(Just an fyi, I read the Divine Comedy last week and it’s living in my brain atm)
God, what is there left to say about The Beginner’s Guide? The game’s critical buzz has never really abated; gristly bits of comparative critics funnel through concentric grinders operating like a fountain in orbit around Wreden and “Coda” , the last cavernous mouth open at the center of things for the player to hop in and be bitten through - and strangely enough, like another undead game as manifesto, Getting Over It, critics keep themselves in the crucible and hop like fishes into that dulce maw. Of course, it’s not a difficult ask when the writing is as sharp herein as it was in The Stanley Parable, proving Wreden is not merely an apt and capable comedic dev but also that he genuinely knows how systems, when contextualized, produce pathos - systems that, when circling ever downwards through architectures and environments inescapable and, if we are less brazen at the end of things come breakdown, irreducible, cannot help but ensnare new writers every year. Unfortunately, I don’t have much more to say on the game than any astute critic has brought to The Beginner’s Guide in the last seven years (so I won’t try to ape Errant Signal, Innuendo Studios, What’s So Great About That, or Watch out for Fireballs) - what I can say is this: I think that the quality of gratuitous self displacement in game circles is proportionately massive in comparison to the toxic empathy seen in other many other mediums’ audiences (I mean, I love Mary Wigman’s dancing as much as anybody, but you never see people get so utterly invested in her or her compatriot’s subliminal ‘meanings’ as we do with fixations in games and other, to a lesser proportional extent, pop media), and this is something that requires more frequent investigation even in the wake of Davey Wreden’s time bomb. We are beset by locutions memeified because of the way games communities are able to articulate themselves in reference to the experiential empathy we incur when playing games: feeling a great deal in the experience but being unable to express those feelings due to a loss laden transliterative method of re-exacting momentums which are plainly articulated with game’s worlds/systems/context and filthily made invective when spoken, written, or recorded. This can often lead to different sins of insular connectivity: feelings of you as a player being the only one who, according to developer universal laws, ‘gets it’; feeling as though you and your immediate circle are elevated by engaging with something that cannot be other but played; feeling like a perfection of play is equally substantial as a perfection of statement. These all can lead to leaps in the infectious inebriation gamers can be drunk on (or be fused with in a pillar of flame) when forming attachment to developers, game characters, game worlds, IPs, or the intermingling of those constituents into a myst of implacable facade sighted through only by those with eyes hardened heroically against blue light. Those sightlines are less rose tinted beer goggles and more cheap 3D red and blue chintzes; Gog and Magog seeing the proper and cordial, cozy by the fire, correct understanding/interpretation of a work while simultaneously turning an icy wrath, freezing from the head down when downturned up, any dissenters of opinion. This is why, in my opinion, affirmative phrasing is often the only accepted internalizations of outside criticisms articulated outside of the game’s referenced mechanics - it’s a system which draws its meaning from solitudinal bits of emotional information. Of course, this is all just restating the premise that Davey Wreden underscores within the opening minutes of The Beginner’s Guide, but I’m trying to do what I’ve just said is difficult: put into words that which is stated by play. It’s a daunting task; one of the popular critical reads is to turn the actions similar to the in game Davey’s back on the wielding critic, self reflecting/flagellating for assuming positions held by the dev byway of inferring from a game’s impossible to translate grammar structure. But I don’t think that’s the real issue - of course assumptions made on behalf of the dev’s personality are fruitless (and frankly useless for unlocking game criticism: I mean, we’ve all read New Criticism texts, right?), but there is something to be said for agglomerating components made within games to form an extrinsic meta text that is based in the language we use to talk about games and not from within the inarticulable games’ languages themselves. Leave the individual games criticisms to other games - media will always be better at critiquing its own kind than we can - and focus on producing a different type of understanding that does not industrialize the meanings component within any art object navigated by button pressing.
At least, I think that’s what I got from The Beginner’s Guide.
God, what is there left to say about The Beginner’s Guide? The game’s critical buzz has never really abated; gristly bits of comparative critics funnel through concentric grinders operating like a fountain in orbit around Wreden and “Coda” , the last cavernous mouth open at the center of things for the player to hop in and be bitten through - and strangely enough, like another undead game as manifesto, Getting Over It, critics keep themselves in the crucible and hop like fishes into that dulce maw. Of course, it’s not a difficult ask when the writing is as sharp herein as it was in The Stanley Parable, proving Wreden is not merely an apt and capable comedic dev but also that he genuinely knows how systems, when contextualized, produce pathos - systems that, when circling ever downwards through architectures and environments inescapable and, if we are less brazen at the end of things come breakdown, irreducible, cannot help but ensnare new writers every year. Unfortunately, I don’t have much more to say on the game than any astute critic has brought to The Beginner’s Guide in the last seven years (so I won’t try to ape Errant Signal, Innuendo Studios, What’s So Great About That, or Watch out for Fireballs) - what I can say is this: I think that the quality of gratuitous self displacement in game circles is proportionately massive in comparison to the toxic empathy seen in other many other mediums’ audiences (I mean, I love Mary Wigman’s dancing as much as anybody, but you never see people get so utterly invested in her or her compatriot’s subliminal ‘meanings’ as we do with fixations in games and other, to a lesser proportional extent, pop media), and this is something that requires more frequent investigation even in the wake of Davey Wreden’s time bomb. We are beset by locutions memeified because of the way games communities are able to articulate themselves in reference to the experiential empathy we incur when playing games: feeling a great deal in the experience but being unable to express those feelings due to a loss laden transliterative method of re-exacting momentums which are plainly articulated with game’s worlds/systems/context and filthily made invective when spoken, written, or recorded. This can often lead to different sins of insular connectivity: feelings of you as a player being the only one who, according to developer universal laws, ‘gets it’; feeling as though you and your immediate circle are elevated by engaging with something that cannot be other but played; feeling like a perfection of play is equally substantial as a perfection of statement. These all can lead to leaps in the infectious inebriation gamers can be drunk on (or be fused with in a pillar of flame) when forming attachment to developers, game characters, game worlds, IPs, or the intermingling of those constituents into a myst of implacable facade sighted through only by those with eyes hardened heroically against blue light. Those sightlines are less rose tinted beer goggles and more cheap 3D red and blue chintzes; Gog and Magog seeing the proper and cordial, cozy by the fire, correct understanding/interpretation of a work while simultaneously turning an icy wrath, freezing from the head down when downturned up, any dissenters of opinion. This is why, in my opinion, affirmative phrasing is often the only accepted internalizations of outside criticisms articulated outside of the game’s referenced mechanics - it’s a system which draws its meaning from solitudinal bits of emotional information. Of course, this is all just restating the premise that Davey Wreden underscores within the opening minutes of The Beginner’s Guide, but I’m trying to do what I’ve just said is difficult: put into words that which is stated by play. It’s a daunting task; one of the popular critical reads is to turn the actions similar to the in game Davey’s back on the wielding critic, self reflecting/flagellating for assuming positions held by the dev byway of inferring from a game’s impossible to translate grammar structure. But I don’t think that’s the real issue - of course assumptions made on behalf of the dev’s personality are fruitless (and frankly useless for unlocking game criticism: I mean, we’ve all read New Criticism texts, right?), but there is something to be said for agglomerating components made within games to form an extrinsic meta text that is based in the language we use to talk about games and not from within the inarticulable games’ languages themselves. Leave the individual games criticisms to other games - media will always be better at critiquing its own kind than we can - and focus on producing a different type of understanding that does not industrialize the meanings component within any art object navigated by button pressing.
At least, I think that’s what I got from The Beginner’s Guide.