Errant Signal - The Beginner's Guide (Spoilers)

after the success of the Stanley parable de Vere Eden began work on a follow-up game much like the previous title his next project would be a wandering game grounded by an omniscient narrator only this time the narrator would be played by reading himself as himself tracing the work of another developer from their early days as a counter-strike mapper to their bolder experiments and up through all of their latest stuff trying to find meaning and unifying elements across all the games as he goes but what I like is that even though he starts from the simple aesthetic of a desert town hidden scatters these colorful abstract blobs and impossible floating crates around the level and of course it destroys the illusion that this actually is a desert town and instead this level becomes a kind of calling card from its creator and if you've seen my episode on Brendan Chung's Blenda games you may see why this sort of freaked me out the first time through the beginner's guide but hints of chums design etho speak through even this early they're really simple gags but they highlight a willingness to toy with player expectations which is sort of a recurring theme in his games so it was sort of hard for me to not immediately compare myself to Davy but we're not here to talk about my insecurities we're here to talk about Davy readin's or not Davy readin's as the case may be look before we're going to be able to have any meaningful conversations about the beginner's guide I think we have to make sure the whole miss reading the text is a literal thing is dead and buried like I really can't believe I have to explain this but the beginner's guide is a work of fiction it is not real that doesn't necessarily mean that the experiences in Davy readin's life didn't inspire it or that flecks of truth aren't in there but the idea that a game developer named coda is a literal person who exists in the real world whose levels and small games are being sold by reading on Steam without his permission is not a real thing that has happened I mean think about it for one second there's no evidence that coda exists we don't get a name or an email address or a website or a Twitter handle or anything ignoring who would after a hugely successful indie game like the Stanley parable package someone else's work up without licensing it and sell it as their own for money on the biggest gaming platform in the world and act like they wouldn't get caught ignoring that who would possibly edit a series of levels to trigger audio files of themselves having a breakdown and then release that to the internet I mean is Oh is something wrong with me cuz I know that I did an awful thing and I'm doing it again right now like I'm showing people your work but I can't stop myself from doing it that's how badly I need to feel something again like I'm an addict Franklin said it was embarrassing that we couldn't cover this game more properly and I have to agree I just can't fathom how anyone has entertained the idea that this highly edited thematically and visually cohesive series of short levels are all made by a single amateur Anonymous developer and are being sold in violation of copyright against the author's wishes as stated in the work itself instead of maybe Occam's razor here Davey reiden simply made another in a line of wandering games that are interested in meta-narratives and how games work anyways Davey that is video game character Davey not human being Davey believes that by looking at code as games he's getting a window into who Koda is that's different than say looking for recurring themes and kotas works or watching coda develop their own particular aesthetic style over time know what's posited here is that Davey feels he can absolutely sense who Koda is as a person by playing their games and that's not subtextual it's stated outright in the opening of the game this is what I like about all of Coda's games I mean not that they're all fascinating as games but that they are all going to give us access to their Creator I want us to see past the games themselves I want to get to know who this human being really is and that's exactly what we're going to do here but it turns out that he can't he can't at all he fails utterly to discern meaning from Coda's games or to get a sense of who Koda is and how he thinks so to give them meaning Davey changes the games unbeknownst to the player one of my favorite subtle moments one of the earliest that villainesses devi though you don't really recognize it as such at the time is when he offers to skip the maze for you in the whisper machine level apparently this space station has a labyrinth on it I sure I don't know there's really no reason for it that I've ever been able to discern so in the interest of time I'm just gonna skip you on pastin note devi self-centered phrasing there there's no reason for it that I was able to discern so let's just skip it it's a maze that actually has a real solution and takes only maybe 60 seconds to solve but Devi doesn't want us to experience the game as it was built he wants to skip straight to the end to the big payoff lets him show off his insights and he does the selectively at it's constantly sometimes without our knowledge and all this is in service of Devi showing us just how well the games Express who Koda is and what their mental state is here's a friend whose work is exhibiting signs of struggle frustration anxiety depression even but the depressing thing is that once you've beaten the game it's clear Davies reads show so much more about Devi than Kota Davies desperate not to feel alone so he senses that he's getting into kotas headspace just by playing these games Devi needs things to make sense and have a meaningful structure so he adds the lighthouse to all of Coda's games as a sort of thematic anchor that didn't exist before Devi can't imagine being motivated by anything other than an extrinsic reward so he adds Wednesday it's or at least conclusions to several of kotas games but of course it can't last the music stops your companion is gone it's time to leave the door at the top of the hill is now open as well again you can't stay in the dark space for too long you just can't you have to keep moving it's how you stay alive and to be fair it's not like this is the first game that's needed some modification to be playable like the housecleaning game you know that one used to actually loop the cleaning chores and you just cleaned a house forever I had to cut it off so that you could exit the house and the game would actually end these are all things that Davey brings to the table things that were not there in the original titles his reads are all invalid not just because they're you know wrong but because they misrepresent the text by changing it and editing it but above all Davey needs validation from others he needs to be told what he's doing is right and that he's smart and that he's special so he shows off the modified bastardized edited games to the public and explains how deep they are for being windows to the soul against the wishes of coda and more than anything that's what makes Davey a villain of tragic sympathetic villain sure but a villain all the same I'm afraid that I did something really stupid because I don't like myself as for Kota well he's harder to discern all we know of him comes from an unreliable narrator and if we try to make any guesses about who coda is from the games he left us well we'd be making the same mistake as Davy we can probably safely assume that he made most of the games that we played and that he lived in were around Sacramento around 2010 really though Kota is more of an idea than a character he's a concept that acts as an ideal for Davey to fail to achieve and more than anything who is coda is left unanswered in part because Davey's the only person in the game who's met him and as it turned out Davey never really got to know coda as well as he thought indeed no one in this game or playing this game really knows coda which is part of the point it turns out you can't really know someone just by consuming their works I come away from doom feeling like I know at least a little bit about who these guys are for all it's pointless violence and a complete lack of a plot do is a personal statement about its developers by its developers I no comment the only other personality hint we get about coda is the way the game kinda uses women to codify the nature of coda and Davey's relationship it's kind of a flimsy motif to make any strong statements about but once you pick up on it it's also hard to entirely deny that there's something going on there gender is often kept ambiguous throughout the game but the player character is well in the killing machine and the game where you can only move backwards both of which feels somewhat autobiographical as one's short meditation on knowing where to go next in life and the other is about dealing with a creative Lowell and the stage game has the player going to a woman who has the players dream job of animal photography and hoping to glean some advice about how she does it but failing due to social awkwardness which resonates with the game overall I think then there's the sobbing woman abandoned in one of the cells from the jail game who interestingly is the only character without a block for a head that could be read as kotas Muse during this frustrating time of creative stagnation but after finishing the game it's obvious it could also have been placed there by Davie to sell us on the idea that this was more of the window dakotas soul that his depression was real then there's the tone of the later part of Davey's discussion about coda which is seeped in a sort of clinging guy who wouldn't quite get the picture tone because I haven't been able to find any other way to reach you I've tried everything and so a part of me has hoped that if I put this compilation out into the world and if I put my name on it that maybe enough people will play it so that it'll find its way to you so that I can tell you that I'm sorry I know I screwed up if I apologize to you truly and deeply will you start making games again coda states that Davy has infected his personal space and that coda can't give Davy what he wants but that Davy isn't kotas problem to solve to begin with again this is how you would talk about a facebook stalker and the result of all these little touches is to make the relationship feel coded as such none of this is to suggest that coda is literally a woman though given the unreliable nature of the narrator that's not impossible but it does present an interesting way to further frame the game's main relationship is poisonous Davy is a creeper who violates privacy and Trust after placing someone else on a pedestal and is obsessed with seeing them again just a thought I mean you know it's not not there anyways in making video game Davy the villain for attempting to read way too much personal stuff into games that actually had very little personal stuff in them I do think the beginner's guide is set itself up as something of a trap for critics see the beginner's guide came out nearly two years after Davy reading the real flesh-and-blood human being Davy reading wrote a blog post about suffering anxiety and depression after the success of the Stanley parable how he felt like he lost control over what the game meant and what he liked about it to his audience and how he searched desperately for external validation only to find that hunger ever-growing and it's really tempting to draw parallels to argue that this game is a direct result of those emotions and those anxieties that Khoda and videogame davy are really two parts of the same person the creative impossible to know Muse making things for their own sake and the post Stanley developer desperate for validation but to say something like that definitively is to make the same mistake that video game Davy did to claim that I see the person in the work to bring in my own lamp posts from outside the game and say there's signifiers of meaning well I'm not going to fall for that then I'm going to keep this video wholly within the text this is I suspect the reason reading is fine with people confusing coda for a real person and hasn't really done much of anything to clamp down on those debates it highlights his point if we can't distinguish between easily verifiable fiction and hard fact how can we possibly gleam any meaningful insight about an author's mental state from their work how many people thought real-world Davy was having an actual emotional breakdown right there on their computer at the end I want whatever that wholeness is that you just summoned out of nothing and you put in your work you were complete in some way that I never was I want to know how to doubt I wouldn't know how to be a good person I want to know how not to hate myself please I'm fading and how different from that would I be if I said this game was real-world Davy reiden processing the experiences after the Stanley parable we'd both be making broad proclamations about the mind of an author we've never met we have to be careful about projecting onto the game's creator a mental state that he or she might not have we have to recognize that this work may fulfill a completely different role for the real Davy than it does for the audience so if we avoid the temptation to extrapolate to the real Davy reading now there's all this metafiction surrounding the game in addition to the literal text and all of it is about how much meaning we as players can pull from a game about its creators if the Stanley parable was about the relationship between players and games and the conflict between them it's apparent that the beginner's guide is about the relationship between players and developers and the that exists there the act of creation and the act of experiencing a work are two completely different things based on different human drives and with completely different end goals Devi again video-game Devi wanted games to speak to him to have a point for the player to consume and Coda's games didn't and that's okay games don't have to be for the players plenty of programmers and hobbyist developers have half-finished prototypes laying around half explored ideas or experiments in an art style or just messing with an idea they fancy that they never intended to see the light of day and some people make game socially like at game jams and during Ludum dare a Ludum dare Ludum dare right no one seems to agree on the pronounciation anyway here's a really good example at Lost Levels a few years back there was a pair of friends who made a fashion game that pretended to be really stat heavy but actually you can only win if you chose the specific clothing items that the friends thought were the coolest the game was a symbol of their friendship a riddle only they can solve built as an in-joke that only they got to share not every game needs to be playable to be valid we'll never know why Koda built prisons not the least of which is because we have an unreliable narrator and can't count on anything we saw but but regardless we're pretty sure he did it often and presumably got something out of it all of that said for all the metatextual mind games an interesting formatic round the game does feel rather hostile to critics and pretty defensive of developers I feel like room 237 is a nice companion piece to the beginner's guide in that film fans of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining espouse various theories on what that film quote-unquote really means that say Kubrick was confessing to the faking of the moon landing or that the whole film was about the genocide of the Native Americans or that the whole thing was really an attempt by Kubrick to address the Holocaust both room 237 and the beginner's guide are about people putting forth reeds of a given work but the unspoken joke of both is that their subjects start from textual evidence but begin making ridiculous leaps and in the case of the beginner's guide outright falsifying the text to support their pre arrived at conclusions the idea in both of them is that oftentimes our attempts to figure out what a thing is says more about us than it does about the but we're both fail is in their choice to criticize the person rather than the mistake in logic bad reads aren't a jumping off point for better more supported reads there are things we use to mock or criticise the person suggesting them room 237 presents its subjects as quirky oddballs with conspiracy theory level reads on a single film it lets them hang themselves by making false statements or including audio of interviewees being interrupted by their children during this important analysis about the Holocaust meanwhile beginner's guide suggests its subject is villainous and willing to lie and to face the work to attain attention if fake Davey is sympathetic it's only in his desperation he's got some real personal problems to work on but he's hurt Koda and he's hurt the player by lying to them if it's a game about the relationship of the developer and the audience it's decidedly Pro developer and not so great on audiences or on critics like how am i as a critic supposed to respond to my job being described like this but when I took your work and I was showing it to people it actually felt it felt as though I were responsible for something important and valuable and the people who played them they treated me like I was important they really listened and cared about what I had to say even though I was showing your work it was I felt good about myself finally for a moment while I had that I liked myself especially since moments later he's having a breakdown because his entire ego was built on top of his ability to tell people how smart games are what kind of sad person would that be it feels like it's trying to distance itself from it's a very cold game the result is a game that uniformly feels cold and indifferent to the player yeah well that was a long time ago really at the end of the day I think there's only two ways to look at the beginner's guide there's the straightforward story of a man who simply wanted so badly for recognition that he destroyed a friend's work to feel better about himself before breaking down a warning for game developers about how your boundaries might not be respected and a parable for game critics about going too far and reading too deep a game that says any analysis of games is mostly self projection and standing on the shoulders of geniuses to make yourself feel better a game with the decidedly anti critic bent the trouble with that is I find that read super nihilistic but the alternative read is that this really is Davey Reed and wrestling with the success of the Stanley parable with letting go of complete control of his work to people who will put their own lampposts in wrestling with the fear that he can't keep making these games and that creative spark will run out wrestling with the idea that he's motivated only by the validation of others to keep him going but if I take that read then I'm no better than fake Davey and I've boiled a real flesh-and-blood person down to a 45-minute game experience so I'm either analyzing a game that says analyzing games is often done to the detriment of the work and the benefit of the analyser and let's be clear I have edited this video in a way that helps me make my point is that any different than Davy skipping the whisper maze in the beginning of the game or I'm assigning value to this game based on the mental state and personal life of a man I've never met and then I am again just as bad as Davy so which is it I I think I know or at least I thought I did look now I'm afraid to say it because of what it might say about me and I like I'm either projecting myself or I'm projecting Davey onto this stupid game right that can't be right though that can't be fair look game criticism is about more than that right right either I'm seeking validation for telling you all what I think about this game or I'm boiling a human being down to one of his projects is is that really what this game is suggesting is that what I'm suggesting is that what I'm doing here or am i doing this to myself by reading my own insecurities into this thing what does it say that I see so much of myself and such a whole person Jesus is this what I've been doing for the last four years I don't know I you may need to figure this one out for yourselves I think I'm going to have to figure out what I'm doing with this show

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 220,909

Keywords: errant signal, The Beginner's Guide, Beginner's Guide

Id: vAbh28j11RQ

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2016