When thinking about artgames, a game that immediately comes to mind is The Beginner’s Guide. In this game, we follow the narrator as he shows us the different games that his friend, Coda, has created. Within each game, the narrator explains its meaning and symbolism.
In an important example, the narrator highlights a common motif of lampposts within the more recent games that Coda created. These lampposts mostly appear at the end of each game. The narrator theorizes that the lampposts are meant to represent a destination, a resolution to each game’s abstract buildup. The narrator contrasts this sense of resolution with the confusing, unresolved abstractness of Coda’s previous games.
The narrator continues to guide the player through Coda’s games, explaining his theories on each game’s meaning. Each game adds up into a dismal picture of Coda’s mental health: deteriorating under the immense pressure of the need to relentlessly create, falling into a state of depression.
Coda’s final game, The Tower, is completely unplayable without editing the game. The narrator helps you through the unplayable parts, and we eventually stumble upon a room with text upon the walls.
“If there was an answer, a meaning, would it make you any happier?” “Would you stop changing my games? Stop adding lampposts to them?” “Would you simply let them be what they are?”
The last game reveals that the narrator’s ideas of Coda’s mental state and his games are completely false, going so far as to edit lampposts in to create meaning where it doesn’t exist.
As an artgame, The Beginner’s Guide uses interactivity to put you, the player, into the narrator’s position. The interactivity of playing through each game immerses you into a false idea of Coda’s headspace, which heightens the sense of guilt and disbelief you feel as the narrator’s deception is revealed. As you navigate each of Coda’s games, taking the narrator’s interpretations at face value, you are also intruding upon Coda’s boundaries.
Some players theorize that The Beginner’s Guide is a response to the immense success of the creator’s first game, The Stanley Parable. The creator wrote a blog post after winning Game of the Year, detailing his negative experiences with the overwhelming response and expectations from fans. With this reading, The Beginner’s Guide seems to put you, the player, into a position of blame. You roleplay as the narrator, prying into the creator’s games and obsessively trying to chase after a deeper meaning that might not exist.
In the playthrough that I watched, the comments were full of people rebuking and hating the narrator for his wrongdoings towards Coda. The narrator is rightfully framed as a villain for manipulating Coda’s games and spreading false rumors about Coda because of his intense desire to find and project meaning into his games. However, as I continued to think about the narrator’s actions, I felt that he couldn’t be entirely blamed. If something isn’t meant to have meaning, is it wrong to try to interpret it? Is meaning something inherent to art?
In my opinion, I don’t think we should fault the narrator for wanting to find meaning in Coda’s games. Even if they weren’t intended to have the meaning that the narrator interpreted, the narrator found peace through his interpretations of Coda’s games (even if he did take it down a very toxic route). Once you put a creation out into the world, it’s impossible to restrain people from trying to understand it and make meaning. Even if something is created without a deeper meaning and without intending to be seen as art, the interpretations that the audience create from a work can be what transforms it into art.
The Beginner’s Guide is an interesting game to think about when considering artgames. Coda’s games weren’t intended to have such deep meaning, but I still consider them artgames. The fact that the narrator could resonate so deeply with Coda’s games demonstrates its artistic value. If it was so easy to be convinced by the narrator’s interpretations of the games, it shows that while meaning may not be inherent to an art piece, it can still be created.
This sounds like a very intriguing game, and the discussion on meaning in art is interesting to me. One of the thoughts constantly bouncing in my head during this class is asking “what if a game isn’t intended to have meaning?”, and I agree that there’s still good reason to look for it even if there doesn’t seem to be any intention behind it.
I’m so happy someone else has heard of The Beginner’s Guide! Although I think for some of Coda’s games they really border on the edge of artgame and seep into game art territory. If I remember correctly, even Coda didn’t know what some of his games meant, he just felt compelled to make them the way he did. I think that to qualify as an artgame the author has to have a somewhat clear goal for the emotion/idea they are trying to convey (although this is 100% an arbitrary qualifier that I am making up).
While artists usually have reasons for creating, sometimes the answer of “it just felt right” is enough to satisfy where significance comes from. Sometimes, we don’t have the words to express why something is meaningful — what’s more important is simply the fact that we care enough to create something in its name. Sometimes, trying to artificially deepen a conversation around meaning causes something to lose the simplicity behind its value. There’s almost an ironic meta narrative that no meaning, in and of itself, holds meaning.
I also think your post touches on the interesting category of games that don’t want you to play them. It creates an interesting dichotomy where a player is problematically intruding on the game (in this case, insisting there is meaning and must be meaning despite the creators insistence otherwise) but because of the public, playable nature of the game and the societal expectation that games are always meant to be played, a player feels justified in their intrusion. Unlike empathy games that place a player in the position of a victim, these kinds of games encourage a player to be an antagonist in a very direct manner — not just taking on the role of an antagonist, but simply being an antagonist.
Thanks for this blog post. I’d never heard of The Beginner’s Guide before, so I really appreciated that you connected the readings and concepts from class this week to an outside game. This game seems ghostly, and similar to Braid where the game seems to speak directly to the user—or user-adjacent, as Coda is technically speaking to the narrator, though the use of the second-tense makes it feel deliberately personal. As you say, the player is also assuming that the narrator’s interpretations are correct, and I can imagine that in playing this I’d also start to ascribe meaning where it doesn’t belong alongside the narrator. The detail about this game being a response to the feedback for The Stanley Parable is fascinating. In a meta way, it makes me feel the need to approach this class in an explicitly mindful way, and even wonder if there is a route that we CAN ethically interpret games that we don’t explicitly know the meanings behind. However, I do agree with your note that it isn’t wrong to try and impart meaning in things where the meaning isn’t clear. That is simply human nature, though remembering that we can’t actually know (in most cases) what the game designer intended feels important.
I agree with your point that imposed meaning can still be valuable, even if the creator of the work did not intend to convey a particular kind of meaning — or did not intend to embed any meaning at all. While it’s valuable to view a work through the lens or framework the artist intended, restricting oneself to the constraints of their messaging is reductive to the work at large, as it undermines our ability to experience and engage with works on a more personal level. In fact, I think the open-endedness of interpretation is what makes games productive: they are not meant to tell you what you SHOULD think, but rather offer opportunities for thought that you can investigate to whatever level of depth you’re comfortable with. Though players’ interpretations often align with the creator’s ideas by nature of games being structured around the creator’s vision, the unpredictability of players’ actions and the influence of their own biases and worldview guarantee that at least some meaning extracted is novel or unique to the person interpreting it.