I Played The Beginner's Guide And This Is My Lamppost. Also, Thoughts On Criticism And Museums

28 5月 2024

i thought i was going to not write a post about the game, but since i already wrote so much on discord explaining my spoilery thoughts on the game, i might as well.

i played The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe and The Beginner's Guide back to back for the first time today, so i was pretty detached from most of the context. the only knowledge i have of TBG was innuendo studio's video, which turns out to be a tangential tutorial to reader-response theory lmao.

so playing this game was interesting to me because while i know what the game was about, i was surprised by how blunt the messaging is. it's literally saying "bro, parasocial relationships between critic and artist are bad". i was quite surprised and shocked to read reviews that didn't get what this game is about.

the more positive appraisals kinda elude me too. they're talking about The Meta and what it means for reading and i'm just kinda confused. i'm really unsure why people are hung up on how to know whether they're forcing an interpretation on davy or coda.

because, to me, everyone is doing that.

i certainly won't install a lamppost on some alt game, but the idea is still similar: every interpretation we make is a curation. we choose what to keep and what not to keep. in the context of TBG, it's extremely artificial: we skip labyrinths and ignore the three dots thanks to davy because he has a particular interpretation of coda as a tortured artist recluse and he wants us to see that.

but i also think all criticism is bound to do that. we make claims/narratives based on how we review a game: XYZ is a masterpiece of puzzle games, ABC is about racism, DEF explores the repressed homosexuality of an author, that whole deal. we're going to carve out our explanations like that, sometimes with finesse and sometimes by hurting them.

the way i think of criticism/interpretations is like curating a museum. let's say you are trying to narrativize the historical memory of atrocity: how should you begin the trip, what should the museumgoer anticipate as they walk through the exhibits, what colors should be used for walls, any audio to be used, etc. you are trying as best as you can to compress the multidimensional forms of an atrocity into a few minutes of walking through a museum.

at the same time, such museums are going to be omitting something. there will be conflicts of interests: the curator is likely to have a stake on the subject matter and may even have -- gasp -- an agenda.

for example:

https://louisthings.itch.io/monuments-to-guilt

Monuments to Guilt is clearly a digital museum with a political goal: to show that we have made it inhospitable for homeless people to sleep soundly. if we actually cared about homeless people, we would build them houses. instead, we don't solve their problems and instead make their lives more terrible. going through this digital museum hurt me and made me realize the seats i've taken for granted are uncomfortable as shit.

i changed as a person. good museums kinda do that to you. museums with good curation will make you accept a very compelling, multifaceted narrative about historical events. i don't know everything about accessibility in seats, but it piqued my curiosity.

in the case of The Beginner's Guide, the most meta it went for me is how cognizant i am of the "designed identity" of the museumgoer/player and how poorly constructed it is. i, the player, have to accept that davy is an authoritative voice and trust their curation to be complete. the "player" (not me but the Idea of the Player) should agree to everything what davy has said because he made a pretty swell game called The Stanley Parable and he even doxxed his own email. however, there are several times when i started to distrust the Voice of the Curator and saw several games, especially at the very end, to be critical of how davy abused his relationship.

the very end of The Beginner's Guide is when the museum/curation collapses. the player identity is revealed to be a sham, they're not the fellow understander who will work alongside davy. instead, the player's role is to reinforce the critic's own readings as valid. they are the audience nodding to what davy is saying until the very end where the illusion dies and they're just a yes-man to davy's bullshit.

i find this pretty cool. obviously, the real designer davy has constructed the game in such a way that the player will realize they have been duped all along and it's executed pretty well. they become aware how they've accepted the narrative and reinforced the self-deception davy the critic has. this designed identity is very cool and deserves more analysis than what games criticism has currently done.

i also find campster's video on The Beginner's Guide so fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAbh28j11RQ

you can just skip to the ending if you value your time. the more relevant text is as follows:

"So I'm either analyzing the game that says, 'Analyzing games is often done to the detriment of the work and the benefit of the analyzer' -- and let's be clear, I have edited this video to help me make my point, is that any different from Davy skipping the Whisper maze ... 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 again I'm just as bad as Davy."

this is utterly fascinating to me. i think campster presents the two choices quite well and struggles with the ethical dilemma of being a critic. be an exploiter or be an asshole. it's hard to tell if this is a Bit because he echoes the breakdown davy has and wonders if he is projecting onto the game before saying "Game criticism must be more than that, right?"

my personal answer is campster's worst nightmare because i share in the nihilism the game has: everyone writes criticism to gain something of value. i do it to advance my own craft as a game designer and fiction writer. some people do it for youtube videos. perhaps, game criticism is an art form like aaa games because they're extracting value.

like a curator who is struggling to keep things together, the game critic is going to construct their reader/player. they are creating a narrative on how to read the game, like davy on coda's games. i sorta wish they understand and own that responsibility: media criticism often benefits the critic because they increase their social capital if done well. they gain more social acceptance, people will admire them more, etc. even if people hate the critics, they are going to know the latter's names more than the designers who made the game. this is why this extraction of value needs to be dealt with by responsible people who are willing to attribute and respond to creators well.

i think players and critics then and now are too owned by the fact that curation is a messy project. they are afraid of putting lampposts in places that don't exist. being told you're oversimplifying is scary, i get it. but honestly, they should accept they're doing harm -- they should accept they're doing epistemic violence.

no good curation is flawless. there's always things we can talk about, framings we can be questionable, etc. the point of discussing about curations/criticism isn't "what can be done better" but "what isn't explored and how can we talk about it in light of said curation". there will always be something missing.

my lamppost says that the breach of trust with coda happened because davy was sharing the game with modified assets and saying "i know what coda is trying to say and so, i'm speaking for them". that goes beyond responsible curation: that's speaking for a person who cannot speak for themselves. but curation itself, already a toxic dynamic, is fine: we need to curate the elements of media that interest us and narrativize them into pieces of legible criticism that people can read. as long as we own the violence and talk about it, this is fine.

and yeah, this means erasing stuff that does matter to the author. that's cool if you aren't literally editing the game files -- way too violent. it's still terrible, but you can't be ultimately comprehensive to find some ultimate message the author has left behind. you can only have an interpretation that you've created, a "narrative" that you've grabbed from digging through the game. any interpretation is going to be "damaging" the game.

so i think game criticism is curation, nothing more and nothing less. and curation is epistemic violence no matter how you spin it. it's apt that The Beginner's Guide is a museum of personal games and you're being guided by a terrible curator. in a "better" world, davy the curator would have asked for permission and allowed coda to speak once in a while. while i write for personal betterment, i also hope my articles work as good museums for the media i write about.

that's pretty much it. okay, bye.