(This piece is intended to be read after you have played The Beginner’s Guide.)

I think of a lot of my writing as a kind of conversation. A processing. An act of giving shape to the shapeless things in my life so that I can step back from them, understand them in some way, and then move on. Like leaving a little world I’ve inhabited for a while behind me and passing through the door puzzle that appears in some of the games in The Beginner’s Guide. Narrating The Beginner’s Guide, ostensibly a guided collection of games by a designer named Coda, Davey Wreden suggests at one point that employing this puzzle gives Coda a kind of closure. But that’s Wreden projecting his own meaning onto Coda’s games.

There’s a writer named Masha Tupitsyn. If you read my other blog, the non-gaming-focused one, you know that a fair amount of my posts there are, in one way or another, responses to or conversations with things that she has written. The first work of hers that I was exposed to, her book Love Dog, challenged and changed the way I thought about my own writing. Love Dog is itself a work about engaging with other works. As Bitch Magazine said of the book, it is “a print text that’s constantly in conversation with other texts and people and mediums.” It is a deeply personal consideration of media and individuals and social systems that I, in turn, had a deeply personal experience with. And I saw some of this in Wreden’s relationship with Coda’s games, and his act of conversing with those games and articulating what they meant to him, in The Beginner’s Guide.

But Love Dog, while available to me and to anyone who might want to read it, is not mine, no matter how deep my personal experience with it might feel. I’ve tried to stay mindful of that in my engagements with Tupitsyn’s writing. The reality is that I’m bringing my own stuff to my readings of her work.  

In the book’s first entry, Tupitsyn writes:

You, X., have become a book. The person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the “you” into a world (the you that came into mine)–an Event. I think all I’ve ever wanted to do is rise to an occasion, to answer a call.

The you will make this a love letter at times, or all the time. It will be a form of address. The you will make this intimate—you, close—but will also refer to the you that is never here and might never be. The you I am dreaming of. Calling forth. Writing to and for a you will make it easier to write. I need an imaginary person on the other side of the page—for a speech act, which is always for the Other. You. Both X. and not X. I need an addressee–someone to whom I write, and just one is enough—because everything I write is really just a letter to One.

I am not the addressee, and yet I got so much out of Love Dog because it came from that place in Masha that was trying to reach one person. In much the same way, a great deal of my writing has originated out of a desire to reach a single person. That was where my energy, my inspiration was coming from. That was what was keeping the machine in me going for a while. 

The fact that I never could or would reach this person in the way that I wanted to was immaterial. Who is our audience when we are creating something and how much does it matter? Who are we trying to reach, and in what way? On what level? What meaning did I pour into mixtapes I made for one person in college? What aspects of myself were revealed in reviews I wrote for major gaming sites that were intended to reach as many readers as possible? 

The Beginner’s Guide starts out seeming to be for anyone who wants to play it. Davey Wreden welcomes the player warmly and even provides his own email address so that any of us can respond to him directly. This suggests that our personal experience with the game matters, and Wreden expresses a hope that a warm enough reception to Coda’s games might encourage Coda to start making games again. Wreden recalls disputes with Coda about the importance of the creator’s uncompromised vision vs. the importance of “playability,” that is, the idea that people actually be able to play and experience the creation. 

And I sometimes get into debates with friends about what it means to be an artist, a creator. At the risk of misrepresenting the views of my friends, the debate boils down to something like them saying that if an artist isn’t interested in trying to communicate something to people and in doing things that will help the art better communicate that, then they’re just being self-indulgent and pretentious. And my feeling is that sometimes it’s the things that make the work really challenging or inaccessible in some ways that give it its meaning, and that sometimes it’s better to be true to your impulses and create something that reaches far fewer people (but maybe does so in a way that is honest and true) than to reach more people more clearly but in a way that compromises the work. 

In any case, the pieces I’ve written in which I’ve felt I was most explicitly trying to reach just one person have often been those that have resonated with some readers the most deeply, and it’s when The Beginner’s Guide evolves from a guided tour of Coda’s games for anyone who might want to come along to a desperate attempt to reach Coda himself that it really comes alive. It’s when Wreden realizes that he has overstepped his bounds as a player of Coda’s games, that he has projected too much of himself and his own experience onto them and assumed ownership not just of his experience of the games but of the games themselves that it starts to challenge me and make me uncomfortable. 

I am all about the deeply personal experience of games. I believe that when creators send something out into the world, they relinquish control of it to some extent and have to accept that people may think things or feel things in response to that art that they never intended. Even if Coda was only sharing his games with Davey, just by doing that, he had to accept that Davey’s personal experience of his games would be Davey’s, that it was out of his hands. But where is the line, there? Clearly there is a line somewhere, a point at which you have crossed over into an inappropriate sense of ownership. That’s when what you feel like you own is not your personal, individual experience of the thing, but rather the thing itself. 

I think reactions to BioWare games provide a pretty good example of the danger that exists for people to feel too deep a sense of ownership over the creations of others. The Mass Effect games are designed to foster a sense of ownership of one’s personal experience by letting players make choices that influence the direction of the story, albeit in very limited, specific ways that have been crafted by the game’s writers and designers. 

Your personal experience of your Shepard is yours. What that character means to you is yours. But when Mass Effect 3 was released, the entitled sense of outrage and betrayal over the endings made it clear to me that for many players, their sense of ownership had gone far beyond a personal investment in their Shepard, to a sense of ownership over the actual work. 

I had a very personal experience with Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I think BioWare wants players to be able to have these experiences. In fact, what I loved about Inquisition was that it pushed back against my expectations and said “Hey, you know how in real life you don’t always get what you want? Well, even here in this fantasy world where you are the chosen one who saves the entire fucking universe, you still don’t get what you want, because these other people don’t belong to you and they get to make their own decisions.” But it is a slippery slope, isn’t it? If a game is designed to give players a particular sense of ownershiip, some players will inevitably feel like the world of the game should heed their every desire, at least until the culture surrounding games communicates to (mostly straight white male) players that they shouldn’t expect to always get their way.   

At one point in The Beginner’s Guide, Davey says that he wants to get past the games themselves, meaning Coda’s games. And I’m not sure that inherently, this is an altogether bad thing. If I had a friend who was making games like the games Coda was making, I’d see loneliness and desperation in them. I’d see things that I thought I could relate to and understand in some way. The struggle of creation. The way it’s painful sometimes, and sometimes you just don’t feel like you have anything to give anymore but you don’t know what the fuck else to do. And if I thought my friend was in pain over this, I’d want to help them. 

I admit, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that maybe Coda really was just making the games for himself and not trying in any way to reach anyone, because, like Masha, when I create something, there is always something inside me that is reaching out. The act of creating is for myself but also, in some sense, as she says, “ is always for the Other.” But perhaps it is dangerous to assume that this is true of all artists.

Masha has this piece called Saudade. This is what it says:

When people ask me what I like about you (X.), I’m not sure I know the answer. Or I’m not sure I can talk about it. Or I do know the answer, but they’re not things I can explain, or that matter to other people. In my head I know it’s partly because you are still wild. Meaning, you haven’t been completely socialized or socially brainwashed yet. That doesn’t mean you don’t have other bad tapes running through your head. But you’re not a fake, in the way that becoming (a) fake is like an American rite of passage these days. You still do and say the things you’re not supposed to do and say. You still act the way people are not supposed to act. You still feel things that people have stopped feeling, and your feelings show–they are all over your face–even when you don’t want them to. You are like a character in a movie and you make me feel like I am one too. You know–the kind of interesting, guarded, passionate chip-on-her shoulder misunderstood woman that people–men–only like in the movies. You don’t ask me to change. You don’t tell me what’s wrong with me. You don’t try to correct my behavior. You innately understood me. In other words, I think you knew me the moment you saw me. I think I knew you, too. Of course I could be wrong about all of this.

It’s that last line that I always think about the most. “Of course I could be wrong about all of this.” I see in Masha’s work a kind of simultaneous acknowledgment of the reality that we may in some ways ultimately be unknowable to each other and yet a championing of the idea that we have to make an effort, we have to reach out and try, try, try to be real with each other and to connect with each other and understand each other on levels that are beneath the surface. Even if we are all going to make mistakes sometimes, slip up, tremendously misunderstand each other, isn’t it worth trying? Don’t we have to try? 

However, the relationship between player and designer, or reader and writer, is very different than the relationship between friends, and when players feel like they can be as demanding of game designers as they could be if the game was something made specifically for them by a friend, things get ugly. 

Wreden and Coda were friends, but Coda wasn’t making the games for Wreden. Wreden felt as if he was, though. He behaved as if Coda was. And things got ugly. 

I expect that at times I have made bad readings of Masha’s work that may have run contradictory to what she intended, and I acknowledge the possibility that all of this is in some sense a very bad reading of The Beginner’s Guide, but I’m okay with that, especially since I think it is in a sense a game about a very bad reading of an artist’s work, or at least a reading of an artist’s work that takes a very bad turn. 

We can go too far. And nowadays, we often do.

It’s the lampposts that really get me. 

Where do we cross the line between finding personal meaning in a work in a way that is positive and valuable, and “adding lampposts”? 

Coda’s games weren’t Davey’s to modify, to try to make more playable or to impose any kind of internal symbolism or logic on, and they certainly weren’t his to take around to share with others. (If Coda were a real person, the very existence of The Beginner’s Guide would represent another tremendous betrayal, sending those games out into the world for all to play.)

As players, we actively participate in a game’s systems, its story. Our experience is ours. But the game is not, the creator is not, and we need to remember the difference.

I love the way this game ends.

The first time you’re lifted up by a beam, it’s a happy accident, a beautiful moment not even the game’s creator intended. I feel like, by disappearing before the end, by not narrating his intention, by just giving us the final moment and letting us sit with it rather than assigning it a specific meaning, Wreden is suggesting that it’s okay for us to find our own meanings here, just as long as we understand that those are meanings we’re bringing with us, not meanings that the artist is trying to give us. Our personal experience is real and valuable but it’s also just ours. The art is not ours to claim ownership of. Masha’s experiences are not mine. Coda’s games are not Davey’s.  

But there I go again, telling you what I think it means. And isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?