Yesterday, while writing about The Stanley Parable, I kind of did a small lie-by-omission type thing. I left out that I’d just recently played through Davey Wreden’s other game, The Beginner’s Guide, and that playing that game gave me a lot to think about in regards to the first game. I’ll be straight with you: this post is going to contain “spoilers” for The Beginner’s Guide, but that’s also a bit of a weird game, so the word “spoilers” feels like it implies more than it does. After all, while undeniably a game, The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t really have the sort of narrative play or inversion that The Stanley Parable did. It’s basically just a straight-forward story that you’re walking your way through a bit at a time. Except it’s not really straight-forward. There’s a bit of a twist to the story you’re being told. Your first hints of it arrive pretty early on. There’s only a scattered few, but with the rise of social media discourse being what it has been, I feel like modern audiences are maybe a bit more keyed into what’s going on underneath the narrator’s story. The rest, though, arrive in a torrent later on and fully reveal the twist if you haven’t figured it out already. It’s an interesting story to hear through the layers, from hearing what the in-game “Davey Wreden” says to you, to reading what the object of the “Davey Wreden’s” parasocial affection is writing to “Davey,” to thinking about what all of this might have meant to the out-of-game Davey Wreden, to finally thinking about what it means to me as a person who played Davey’s games and really likes to dig into this stuff with a critical and analytical lens.
To unveil the spoilers completely, the in-game “Davey Wreden” has developed an unhealthy, toxic, and clearly parasocial relationship with a game developer whose work he claims to admire. The premise of the game is that “Davey” has put together a collection of this developer’s games to show off to other people so this developer can get the acclaim that “Davey” says he deserves (and, as “Davey” eventually admits, so “Davey” can feel special). He shows of a wide variety of games, telling you, the player, all about the growth of this developer, the themes he slowly works into his games, and how his games evolve from little whatevers to something “Davey” claims is incredibly meaningful. What becomes clear to the player is that this developer is creating less and less, doing sometimes more, sometimes less work but always seeming to head away from exploration and joy to feelings of doom and being trapped. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, to see the game’s narrator describing one thing while another is playing out in front of you. Even if “Davey” often comments on it as well, you get an incredibly one-sided sense of their relationship, further complicated by how often “Davey” not only seems to take issue with the other developer’s game but hacks it to change how it plays so that he can show you, the player, “the heart of the game” that this other person made, often in ways that substantially change the way a player could even possibly interact with the game.
After playing The Stanley Parable, I came into this game looking for corners to cut, ways to mess with the narrator, and another experience of finding myself in a strange narrative subversion that creates a conversation between player and game the way Wreden’s first work did. Instead, I found an exploration of the assumption that you can know someone through their creative expression. As someone who studied literature in college, I can see how a lot of people fall into that particular trap, to say nothing of being a person that exists on the internet in a space tangential to multiple fandoms (and only ever tangentially for this very reason among others). After all, even if you’ve been trained to analyze literature in an effort to understand what someone a thousand years ago was saying about their society, you don’t actually know what the person was like. At best, you know what they thought about one specific thing and even that is often a dangerous trap that requires a great deal of citing other sources in order to substantiate it enough that anyone will take your critical analysis seriously. Someone’s creative output is a window into them, sure, but one that has been specifically created and aligned in just such a way. We might be able to use that window to see something they never intended us to see if they weren’t particularly careful, but generally we are viewing something specifically manufactured for us to view it. We are not viewing a person, we’ve viewing a person’s expression. To believe anything else is a recipe for disaster, which we’ve seen play out so many times on the internet in the last decade that I’d need to link every single letter of this post to a different example if I wanted to even cover a small portion of the stark examples I can think of off the top of my head (I mean, look at the whole Neil Gaiman debacle if you actually want an example: a lot of people reacted poorly to the credible allegations against him, often because they felt like the person they’d built in their heads based on the things they’d read couldn’t be the person accused of such heinous sexual assault).
Beyond that message, I still think it’s an interesting exploration of an unreliable narrator in a style of narrative that hasn’t really been that heavily explored. Most of the time, in video games, your interactions with the world and the plot are to taken at face value. Twists will often come up in a way that causes the way you saw things to be changed in the light of some new information, but a lot of the time they will just reveal something outside of your character’s view that changes what it seemed like you were doing. This game’s twist doesn’t change what you’ve been doing, but it does challenge the source of truth in this game and casts doubt on your experiences, some of which the narrator will eventually admit to and some he won’t. You can’t really do that in a book since, on some level, the narrator is your portal into the world and while unreliable narrators are absolutely a thing in books and movies, they don’t require your participation. An unreliable narrator in a video game does. Then, by participating (since the only way to not participate in the narrator’s subversion of the truth is to quit the game), you are buying into the world they’re creating, even if you’re finding implications that they aren’t a source of truth you can rely on. Which makes this game another interesting narrative exploration from Wreden but this time with a clear message about the distance between creator and consumer, even if there’s possibly more to read into this story than that. It is tempting to read a degree of autobiographical storytelling in this game, to see Wreden as the creator of the games in The Beginner’s Guide and “Davey” as so many of the fans of his first smash-hit game, but that’s not entirely a conclusion we can draw. We can definitely say that Wreden was thinking about this topic and comes down on the “you can’t know an artist through their work alone” side of things, but anything beyond that is going to carry a heavy slice of our own interpretation.
Anyway, I think this game was a lot of fun. It gave me a lot to think about as I played it and then for the rest of the day afterwards. I had a great time with it and would recommend it to anyone who wants something that’s more a philosophical exploration of an idea than a classic video game, but also to anyone who wants to see what kind of stuff can be done with narratives and storytelling in the video game format when you unshackle yourself from what is supposedly “proper” narrative structure and formatting in video games. After all, we saw changes in narratives as storytelling changed into writing, as radio and movies became a thing, as TV shows grew in popularity and scope, and now we’re starting to see one in video games as people begin to push at the bounds of what can be done with a story now that player interaction with it is a requirement of the format as a whole (and that the interactions a player has with the story are almost always dictated by the game’s designers and developers). I will say that this won’t take a lot of your time, if you’re worried about that. I went through it in about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, so it shouldn’t take you much longer than that. I would recommend playing through it all in one sitting, though. It’s worth your full attention and consideration.