The Second Playthrough Guide

Since The Beginner's Guide isn't a game that needs a walkthrough, this is instead a guide to give you more context on your second play through the game. Obviously, SPOILERS. Play through the game once first.

Preface

As you should be aware, there are SPOILERS for the game. It only takes two hours to play it at most, you can do it!

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Okay so this is the method by which I approach the game's text. ("Text" being the content of the story itself, in case you're not up on your literary lingo):

Everyone loves to take this story on its metatextual basis (that is, on the basis of what the story says about itself). But once you start reading a story wholly metatextually, you run into a problem of the metatext creating a feedback loop. Because Dave makes the mistake of thinking he can read in motivations to Coda, does this mean that it is a mistake to read into the text of the game?

Well, no. Or at least, if you want to say anything meaningful about the work, you can't let the text dicate to you how it must be read. There may well be some story out there that ends with "anyone who reads this sentence twice will go to hell when they die" doesn't mean we have to take it as a given if we want to talk about what the meaning behind the threat could be and accept we must be condemned to hell to do it.

The Beginner's Guide didn't create a taboo of interpretation, even if a lot of writers worry that might be the case. The main difference is: The Beginner's Guide is a fictional story. I am not interested so much in "what the real Dave's motivation was behind making this game" because that's not the level of textual analysis I'm interested in, in part because I actually agree with the game's final message: making assumptions about the author from their work is troublesome, and at times can border into dangerous.

I generally prefer to interpret the whole as simply as possible. There's theories out there for Dave and Coda being the same person Fight Club style, or for there being some additional relationship between Dave and Coda that's not mentioned, or that Coda is a ghost or whatever, but those are additions that aren't present in the text. While you can have fun making imaginings out of elements not present, I think it's best to start with just saying "what does the text itself tell us?"

You might think this is impossible given that at the end it's shown that Dave is an unreliable narrator, but it's not. Even when a narrator is unreliable, that doesn't necessarily mean you throw out all evidence of anything being real. After all, this is a work of fiction--"none of it is real" is ALREADY true. So we need to pick out the parts that are true and false based on what we understand about Dave at the end of the story.

And what we understand about Dave is this: he met Coda at a game jam in 2009, became interested in Coda's games. Coda sent him these games (otherwise he wouldn't have them; we have no reason to believe that Dave is somehow stealing these) and that Dave interprets these games in a way that Coda completely rejects as evidenced in the dialog in The Tower, and that Dave has edited these games to make them fall more in line with what Dave thinks a game should be.

So there's really only two things you need to keep in mind on your second playthrough: that Dave is PROBABLY WRONG about most of interpretations he makes, and that he DID edit the games to fit his personal structural needs.

Based on these assumptions, this read-through of the text of The Beginner's Guide will try to cover the events as un-meta-y as possible, by pointing out instances where and how Dave makes faulty assumptions about the works of Coda. In doing so, I will in some places still ascribe potential motivations to Coda and Dave based on the things we do know--because they're fictional characters. They don't have actual presence outside of the context of this game. Unlike Dave, no matter what I ascribe to the meaning of this text, it will not reflect back on the real author of this work so long as we keep in mind that we only have the text to work with.

Intro

Dave introduces himself AS the creator of The Stanley Parable in order to assist in the versimilitude of the story but don't be fooled, this is a fictional representation of himself. If it's bad for the Dave inside the game to use Coda's work to say something about Coda, then it's likewise a bad idea to use it to say something about the real Dave.

HOWEVER, given this is a work of fiction, we can actually speculate all we like about the characters inside the work.

We can still take Dave at his word when he states upfront what he wants from the game: he wants to get meaning from Coda's work. He says upfront, he was "struggling with some personal stuff" and he finds Coda's work to be powerful. So, since Coda's games mean something to him, he wants to peel back the layers of what's happening and figure out what the work is actually saying (like this guide is right now)




And then he says this. If this wasn't a red flag to you the first time through, then it should be now: Dave is not actually all that interested in Coda's games. He's interested in peeling apart Coda's games in order to understand Coda. Because from what we see later, Coda considers himself a private individual and preferred to simply say something through the art he made.

Usually just to himself. Because sometimes that's what artists do. They just make things for themselves.




But that's not how Dave sees art. And because Dave doesn't see art like that, the possible interpretation that "maybe these games aren't meant to be played by just anyone"--for whatever reason Coda has to not want them played--simply never occurs to Dave.

Of course Coda eventually gave some of the games to Dave directly (or at least that's the interpretation I'm going with--I'm assuming that their initial relationship was cordial and that Dave didn't go out of his way to actively steal anything from Coda. Then again, keep in mind--later we find out Dave did visit Coda in person a few times, but there's nothing to indicate he knew Coda's address, just that they met at a developer's conference and that Coda emailed him directly several times.)

But Coda could have been friendly with Dave enough to share his games, given the information we know (or at least presume for this reading)? While Dave is subtly not all that interested in most of Coda's games, on the face of it he sure seems enthusiastic about them. It's only after a while you get the sense that Dave would not be interested in these games for the same reason Coda is in making them--and that like us, it took some time before Coda would realize that Dave's influence over the "message" of the games is what's poisoning his enthusiasm.

And while the game's message rejects the idea that we can really know Coda--Dave is making the mistake that "reading into his games" can actually tell us concrete details about its author--Coda is nevertheless fictional on the same level Dave is. Many of Dave's premises about what the games are saying are unsound, not because Dave makes necessary assumptions in order to create a theory of meaining, but that once he's made those assumptions, he acts on them as though they were true, rather than what they are--a theoretical interpretation.

Dave "tells everyone" that Coda is depressed because his theory implied the author is depressed making these games, so it must be true. As much as I might like literary and artistic analysis, that's a step too far, no matter if Dave met Coda in person or not.

Whisper

If I was going to show you all the ironies in Dave's dialogue, this guide would probably consist of every other line in the game. Suffice to say, Dave does talk about what he thinks Coda's games are, but very soon after this section is the infamous Labrynth.



And this gives you the key to a lot of what Dave interprets from the work. If he doesn't get something, he simply doesn't comment on it, or worse, removes it entirely. Now, that doesn't mean, as many commentors have said, that this makes Coda a good game designer. But again--this game wasn't meant to be played. In fact, it probably wasn't even supposed to mean anything. What it looks like is someone learning to use the Source engine and playing around by shoving gameplay parts together whether it makes sense or even plays well or is fun.

But Dave implies that it must have a meaning, somewhere, only that he cannot discern it.




It happens again here, but it's more subtle. When you step into the beam, Dave gives you his interpretation of what was supposed to happen first, and only then shows the actual ending.

And I actually believe Dave's interpretation here is correct, that the original ending was some kind of bug. After all, he poked around in Coda's code enough, he ought to know.



Now, Dave attributes multiple possibilities to what "Coda must have felt" after experiencing this bug. He never says once that Coda confirmed any of this--he says outright that Coda never talked about his own games after they were done, so Dave received this game and started throwing all sorts of interpretations into this simply because it was Coda's first "proper" game, and therefore something must have happened here to make Coda rethink how he approached games.

Maybe it did. But make a note of what he says in the screenshot provided: "A peaceful place juxtaposed against all the hysteria you've JUST HAD TO TRAVERSE." Dave is showing here what's important to him: the peace comes at the end of the journey. Later on we'll see text directly in Coda's games that contradict this entirely.

Backwards

This is the important part here, again: Dave wants to get to the end. "It works because it gets out quick" is Dave's preference when it comes to game design, not Coda's. And this might be seductive to people who like to criticize video games; the idea is that standing around is wasted time

But also note that Dave did not attribute the message of the game to Coda himself. In fact, unlike future games, what this game actually says is not given as indication of Coda "breaking down" only because it's not from the breaking-down period--even though it could totally fit.

(I will skip over Entering for now, see later at Entering & Exiting)

Stairs

As indicated: Coda provided NO context of anything to Dave before the House chapter.



Well, Dave, he DID show this one to you, didn't he?

But the really interesting thing here is that Dave never thinks that maybe Coda made these games for himself. As is shown in other games later, Coda likes the between-places. In fact, there were a few theories about this game's "real purpose" that I'd like to share because I find it interesting.

Coda perhaps made this as a way to generate ideas for games. He'd start up the stairs, and then by the time he got to the top, he'd have something which he'd then put into the room. Or perhaps this is where he went to discard ideas, and if he really needed to see them again, he's had to traverse the stairs first to be sure he really wanted to do it.

But here's my interpretation: Coda DID want to show his games to people. After all, at a certain point he started showing them to Dave, including a backlog of games he'd made in the past. And the point of this game was that you had to really, really want to get to the top in order to see the reward at the end, all these neat and interesting game ideas.

And the irony is that once you're in there, Dave doesn't even give you enough time to stay and look. Dave is about getting to the end, yes, but he's also about getting to the next thing once you're done.

Here's one of the times Dave directly reports something Coda told him:




Also he's about ignoring things he's told directly in favor of trying to peel back the layers. Coda realizes he can come across as distant and that it doesn't matter to him, but to Dave, this idea seems horrible. Later on he'll describe Coda along the lines of a puzzle he has to solve--but Coda already told him straight-up, he doesn't NEED solving. But statements like this, Dave has trouble comprehending, because he doesn't understand why someone would want to be aloof from other people.

Puzzle

This chapter is the first appearance of the door puzzle, but it's actually not terribly important until later when Dave starts trying to interpret it.



My actual feeling is that this game file wasn't meant to be played either. I mean, you don't know there are other hallways in the game because . . . you don't know. As far as we know, Coda was just messing around building lots and lots of hallways to get a feel for how he liked to build them. Just because the file that Dave received had the player starting point at one particular hallway doesn't mean that was "the intended way to experience the game". If any game was meant to not be played, it's clearly this one. Maybe it was just meant to be built.

Entering & Exiting

. . . why?

If anything rubs some people the wrong way about art criticism, it's when critics do things like this. The games are literally just a straight path forward with a sign that has one word on them, and suddenly that means Coda's games have a deep linear connection between all of them.

. . . despite the fact that Dave also thinks that Coda believes games are "dead to him" once he's finished with them. Again, Dave said Coda never talked about these games.




So, this can't possibly be Coda's doing.

Now, it's one thing for a person to read and alayze a text; I'm doing so now because I find the story in this game fascinating. When this game came out initially there were a lot of thinkpieces about how games criticism would be rocked forever because how can you actually interpret art when you have a clear internal bias?

But it's not Dave's bias that's the problem, is it? I mean, if this was all benign, there'd be nothing wrong with Dave making the proclimations on these chapters that he does. He'd probably still be off-base and reaching, but there's nothing wrong with getting a little out-there when it comes to textual interpretation if that's your thing.

But despite the fact Dave insists that we can't know what Coda was REALLY thinking, Dave still goes forward presuming he's more or less correct in knowing what Coda was really thinking. And that gets dangerous later on when he starts applying his interpretations to Coda himself.

Down

"There wasn't"

The gag was on you, Dave. I mean, at some point it was obvious to Coda that Dave was going to consume whatever Coda gave to him whether or not it was playable. The actual gag was that the games were playable despite having nothing in them, because Dave played them.

The conversation seems to indicate that Dave's idea of what's "playable" is different from Coda's. To Coda, all you need to do to play a game is to engage with it. But to Dave, what you need to do is get through it. Dave never shows us what those hundreds of nothing games actually were, but if they were what he says, just blank boxes to walk around in, Coda's point completely sailed over his head.

What seems important to Coda is the stuff that's inside the game, far more than "just playing" it.



And this is funny because two rooms later:



Coda has basically straight-up explained it. Dave never comments on this, despite later talking about dialogue in games as "Coda talking to himself" but he attributes no meaning to the box heads saying that the important part of the puzzle is the black space in the middle.

Every single time that Dave brings up the puzzle again, he completely omits this. He thinks the black space is a place that's meant to be passed through--because of course it is, it's a game and the important part is to solve the problem and get to the end. There's no point in stopping in the middle!

Now of course, just because Coda includes dialogue like this in the game doesn't mean that it is absolutely indicative of Coda's feelings. But the words are there. He has provided an alternative explanation for the puzzle, and he's framed it in a particular fashion.

So I have to ask, at the end of the day, what exactly can we learn about an artist from their work? If you watched the Innuendo Studio's video on The Beginner's Guide, you know the quote "Every Painting Is A Self-Portrait".

So when Coda includes a prison in his game you need to stand in for an hour, can we presume that Coda liked the idea enough to want to include it in his game? Even then we kinda have to make the presumption to exclude other explanations, such as, that, Coda's arm was twisted by some unknown third party into including it, or that it was a bug that Coda didn't remove, or that Coda's suffering from schizophrenia and his other personality put it in without his knowledge, or that Coda's hand slipped, or that a ghost is haunting Coda's computer and that's what caused the prison to appear in this game. Or God did it.

But you can tell that all these possibilities have wildly different degrees of plausibility, and it'd be absurd to have to go through all of them one by one and break down why it isn't covered in the text. If we HAVE to make an assumption about Coda's motivations for including prisons in games, the "most sound" theory is the one that's supported by what we know about the body of work.

And what we know is this: Dave doesn't like prisons, and disagrees with Coda's ideas about if a game should be playable or not--so we can discard the idea that Dave was somehow the one including these even if he later says he altered Coda's games. So if we're assuming that we at least know Coda's original vision, we can conclude that it was Coda's intent to include prisons in his games. On the outside, because we're not given much else to go on besides what Dave thinks must be the case regarding Coda and prison games, we could possibly potentially maybe say Coda does like prison games, as Dave finally concludes in the Epilogue.

So then, what does it mean that Coda likes prison games? Honestly? Absolutely nothing we can glean. It's at this point I'd have to say, this is where the text doesn't give enough evidence to say. Now you can find some scattered bits like this converstation with the block heads, or the phone conversation at the end of Escape, but all that really is is further reinforcement that Coda likes prison games. We can't glean what they made Coda feel, if they're comfortable to him, or they're terrifying and that Coda likes including things that scare him in his games, or that Coda is sexually gratified by prison environments, or maybe they're meditative and meaningful on a level that's hard to grasp.

Or, as Dave seems to think when the motif comes up again in Escape, it's evidence that Coda is depressed. In fact, even though we know Coda never talks about his past games to Dave, Dave seems to think a prison environment is evidence of wrong-thinking. At that point, we've stepped past disagreement on game-making methodologies and into diagnosis. But more on that in Escape.

And then . . . ohhhh, it's the Lamppost.




This is one of the things that's explicitly called out in The Tower, that Dave keeps adding lampposts to Coda's games. I'm just going to assume for argument's sake that Coda included it twice: once here, and once at the end of Escape. Something made Dave believe this was supposed to be a pattern, and the lamppost over the telephone booth in Escape is one of the few other places it actually makes sense. (And possibly was the impetus for making Dave think the telephone booth was the "end" of the prison games)

So, for some reason, Dave decides to keep editing Coda's games in order to insert the lamppost so that there's a "destination at the end", which is why I think he really starts to unravel in Escape.

Notes

I am myself an artist, so I tend to get the feeling a lot of people think this about creators right away: "Hey, I like their work, I want to get to know them"



And this often happens. Even though Dave is ostensibly a game developer himself, the persona he inhabits for this story seems to not really understand why some people prefer to be private. And it's not like Coda never ever wants to interact with other people, he did decide to go to this game jam in person.








In one sense, yes artists, when they create art for an audience, are inviting that audience into their world.

But the world is not the artist. The created world might be part of an artist, but the most you can ever really glean is a fraction of the whole image. For most artists, they do indeed want the art to communicate something on their mind.

Dave outright states that he wants the art to be the replacement for the person. But how could anyone live up to that? An artist's work is curated, carefully selected, and in general build in a place of safety and presented at the expense of pain one feels for bearing their soul.

So it's no wonder that Coda was fine with Dave at first. It must have seemed as though Dave understood Coda simply by getting something positive out of Coda's work at all. What artist wouldn't want that?




This is the way that Dave reconciles all of Coda's work as having some big-picture meaning. Problem: This still doesn't mean that Coda's entire body of work was meant to be taken in by the audience in sequence. Even if Dave was right, and the puzzle was meant to be a "moving on" point, unless Coda actually stated his intentions, why would Dave make that presumption? Wouldn't that actually mean that, when Coda is done with a work, it is not to be regarded in the context of any of his other works?




Dave misses the point of the dark space again. In fact at the end of this part he hints that the purpose of the doorways MUST BE to grasp at the elusive bigger picture, because he's already decided there has to be one.

You remember at the beginning, when Dave said


Dave will all but admit he looks for meaning only outside of himself, that he can't actually fathom the idea of NOT looking for external validation.

Then he started constructing this idea of what Coda's games meant.

Escape

At the end of the game, Dave laments "I don't know this person". I think this should have been the indication to anyone watching that he never really did.

This was the point in the game where I started suspecting that Dave really wasn't all there when it came to his interpretations. He doesn't "get" these prison games because they consist solely of the antithesis of what Dave thinks a game should be.

So why does this scare Dave?





This is just a series of rooms that have bars on one side. This is still one of the games that was presented to Dave after-the-fact, so Coda never told him anything about it. Dave opens up a file with all these single-room prison games and he feels scared, and he projects this feeling onto Coda.

Is it because Dave can't abide the idea of not getting to an ending?

Also notice Dave's use of the impersonal "you". Without a voice telling you no, "you just spiral", as though it's an inevitability. This might be diagnosing again, but it sounds to me like this is probably the sort of struggle Dave was talking about. We know that's Coda's feelings at the very least:



And for Dave at least this might be absolutely true. Dave can't function without a "voice that says no", and he projects this personal need as something Coda needs. Ironically, without any voices telling him to stop. Because it's Dave who can't stop--he has an inner need to keep going regardless of what's happening around him. Later during House, he frames this as a survival need:



Which is rather drastic when you think about it. Because . . . it's just a game, right?

When I first played though this, it sounded like the difference between people's relationships to claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Some people hate closed-in spaces, and some people hate wide-open spaces. At the very end, Dave wonders




But that's really Dave's problem, isn't it? Because of his own internal fears of something that Coda likely finds comforting, he attributed his own internal feelings to Coda's intent.

That is not where you're supposed to go with textual analysis. Your reaction to events are key, but they are not absolute evidence of intent.

And remember, Dave edited these together. He's presuming that these are all causally linked, and that the final game in this sequence:



You get the sense that Dave is inserting himself into this situation? He doesn't understand some people tend to work best when they reflect on ideas by themselves. He's already determined that this is a cry for help; he sees himself as the hero in these situations, looking to fix a problem that must exist simply because he can't fathom that it isn't a problem (which will again become relevant later).



Which Coda didn't curate as such; Dave put these in order. Dave is the one obsessed with concluding things and moving on, which is why he put these prison games into context but not, say, the hundreds of empty box room games he talked about in Down.




. . . does Dave even realize what he's saying? Yeah, all text in every game is placed in intentionally, so it's all Coda. What, specifically, makes House "someone else" but not the people the character spoke to in all the other games?

House

I actually think Dave is correct. But Coda already made it clear that he LIKES the transitional space. Dave recognizes this kind of game is meant for "cleansing", but he doesn't seem to get the details of what's being said.




What traumatic experience? Dave seems to conjure this out of nowhere. In fact, if anything, a later chapter Theater is much more in line with digesting a "difficult or traumatic experience" but he never brings it up then. In fact, when we get to Theater, we will see Dave as treating the game itself as indicative of being hurt by a traumatic experience, rather than a way of confronting it.

Dave seems to need the housecleaning more than Coda does.



Which is ironic because this seems to indicate this could have been the first game Coda intended to be played. But it's not actually different from the prison games.

Now, Dave SAID that the telephone booth was intended as the capstone to the prison games, but what makes House different? Dave says at the end that he deliberately put the "ending" into this game. So, without the ending, you're just inside this place that in a transitional space.

But we already know how Dave feels about prisons.

Lecture

Isn't it interesting how this game comes immediately after the first one that Coda actively solicited feedback on?




Tho specifically I just need to mention what Dave's comment on the game is:





Because it seems to me Dave is of two minds about Coda by the end of the game.

First is the opposite of Lecture: rather than seeing Coda and assuming he's perfect behind the mask, he sees Coda and assumes he's deeply broken behind the mask.

But second, there's this:

Theater

This is another thing I haven't touched on: For some reason, Dave assumes that Coda is making these games nonstop. "Why'd it take you so long, it's not like it's hard"

Well, it doesn't matter if it's hard? I mean, you did say



And not telling yourself "no" is part of the process of creativity. In order to be creative, in some manner you need to be unafraid of doing things wrong. Which, surprise, is what Theater is actually about, the fear of doing things wrong. Specifically, when around other people.





Now a brief read of this, if you're to assume that Coda is talking about himself, which seems likely, then this is basically him explaining what it's like to be in face-to-face conversations.

Dave immediately turns it around and presumes that, instead of Coda describing what it IS, that it's Coda saying what he himself needs to DO.




Once again, Dave's personal fears, the fears of being closed off from other people, are being read into this game. So what does Dave do? Try and push Coda out of that withdraw. There is, after all, a problem here, and it needs fixing.

Mobius

The only way to complete Mobius is to disobey the instructions. What instructions is Coda disobeying, I wonder?



This is the dumbest place to put a lamppost

It's possible that, at this point, Coda doesn't fully grasp the problem of being creative under pressure from outside criticism. That is, it WILL cause the well to dry up.

But all Dave can see at this point is that his source of games that keep him going and thinking and productive is going away.

Island

Does he? Coda clearly wants to make games. But at the end of the game Coda explains himself the most directly:



Which is absolutely the case. The real reason Dave is scared isn't going to be for Coda's sake. If he was honestly concerned about Coda, then he would listen to Coda, wouldn't he? But he doesn't He explicitly ignores Coda's wishes.

What Dave really seems to be after is more games. And so when it seems that Coda's inspiration is drying up, that makes Dave panic, because as usual, he reads too much into these and applies his feelings toward Coda's intent.






Dave's presumption is that Coda is lonely. But again, we learn afterwards that Dave can't fathom a life that's not living exclusively for external validation. So when he sees this "spiral" he presumes that Coda is in, he thinks that Coda is going to stop making games altogether--because where else is Coda going to get his validation from? Internally? Impossible!



This was one of the most interesting quotes in the game to me. What failure is Dave talking about?

Because if Coda is making this art for himself--and for the longest time he seemed completely comfortable doing just that--then there's no failure state. He can't "fail" at art that only he's going to see. So, why not channel all of his anxieties into it? And even if Coda wanted to make this for public consumption--who cares if it's done wrong or not received well, so long as Coda is satisfied with it?

But, of course . . .

Machine

I have an interesting idea about this chapter. What Dave sees is Coda deciding to destroy Coda. But what if it's not? What if Coda intended this to be the ultimatum to Dave, and not The Tower?

What he's showing is the viewpoint character is not himself, it is Dave. Dave is destroying Coda.

Dave addresses all the people, Dave blames Coda for not providing games that provide him nourishment. And so Dave tears apart Coda's games. (or Coda. It doesn't matter which; even if the art is not literally Coda, it nevertheless hurts to have your work torn apart)




And so Dave thinks that in order to fix all this, Coda needs external validation, because that's what Dave would need in this case.



And then, literally over the screen of Dave emptying a gun into Coda, he insists he was doing the right thing.

Tower

The question is, does Dave actually comprehend what he did was wrong? All of the sudden his theory about what Coda's games mean fall apart.

THIS game is, ironically, meant to be played. Specifically, it was for Dave to play, in the way that Dave played Coda's games: cheat himself out of the experience in order to get to the end. And it's impossible to beat without altering the game.

But that's what Dave kept wanting out of Coda's games--something to fix. First the games themselves, then Coda.



But Coda only ever made one game for Dave, and it was this one. If there was anything to fix, it was Dave.




And despite all of that, no matter what Dave thought these games MUST have meant, Coda was more composed than him all along. Coda is not obligated to help Dave, especially when what Dave did was violate Coda's trust. Coda is not obligated to maintian Dave's addiction.



And Dave is left incomplete because he never got closure on this matter. But that's what he needs, badly, is closure. If he wants to be okay, he has to learn to live without it. Because if that's all he got out of Coda's video games--an artificial sense of progression and closure--that wasn't even there in the first place, that he only pretended was there for the sake of his own sanity . . .

. . . then he'll have to look elsewhere if he wants to move on.

Epilogue

This guide is not meant to be a comprehensive look at the game. There's not going to be any one reading of a text that is absolute or encompasses the whole, or a "solution" to every stated problem. I just wanted to write this as a starting point if you wanted some more aspects to consider.

I don't think Dave is a bad character, even though he's revealed to be the antagonist at the end. I mostly suggest that he and Coda were at odds with each others' viewpoint, and that his insistence on seeing things that were not there and making assumptions based on vague, and inconsistently applied criteria, got him into this mess in the first place.

There's probably something to be learned from the game, but whatever it is, it is not how art is a guide to diagnosing the artist.

Addendum (7/29/2020)

I'd like to thank everyone who found this rambling at least somewhat enlightening; I decided to make this guide after I mostly couldn't get my thoughts out of my head. As interesting as the metanarrative is I frequently found it frustrating that people ignored the actual story entirely in favor of discussing that, hence me spending like a day and a half of my life throwing this together. Like I said, it's hardly comprehensive but I do hope that maybe someday someone more articulate than me could put together a much more comprehensive theory on the narrative itself rather than the metanarrative.

Something I'd like to add though, since I was reading back through and this jumped out at me: I mention in the section Escape about the relationship between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. These are framed in terms of fears but I find their opposites tend to crop up in people as well: agoraphilia and claustrophilia. And when I thought about that I thought: Where else does this pop up? In the first game of the story.

The part of Whisper that Dave skips over is the maze: a very closed-in space. But the part that sets his imagination on fire is the "ending" when the bounds of the level are broken out. This happens again in Puzzle where Dave wants to open up the walls and see everything outside of the interiors that Coda has made.

I don't think this is specifically a mania of any sort, but there is definitely an attraction: Dave simply does not like staying put in closed environments. Coda... does. Dave either has to keep moving OR, at the lease, he has to feel like he CAN keep moving. Now closed-in-spaces are definitely not 100 percent of what Coda creates, but it is patently obvious that they're definitely a big part of what makes Coda Coda, and every time he includes closed-in spaces, Dave brushes those off as boring up until he has no choice but to stay there (usually when the game is structured so that's the only thing TO DO), at which point it becomes threatening. This certainly would be a frustrating part to Coda because Coda might not even realize he's doing this or that it specifically makes him happy, he just knows that it's not what Dave likes and Dave keeps pushing him to not do the thing.

It just strikes me as funny that in Whisper, the thing that Dave claims is what must have set Coda's imagination on fire is the thing that, given what we know, definitely set Dave's imagination on fire. But maybe Coda was much more proud of the corridors and environments he made than anything else. After all, that's what he KEPT DOING for most of the rest of the games, and not suddenly bursting out of the top of the environment.

Anyway I'm sure someone much smarter than me can weave that into their inevitable comprehensive retrospective.

Addendum II (10/22/2020)

I can't believe this didn't occur to me originally, but I wonder if the games in Escape are the same "playable games" that Dave mentions in Down. After all he's ostensibly showing us "all the games" that Coda did and the folder labeled "playable games" wasn't otherwise shown. The only thing against this would be that Dave doesn't attribute the same emotional quality to Playable Games that he does to Escape, but then again, Dave is rather disingenuous.

But if this was the case it instantly gives additional context to Escape: these prisons with nowhere to go are what Coda thinks of Playable Games, and Davey sorta took offense to that. He brushes it off in Down but later when we actually see Escape he frames it as Coda being depressed even though earlier he framed this as a joke that Coda did. (although, Dave didn't give much indication that he thought it was a joke...) As though he wants to diagnose Coda's resistance to making "playable games" as some kind of inner failing.

Just a thought. Okay maybe I'll be back in one month to three years.

Addendum III (6/19/2022)

Hey again, this thing is still receiving a zillion Deep Thought awards, though something crossed my mind while I was reading over it again, and I wanted to make something clear about what I mean when I say if a work of art "means something". It's been a part of The Discourse lately. You might have seen this meme floating around:

Author: The curtains were blue.
English Teacher: The curtains represent his immense depression and his lack of will to carry on.
What the author meant: The curtains were f*cking blue.

And there is, perhaps rightly or wrongly, pushback against this, and all sorts of claims that this one meme has "set back" literary criticism, because what the author "meant" is basically immaterial when it comes to textual interpretation. The teacher in this case could very well have a defensible reason for her reading regardless of what the author meant, and that's absolutely valid.

But if you know anything about the Beginner's Guide at this point, that's not the whole story, is it? What Coda MEANT by these games is absolutely central to the plot of the story, and Davey here is our teacher leading us on the path of a very specific interpretation of the work. As a result, it causes us to draw conclusions about it, until the rug is pulled out from under us and it is shown that very little of what Davey pulled out of the work could possibly be true.

But this also isn't to say that Coda never "meant anything" by his works. Even if, as I say early in the guide, that Coda was just messing around with level building tools, there may still be interesting reasons why Coda picked certain themes, motifs and tropes over others. Even if it is dismissively added offhand, there may be *a* reason that the author decided on blue for the curtains. That all is still textual interpretation. Coda might not have meant to mean anything, but in being art it still "means something"; it's only a matter of figuring out something interesting to say about it.

The difference, and the part that's difficult for people to really grasp, is that this is always conjecture. Even if the author overtly gives a canonical meaning to something, it's STILL conjecture. The author can even be wrong about their own work! Ray Bradbury was famous for claiming that Fahrenheit 451 was about the evils of Television, even though the themes of the book work far better with a much broader, universal interpretation about censorship and education.

But that only applies insofar as we're looking for a "most complete" or "most useful" interpretation of a work. Bradbury claiming that F451 is about Television is certainly supported by the text and even defensible--it's just less interesting than the more broadly applicable reading.

So when I say that Coda never "meant anything" by his earlier works, it's from the perspective that Davey's decision to tie everything into a Coda Supernarrative is, itself, not a very defensible interpretation, at least when you step back and realize how selective Davey was with his presentation. Sure, knowing what recurring things Coda liked to put into his games may be instructive on building said Supernarrative, but as we see by the end, the narrative falls apart. It was wrong. It clearly DIDN'T mean most of the things that Davey supposed, and as such... the early works don't mean what Davey thought they meant. The don't "mean anything" because the Supernarrative doesn't "mean anything" in the end. It was just reading into someone messing around with the engine and supposing that this has some hidden meaning that it objectively did not.

Might there be a different "meaning" to these games? Well, sure. Of course there is. You're reading an analysis of it right now; these games were built for The Beginner's Guide with a particular intent in mind, and a more sober interpretation clearly demonstrates the themes that the "meaningless" games support.

"What a piece of art means" is just a matter of finding the most useful or defensible narrative. Not all narratives are useful or defensible; we can't tell for sure if the Teacher in the meme above is BSing or calling upon a well-supported interpretation of the work because we don't have enough context. But in either case, don't just take the teacher's word for it. Sometimes people have ulterior motives in wanting to force a narrative to mean a particular thing.

Addendum IV (9/6/2022)

Currently sitting here procrastinating on a novel, again something else popped into mind when re-reading my arguments in this guide.

I didn't bring this kind of thing up initially because it was outside of the scope of this article, but I realized there's a big reason why I don't like implicitly reading into the metatext of the story. It's that if you take the text on its own terms too literally, then you are assuming that Creator Dave Wreden is the same person as the fictional Dave inside the story that he initially claims to be. And maybe people would love to argue up-and-down "how much" Dave Wreden is similar to Dave The Narrator, up to and including whether or not he personally hurt someone analogous to Coda in this story.

I just realized why this always bothered me. All the assumption does is erase, in what ways, Coda is like real-life Dave Wreden. And yeah, that's stepping into "diagnosing the artist" territory, but I'm more talking about the people who are doing the diagnosing than Dave Wreden himself.

Because one of the things about a fictional story is that it's understood that every character is, in some way, at least a little reflective of the author. In the argument of whether or not Dave = Dave, what gets lost is in what ways Dave = Coda. In this framing, Coda is always 'someone else' that Dave interacted with, and not an aspect of Dave himself.

I wanted to make certain that it was clear this is an entirely fictional story, because that way it's clear that, if there is any reflection of real life Dave Wreden in this story, it's in *both characters*, not just the one that he wrote as his personal self-insert.

It is entirely possible to write yourself as the villain in a story and it not be pointing directly toward a one-to-one veiled biography. It's writing. You can just make stuff up.

Second, minor thing:

When I say that House may have been the first game that Coda meant to be played, combined with the fact that this was the first game that Coda deliberately shared with Dave, I wonder if the intention was that Coda made this game *for Dave*. Dave was already certain that Coda was spiraling at this point, but if Coda is going through a depressed period, it's after this--after he puts his heart into a game for someone he considered his friend, and ends up being wholly rejected as "not what I want".

Dave clearly liked the therapeutic talk, but nevertheless could not help himself in "fixing it" in order to make it A Game as Dave saw games. If he left well enough alone, the intent was to get Dave to understand that a game doesn't need to be beatable, and it's like... he's almost there. He almost got what the point was, and he still refused to see.

[testicular manslaughter]

thank you for this! I just finished The Beginner's Guide and it helped me grasp more of an understanding. the addendums are also appreciated for extra clarification

[the admiral]

thank you for writing this. ive had a lot of thoughts clouded up in my head about this game. this helped clear it up and give me a stronger interpretation

[Roop]

This was a really great entertaining read. It helped me understand and appreciate the underlying narrative in this game a lot more. So many details that I missed even on my third run through the game. Thank you so so much for writing all this analysis and effectively contributing to the discussion. <3

[READ HOUSEPETS]

@gabezeno Oh! My space opera/heist trilogy Final Days of the White Flower II is almost complete--first two books are on Amazon and Audible. My other novel is Ani-droids, it's on Amazon and the audiobook is still in the works. I also do comics, current project is The Witch of Kurikuto.

[gabezeno]

Can I hear about your novel and other creative endeavors?

[Snowcrash]

If we accept the interpretation of "Machine" where Dave is the player character, there's an extra layer of irony: Dave mentions multiple times wanting to see himself in Coda's games, and yet cannot see when he is a character in one of the games. It kind of makes me wonder for each game "Who is the player character and when does it matter?" Dave's narration and manipulation of the games made me feel like I was "outside" of the game. On a guided tour, rather than playing the games themselves. Like a Let's Play.

[READ HOUSEPETS]

Interpretation is invariably flawed in that way. Sometimes the artist means the work to just be what it IS, but the act of trying to put this into words--or even translate that experience to another human being--means something of the core truth is lost along the way.

There's not really anything you can do about this. You can understand that there IS a core truth, but if nobody but the artist can access it, what good is that? I suppose it can be good for the artist, and if your perspective is that art is only ever made for the artist... okay, but that kinda demands that you fully disengage from anyone else's art in order to respect that. After all, you don't wanna end up like Davey.

[READ HOUSEPETS]

Secondly, we can always say that as an audience, it is our duty to seek out the artist's message firstly, but we also don't have full control over everyone, nor can we control how people would interpret that imperative. The best any audience is CAPABLE of is being charitable in the interpretation of the art--the vast majority of the time, the artist's intent is the most interesting part about it!

So what's the disconnect here? Davey IS seeking the truth of the artist. What is going wrong? He has the artist at his fingertips, and makes assumptions anyway. But Coda wasn't required to provide any answers, either. Why would an artist want to answer each and every single specific question about one of their works? Most artists don't assign specific meaning to their work because it's not something that can be easily expressed in language.

[READ HOUSEPETS]

@timo This is a nice perspective, but it's impractical. The artist cannot beam their full and express intent into the heads of the audience, except through crude communication--which is, the art itself, and on the outside any statements they make about it. We can perhaps say, at best, that it is the duty of the audience to seek the artist's intent, but that's the exact thing you say is an issue, because the audience brings in their own perspective regardless.

So when you say only the artist knows the true meaning of their work, you're saying that the full truth of any work is impossible to impart to the audience. And in a way, that's accurate, but it's also unhelpful. If we cannot bear witness to the full truth of the art, the best any audience can do is interpret. So we're right back to square one.

[timo]

What a piece of art means is just a matter of finding the most useful or defensible narrative

This is wrong to me
Nobody but the artist knows the true meaning of their work.

To frame the meaning of ones work as "merely what's most defensible or useful narrative"? A very Davey interpretation.

We all differ in our thinking. Take Davey for example, imagine he DID take the most useful and defensible interpretation of all Coda's works, from his perspective. He certainly could have, and such would mean he was correct on the arts meaning, by your definition.

We often differ on what is most useful and defensible,
The artist is the only person that knows the true meaning of their work. How could anyone but them know, we aren't the artist?

It's up to the artist to dictate their meaning. And I say their, it's their art, not ours. They may share it with others, but we cannot dictate such from a viewers perspective.

That is what Davey does.