The Beginner’s Guide - Another Bloody Retrospective
WARNING - There are some mild spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide in this post. Read with caution! The Beginner’s Guide has certainly thrown everyone for a loop since its release. Many pieces on it have been somewhat vague at best, mostly due to the almost paradoxical message it communicates. At its core though, I believe the Beginners Guide to be an exploration of how we value ourselves and those around us. Something that concerns both the creator and the consumer.
Value is a fairly complex concept. It’s used to define what is most important to us, and to other people. It helps us compare, contrast, calculate and ascertain. The value we place on each other, ourselves, and our creations is at the core of the dialogue within the frame of the Beginner’s Guide. It’s clear the stance of valuing one’s self through the eyes of others is one the Beginner’s Guide is trying to drive home, going so far as to call it a ‘disease’ of some kind. And while the narrator certainly comes to this conclusion, I believe the piece’s ultimate goal is to directly ask the player: what do you value?
While the game may appear to revolve around a personal story, the final scenes reveal the Beginner’s Guide to be more about self-reflection. As the player moves through the last few levels, it gives them time to contemplate the piece as a whole. The seemingly never-ending maze within the final moment of the game serves as a meditation on the ideas at play, on their depth and complexity, ideas that encompass both genres and mediums alike.
We would like to think that we don’t take any outside opinion when it comes to valuing ourselves, but this would be untrue. Humans are built to observe their social environment, and make judgements based on those surroundings. As such, we always seek confirmation from our peers as a survival technique. When I finished the Beginner’s Guide, I was, as the narrator puts it, almost in a state of illness. I saw myself pawing over my multitude of attempts at approval. Not even specifically from my peers, but from everyone.
Some time passed between when I played The Beginner’s Guide and when I wrote this piece. Since then, many things have happened in my life that have made me rethink what I value and whose views I deem valuable. This coincidental synchronicity between the game and my life crystallised in a moment of clarity that is affecting me on a much larger scale than a video game customarily would. Can it all be attributed to The Beginner’s Guide? I’m still not sure. The initial impact of the game was deep, but the real lucidity came much later. It’s difficult to tell if The Beginner’s Guide is purely the creator’s story, or if it’s making an exquisitely broader statement about value in general. Regardless, it certainly made an impact. What that impact is exactly is something many of us are struggling with. Yet we certainly can’t argue with the magnitude of it. Article written by Benjamin Wallis Edited and Proofread by Eleanor Rigg
