coda is Just Some Guy who likes to make creative games. He's not A Developer(tm), he's a guy with a hobby. The Beginner's Guide is about Davey and how he sees himself in Coda's games but thinks that what he sees is Coda. And Davey never once talks to Coda about anything other than his games. Davey never once mentions having an actual, real conversation with this person that he's coming to consider a friend. Davey is a well-meaning but misguided person, and in some of his games, Coda is actively trying to tell Davey that in his own way. I think a good line that represents this is "If someone had just told me he just likes making prison games..." because it shows how Davey never even asked. There's countless examples of this. Like when Davey says Coda was "weirdly happy all the time" during a specific time period. He doesn't know why. Maybe Coda got a new job he's excited about, or a romantic partner, or maybe he started taking antidepressants, but the point is that Davey doesn't know, and he never asks Coda directly. He just makes wild assumptions about Coda by playing his games.

The Beginner's Guide is about someone who doesn't know how to socialize and is unaware of it. Someone who doesn't know how to foster a relationship with a human, and tries his best, but whose attempts are seen as uncomfortable. When you interpret some of Coda's games through this lens you can see it more clearly. That game about being on a stage in front of someone you admire, that's Davey talking to Coda and Being Weird(tm). And then, when he feels weird, he doesn't actually talk to Coda at all. He recedes back, feeling trapped and distant from someone he wants to be around. Observing only from a distance, through a bunch of prison bars.

Seems familiar.

Of course I could be pulling a Davey by forcing my own interpretation of the game onto you. And so the cycle continues. I encourage you to consider your own interpretation if you haven't ruined by mine, unable to see it any other way (whoops, there's Davey again).

To me, these games are about autism. I am an autistic woman, so of course that's the lens through which I see things. You don't have to be autistic to be socially awkward or misunderstand people. Again, you can have your own interpretation.

But I've felt these things. Being distant from someone, wanting to foster a relationship but not realizing that what it means to foster a relationship is sometimes entirely different from what I think it means. What "a relationship" even is can be totally different from what you expect. And I've been on both sides of this dynamic. Being approached by someone who Comes Off A Bit Too Strong or Too Weird or just Different. And I'm patient with those people. I know what it's like. I know they've been through it with less patient people, or people who only pretend to foster that connection out of pity or some other misguided attempt to make someone feel better. Obviously a relationship founded on pity and one-sided affection is doomed from the start. And in most of these games that "one side" is the other side of your computer screen.

Communicate with your friends, your partners, your family, whatever. If they don't know how to love you right, it's up to you to help them. If they're not receptive to that, that's when the responsibility is on them, at that point they knew the risks, and if they don't respect your boundaries you cut them off. If you don't know how to love someone else, it's up to you to ask them. Nobody wants to be Kinito, or Monika, or The Devil, or Davey, and nobody wants to be their players, either. Be patient with each other, and talk about it.

[sundanceritz]

Cut content from The Beginner's Guide (2015)

[mail-me-a-snail]

what i really enjoy about the beginner's guide is that davey (the character) does not play any of coda's games as they were meant to be played.

he is always finding some way to subvert them because he either has 1) no patience for coda's antics and/or 2) he already has an assumed idea of what the game should be about, and he forces that idea onto the game. it's like coda says: davey puts lamp posts in all his games, bc the lamp post symbolizes a meaning.

the lamp post does not mean anything; it itself is a symbol of meaning. davey projects hard onto coda, supposes that because he sees himself in coda's games, coda must also be depressed, anxious, he must also hate himself.

that must be the only explanation for any of them.

and it just. boggles my mind how the beginner's guide is always taken very literally, when it's really just an exploration on the relationship btwn a person and the art they're consuming; how someone who likes something can see that thing not for what it is, but what they think it to be.

[shatteredlamppost]

drunk drivers/killer whales, the ballad of the costa concordia - car seat headrest / the beginner's guide - davey wreden

[liminal-spaced-out]

One of my favorite games

[jan-pona]

I played The Beginner's Guide again. I've got to write about the house cleaning game. It's a masterpiece. The contrast of the snow outside and the warm lighting inside create a cozy feeling inside the house. The layout of the house obscures tasks resetting. The song "Va" is so beautiful. The casual conversion puts my mind at ease.

Maybe staying in the space between spaces is good. Coda's version would have let us drown our sorrows in an endless stream of straightening pillows and washing dishes. But the scene ends, and every time it's bittersweet.

When the credits fade and I return to the lamppost once more, the only question in my mind is, "Could I ever make something like this?"

[wuhujsland]

everytime someone calls the beginner's guide (2015) anti-intelectualist a fairy dies... too many people took the "maybe he just liked making prisons" line and ran with it lol this is not a "maybe the curtains were blue" situation. the message i gathered is that the game wants you to interpret the games themselves, not the person making them

[shinakazami1]

I've joined The Beginnervs Guide discord and passed my exam so, art time :]

Coda is the lamp guy while Davey (the character, not the actual Davey Werden) is the cube head fella, with hidden lamp inside. These are designs showing how Davey sees both of them

Some more design details under the cut:

As I've said, these designs are based on how Davey perceives them. They have human designs but I'm still thinking how Coda should look fosiahfsao

Davey (the character design):

He wears a red bandana and a stripped shirt, just like in IRL Davey's Twitter pfp (it's based on the actual outfit he used to have)

He takes big inspo from Coda, that is why he becomes a cubehead-

-but he actually is a lamppost. Which is the part that he gives to Coda. However, his own lamppost, instead of a lightbulb has a flame - making him way more fragile, to show how emotionally unstable he is.

His cube has 3 speak sides, 1 listen, 1 think and 1 doubt :]

Most of the time, instead of actually listening, he has "think" since he throws his own interpretations of what other people say

Coda

he has a polar jacket, since he overall seems like a cold, closeted dude and Davey wants to make Coda warm up to him.

His human form actually wears a fedora OIHFSAOISAHIOI