Introduction
What makes games accessible to play? What prompts players to think, to reason and search for meaning? Is this always the desired action? In The Beginner’s Guide, created by Davey Wreden – Davey (or rather, the characterized persona of Davey, referred to by his name in this essay), at one point, mentions this exact debate between him and Coda: “whether a game […] means anything if no one can get through it, and I would always defend that, you know, all this work goes into the game, why not make it playable and accessible?” (Down, March 2009). In placing the Beginner’s Guide in conversation with Death of the Author, I center on the latter of these two central concepts: accessibility. The Beginner’s Guide is at its core a linear walking simulator – in this way it is both playable and accessible, without requiring any conscious choice or dexterous effort on the end of the player to receive the story as intended. But on a meta-theatrical level, the concepts of ownership and poetic meaning-making are not themselves necessarily accessible to the player. We grow reliant on Davey’s steady presence to produce the narrative for us and pull the wool away from our eyes; there is no reason the player is made to question what he is telling us until he follows his pre-determined script to reveal his narrative unreliability.
Thus, though the Beginner’s Guide prompts the audience to passively reflect on the concepts of the Death of the Author – in that there is a plot-level tension between Davey’s analysis of Coda’s work, and Coda’s true intention for his own work – it ultimately does not cultivate an active analytical response in the audience, due to its structure as a linear walking simulator.
Authorship of Meaning / Linear Accessibility in the Beginner’s Guide
To tie back to Davey’s previous quotation – if “all this work goes into the game, why not make it playable and accessible?” – I purport another: if “all this work goes into the game”, why not invite the audience themselves to create meaning from abstractness?
Barthes, in his essay, cites Brechtian alienation as a significant form of Death of the Author; where the author “diminish[es] like a tiny figure” on the literary stage (Barthes, 3). There is a reason that the Beginner’s Guide imagery focuses so heavily on the visual of the theater. On the stage, Brechtian alienation is intended to intellectualize theater, to evaluate the situation presented objectively, to make visible the mechanics of what is in front of you- born from a rise of fascism (Britannica). In simpler terms: think for yourself, notice the vehicles that are influencing you, or else the world will choose for you. On the stage, this could look like visibly seeing a lighting fixture, not just the light it produces.
I believe that the Beginner’s Guide does not ultimately do this (that it still primarily shows the light rather than the fixture), and therefore, is not acting as the fullest example of Death of the Author. While (the character) Davey certainly does point out certain game mechanics and make visible his labor – for example, the required editing due to the “implayability” of some games, or the description of how the game engine leads to linear hallways – but the game directly hands this information to the viewer. The audience member is not invited to think for themselves, or in an aesthetic, argumentative, or interpretative way. They are experiencing a linear storyline, with a character that experiences an unambiguous narrative. The audience may believe that they are seeing ‘beyond the veil’, in reality, they are having the exact author-intended experience they should be, and it is is wholly imbued with (the real game developer) Davey’s experiences, identity, and personality as a wealthy, acclaimed, and successful game developer. The game cannot fully alienate from the success that preceded it with The Stanley Parable – it exists too far in an identity-based community and work.
The ending scene – perhaps the most powerful – where Coda breaks the form of his previous games, and directly addresses (the character) Davey, as the music stops, is still contrived. There was authorial intent behind the visible truss, the circular shaped lights emulating a museum – it is not a stripping away of the form of the game engine, as Brecht would search for, but the audience is still imbued within the confines of a constructed narrative, and influenced by the author’s choices on two levels (Coda and real-life Davey). This in comparison to games playing with similar concepts of alienation – Doki Doki Literature Club or Undertale come to mind, both of whom distance themselves from the visibility of the author, while relying on player choice to themselves break the confines of the game (ie: editing files of computer, etc.)
Conclusion
While the Beginner’s Guide intellectually engages with the concepts of Death of the Author, it does not exemplify it. The work is necessarily viewed in Davey’s real-life context – it does not rely on poetic vagueness at all – the strength of the narrative relies on an understanding of Davey’s real-life background and the belief that he is truly who he presents as. Like the lampposts, the game is weighted through its relation to its author, cropping up at multiple turns, rendering it unable to be truly analyzed from an audience’s distanced perspective. And, through its academic-like, linear narrative, the audience is fed a certain set of concepts to intellectualize, but not to inhabit the choice, analysis, or discovery of themselves.
Citations:
Beginner’s Guide Script: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C3INE3FlfzxsDY_BT1uO_l6SLIelBV04kJgoFoEyVJs/edit?usp=sharing
Death of the Author: https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf
Brechtian Alientation: https://www.britannica.com/art/alienation-effect
