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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
With The Beginner’s Guide, The Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden has delivered yet another fascinating musing on interactivity. This time, however, it’s a far more personal essay, and I was left thinking - for many, many hours afterward - not just about the process of game-making but about Wreden himself. In this regard, The Beginner’s Guide is an unforgettable experience.The Beginner’s Guide opens in a charmingly illogical Counter-Strike map created by a developer named ‘Coda’. We are told this by Wreden himself, the emotive narrator of The Beginner’s Guide. Coda was a friend of his, he explains, who created many interesting games - not intended for public consumption - but has since stopped creating for reasons Wreden doesn’t understand. Wreden tells us he created The Beginner’s Guide in part as a message of encouragement for Coda to start creating again.Wreden’s secondary intention is what got me hooked - to take us through Coda’s body of work chronologically and thus reach a previously elusive conclusion about the man and his methods. What are the common elements in each of Coda’s games? Why did he make them during the time he made them? What was he trying to say?Can a video game offer insight into the mind of its creator?It’s Wreden who makes moving through Coda’s body of work during The Beginner’s Guide’s 90 minutes the engaging experience that it is. Coda’s games are exploratory and deeply personal, demanding very little practical engagement from us, and more often than not are thematically obtuse. But Wreden’s lively commentary sheds light on their meaning, or at least, his interpretation of their meaning. He dances easily between topics - repeated motifs, for example, or possible themes - while littering the Beginner’s Guide with anecdotes of his relationship with Coda, like a self-deprecating story about his over-eagerness at getting to know the developer at a game jam. It’s a charming performance.His presence encourages a great sense of fun while moving about Coda’s worlds, too. Like The Stanley Parable, much of my enjoyment in The Beginner’s Guide came from the narrator’s awareness of my actions and thoughts in my role as ‘the player’. Wreden’s commentary was always one step ahead of my own internal monologue: ‘Why is this wall here?’ I’d think. It just ends like that, says Wreden with a laugh. ‘Why is there a maze in a space station?’ Wreden doesn’t know either.The smashing of the fourth wall reaches its peak when Wreden actually dips into Coda’s games to add his own little flourishes in particularly janky or unplayable parts, or just to open them up and see how they tick. In one game, for example, he grants you the ability to make the oppressive
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