History VideoGame / TheBeginnersGuide

* AnAesop:
** [[spoiler:You cannot assume what a person is like just through their creations/works of art, and your interpretations of a work are just that -- don't project it onto the creator. Davey spends the entire story trying to piece together what kind of person Coda is through [[AmbiguousGender their]] games, only to ultimately find that he does not know Coda at all, and most of his interpretations are wildly wrong. In fact, his insistence on reading Coda as a tortured soul who needs help leads him to invade their privacy by showing their games to others against their will, which ultimately severs their friendship.]]
** On a lesser note, [[spoiler:altering someone else's artwork without their permission, even if you think it improves the end product, is just plain wrong. So is showing off someone's private work to others without their knowledge, especially if you only do it to make yourself feel good by taking in the praise from others]].

* TheEndingChangesEverything: The game is ostensibly an autobiographical tale about Davey Wreden, creator of ''VideoGame/TheStanleyParable'', wanting to show off some old short games made by an old friend of his, Coda, who inspired him to become a games creator. Davey invites the player to play them in chronological order while he narrates his thoughts on them, eventually seeing Coda go through depression and a CreatorBreakdown[[invoked]]. The later games begin straining against this premise until the last game in the collection reveals that [[spoiler:the story is fictional -- the Davey Wreden who's been narrating is ''not'' the RealLife Davey Wreden, but an InkSuitActor and that he is an UnreliableNarrator whose motivations are very different from what the premise made them out to be. Davey released ''The Beginner's Guide'' because Coda refuses to speak to him, and he hopes it'll get their attention -- but Coda disappeared in the first place because Davey tampered with a lot of their games to fit the narrative of them as a depressive artist trying to deal with their issues by making games. This changes not only the entire purpose of the story, but likely the way the player viewed Coda and their games as well, and makes it ambiguous just how much of the games’ contents was Coda’s and how much was stuff Davey added in.]]

* UnwantedAssistance: [[spoiler:Davey redistributes Coda’s games to others without permission, all the while editing them to make Coda look more like a tortured genius. While Davey originally says that he did this in an attempt to help what he sees as a lonely person who needs more friends, he later reveals that having this power over another person made him feel complete and that he's desperate to reconnect with Coda to re-kindle this addiction. Coda cuts off all contact from Davey once they realize they can't get him to stop.]]

* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: In one of the prison games, Davey talks about an argument he had with Coda about game design. Davey argued that games should be playable, whereas Coda is not afraid to add hour-long waits or difficult-to-impossible mazes in their games for the sake of artistic experience -- likely because they were just messing around and wasn't intending his games to be released.[[invoked]]

* NonHumanHead: There are numerous [=NPCs=] who, given the abstract and prototypical nature of many of the game's segments, have their heads replaced with brightly-colored squares. The squares have words on them, and they rotate them when they have to switch between multiple modes, like listening and speaking.

* DramaticallyMissingThePoint: [[spoiler:Davey continuously does this to Coda and to their games. Instead of realizing that Coda is making little experiments in the Source engine for fun, Davey insists that these a) are capital-G Games, and b) won't have any value as Games unless they meet Davey's criteria for what video games are. Instead of seeing Coda's fixation on prisons as trying to get an idea out or experimenting with the game engine, Davey sees it as tunneling into depression. Davey misses the point of "Lecture", in which a know-it-all character is revealed to be insecure and extremely passive-aggressive, noting that he thinks it's neat how Coda has exposed everyone to be this way instead of realizing that Coda's message was intended solely for Davey. There's another game in which the protagonist passes by reporters to interrogate "The Machine", holds a press conference on how The Machine has failed him, and then destroys all of Coda's games FPS-style. Instead of realizing that the protagonist in this game is supposed to be Davey and that he is harassing Coda (The Machine) for not giving him what he wants (more games that he can hyperfixate on), then telling his friends online (the press) about all of what's going on between Coda and him, all the while defacing Coda's work to get more attention directed at himself, Davey interprets the game as Coda becoming nihilistic and hating all that they have accomplished, which compels Davey to share Coda's games publicly -- the incident which led to the creation of ''The Beginner's Guide'' in the first place. By the end, the player finds out that Coda wants Davey out of their life for sharing their games with the public, at which point Davey tells the player that he released ''The Beginner's Guide'' explicitly so that somebody could help him find Coda again, not just to apologize to them but to ''beg them to continue making games just for him so that he can feel better about himself''.]]

* TheEndingChangesEverything: The game is ostensibly an autobiographical tale about Davey Wreden, creator of ''VideoGame/TheStanleyParable'', wanting to show off some old short games made by an old friend of his, Coda, who inspired him to become a games creator. Davey invites the player to play them in chronological order while he narrates his thoughts on them, eventually seeing Coda go through depression and a CreatorBreakdown[[invoked]]. The later games begin straining against this premise until the last game in the collection reveals that [[spoiler:the story is fictional -- the Davey Wreden who's been narrating is ''not'' the RealLife Davey Wreden, but an InkSuitActor and that he is an UnreliableNarrator whose motivations are very different from what the premise made them out to be. Davey released ''The Beginner's Guide'' because Coda refuses to speak to him, and he hopes it'll get their attention -- but Coda disappeared in the first place because Davey tampered with a lot of Coda's games to fit the narrative of them as a depressive artist trying to deal with their issues by making games. This changes not only the entire purpose of the story, but likely the way the player viewed Coda and their games as well, and makes it ambiguous just how much of the games’ contents was Coda’s and how much was stuff Davey added in.]]

** The ease with which Davey is able to modify Coda's maps to [[AntiFrustrationFeatures bypass some of the unwinnable parts]] doesn't just come from an intimate knowledge of the Source engine. [[spoiler:As we later learn, he's been adding other things, like [[UnreliableNarrator the lampposts he said were Coda's]]. And since Coda knew Davey wouldn't be able to resist editing their work for his own satisfaction by the end of their relationship, he designed the final game, The Tower, so that Davey had zero choice but to hack it in order to receive Coda's farewell message.]]
** You're told early on that Coda made games from 2008 until 2011, bringing up the question of what happened that he stopped making them four years before this game's release.

** In the play/theatre chapter, the lamppost appears ''before'' the actual end. [[spoiler:That's because it's the only place Davey could put it.]]

** In ''The Machine'', [[spoiler:the player character (meant to represent Davey) is a VillainProtagonist who interrogates Coda (represented as The Machine) and then holds a press conference to the press about it (a very thinly veiled metaphor for Davey harrassing Coda to make what he wants, and then Coda correctly guessing that Davey was telling his friends every detail of their’s and Davey's private relationship), then destroys all of Coda's games and the Machine itself, saying that the Machine hates the light and being seen (referring to Davey editing the games and showing them without permission to do either)]].

* ForgottenFramingDevice: The last two levels both make it impossible to take the game's premise of Wreaden uploading these games and his commentary to the internet at face value. [[spoiler: The Tower ends with Wreaden reacting to the level as if he's never seen it before and then going on to have a mental breakdown which he would obviously not upload to the internet. And the epilogue consists of surreal landscapes that are never given any in-universe explanation.]]

''The Beginner's Guide'' is an EnvironmentalNarrativeGame published in 2015 by Creator/DavidWreden.

''The Beginner's Guide'' is an EnvironmentalNarrativeGame published in 2015 by David Wreden, creator of ''VideoGame/TheStanleyParable''.

--->'''Davey:''' "And to be fair, it's not like this is the first game that's needed some modification to be playable. [[spoiler:Like the housecleaning game, you know that one used to actually loop the cleaning chores and you just cleaned a house forever, I had to cut it off so that you could exit the house and the game would actually end]]."