"Just make sure to complete [The Beginner's Guide] within your Steam refund window..."

[Problem Machine]

Yeah, or any story written from the PoV of a dead character. The only thing that makes TBG unusual in this regard is that the game tacitly acknowledges the existence of the commentary apparatus, equivalent to a character talking directly to the camera in juv3nal's example. And it'd be totally fair to find that jarring, I suppose, but it would be difficult to untangle from the core concept of the game in this case.

[clyde]

I think I asked an irrelevant question above. Let me try again.

The versimilitude of The Beginner's Guide's conceit was broken so intensely at various times that I began to think the story was about an unreliable author writting a story starring an unreliable narrator. So instead of buying in to the fiction that this was a autobiographical work, I was building a persona of the fictional author that was being expressed through what we were seeing/playing. By the end, I felt that making assumptions about this fictional author was a preparation for the audience to then make the same types of mistakes Davey made without making assumptions about the person, Davey Wreden, himself. So I saw the holes in the conceit as something that was actually intended to make the audience start to bypass the narrator as the main character and start thinking of the author as one.

[zerofiftyone]

I saw this a few weeks ago and thought it would be good to share here. It's from the guy who made the "

" video a few years ago.

[Problem Machine]

I think I asked an irrelevant question above. Let me try again.

The versimilitude of The Beginner's Guide's conceit was broken so intensely at various times that I began to think the story was about an unreliable author writting a story starring an unreliable narrator. So instead of buying in to the fiction that this was a autobiographical work, I was building a persona of the fictional author that was being expressed through what we were seeing/playing. By the end, I felt that making assumptions about this fictional author was a preparation for the audience to then make the same types of mistakes Davey made without making assumptions about the person, Davey Wreden, himself. So I saw the holes in the conceit as something that was actually intended to make the audience start to bypass the narrator as the main character and start thinking of the author as one.

I think I addressed this. In TBG, the narrator is also playing the role of the author of the game. You can go another layer down and think about an author writing the author character... who is also 'Davey', and also played by the narrator, so that kinda ends up being a turtles all the way down situation. I'd say that's a feature rather than a bug, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.

[clyde]

I think I addressed this. In TBG, the narrator is also playing the role of the author of the game. You can go another layer down and think about an author writing the author character... who is also 'Davey', and also played by the narrator, so that kinda ends up being a turtles all the way down situation. I'd say that's a feature rather than a bug, but I suppose that's a matter of taste.

 

I think the concept of an audience adding a layer of fictional frame-work over and over again until they reach a point where the piece is comfortable to interpret is actually really interesting, so thanks for that. I guess what I am trying to say is that the "flaws" some people point out about TBG in order to disprove the conceit of the framework, I see as prompts for the audience to break the conceit (so that they can add an additional layer of frame-work until the reach a point where the piece is comfortable enough to interpret).

I should mention that after watching Davey Wreden commentate over a Twitch-stream of two people commentating over TBG, I no longer think that Wreden intended the audience to believe that the non-narrator author was fictional, but I still do.

 

 

That was a nice video zerofiftyone, it helps to have someone lay out some concepts for meta-textual analysis like that. As a bonus, I enjoyed seeing the meaning of TBG that the video-maker felt was general and corroborable enough to feel confident about settling on.

[Jake]

Over the life of this game how have seemingly so few talked about about Adaptation (the Charlie Kaufman movie where he wrote a fictional version of himself into his own script*) or Kaufman in general when talking about The Beginners Guide? It seems 100% to me like Wreden is going for a Kaufman thing - a complete work of fiction that draws as much or little from the authors life as any piece of fiction, with the fresh wrinkle added to the mix of the author himself appearing as a character in the story - but (maybe since he narrated it himself instead of hiring an actor? because it's a video game?) people seem massively confused by it and can't seem to shake themselves free of the idea that some part of it is "real."

* the movie also includes Kaufman's twin brother who is a creation entirely of the movie. The brother suffers from fewer hang ups and neuroses than the ones that plague "Charlie Kaufman" (the film character), and through working things through with his brother he ends up sorting out a lot of his own problems. Like Wreden and The Beginners guide, there is no way of knowing how the process of writing the script for Adaptation impacted Charlie Kaufman - was he working through some very real and similar issues in his psyche to those expressed by his fictionalized self in the film, using his brother (or Coda) as a fictional sounding board and reflection point to probe his inner thoughts, or did he just think, maybe, the idea of a person doing that was funny and weird and would make for a strange and unique and compelling story? "Davey Wreden" or "Charlie Kaufman," the characters, are not real beyond sharing names with their authors. Like any fictional characters they went through months of editorial process, re-writes, re-recordings and reconsiderations before their creators were done with them. So really I believe it's impossible to know, I think, and also probably not worth knowing when it comes to assessing the work. I mean, just because the author is a character in their own work doesn't mean death of the author shouldn't apply. Is all this way off base?

Whoops missed that video! Watching it now.

[Jake]

Oh man, I like this image/analogy a lot.

[mikemariano]

I saw this a few weeks ago and thought it would be good to share here.

 

At first I thought I had previously seen this but I hadn't and it's good!

 

 

"Davey Wreden" or "Charlie Kaufman," the characters, are not real beyond sharing names with their authors. Like any fictional characters they went through months of editorial process, re-writes, re-recordings and reconsiderations before their creators were done with them. So really I believe it's impossible to know, I think, and also probably not worth knowing when it comes to assessing the work.

 

This is really good.  I felt in both works that the fictional relationships felt complete.  Donald never felt fake to me—he wasn't just a foil to Charlie; he had his own goals and relationships.  And Coda demands an identity separate from his relationship with Wreden—one that Wreden will never know.