Sin Apocalypse Cash

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 4

Eron Rauch — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:13:21 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 4

Eron Rauch Mi. 19 Okt 2016 - 11:13

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the final part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - the previous parts can be found here

“It’s hard to create a narrative of success when you’re the dark matter against which the stars shine, but I find that it’s important for artists to be able to articulate what is valuable about art beyond prices and the market.” -William Powhida

Continuing last week’s discussion of the The Beginner’s Guide as an attempt to trigger an apocalypse to wipe clean the slate of video games, it is useful to note that in Japanese creation circles, there is a genre of animation and comics called sekaikei (literally: “world type”). This genre places a single character, almost always male and young, as the center agent in the future apocalypse. This character’s psyche alone gets to remake the world, but only as it burns to ashes. The interior becomes the all-consuming exterior. While perhaps the capstone of this genre, Neon Genesis Evangelion is unique that that it leverages the dark logic of fandom to subvert its perfect apocalypse and decry the passivity and literalism that threatened to stifle the future of anime fandom.

The Beginner’s Guide, if read as apocalyptic in intent, could also be part of this genre. But it portrays a vision of the future world that comes from deep privilege and is unmoored from history. Evangelion was grounded in a disturbing vision of the future glimpsed perhaps most painfully through the terrible AUM fan-cult nerve gas attacks that killed twelve people in the Tokyo subway. This cult was inspired by anime, and Evangelion followed nerd-logic to it’s painful end to try to disjunct fans out of a similarly hapless tragic destiny. Such a future must reconnected to society will then of course be painful and awkward, but Evangelion tried to show that it is also better future than the alternative. The Beginner’s Guide also tries to harness flaws in nerd logic to kindle the pyre of apocalypse with the art and criticism community as kindling, but its aim seems to be to try to placate fans from the pain and disappointment that inevitably comes with art, life, community, and the uncertain future.

Of all the criticism leveled against the sekaikei genre in the decades that followed its heyday, it is that by hyper-focusing on the singular, antisocial, interior perspective of the young male leads, it imagines a world, as scholar Motoko Tanaka observed in her article “Apocalyptic Imagination”, “Without meaningful inter-subjective relationships and confrontations [so] there can be no substantial communities and societies sustained.”

While it might sound boring to say that art should foster “substantial communities and societies,” phrased another way, it is really hard to give any credence to an art object that doesn’t seem to be aware of multiplicity, potential, growth, change, failure, or the other. So even if we take the view that The Beginner’s Guide is a sekaikei, or some other form of apocalypse, to put the redemption of the self, let alone the whole social order of the world, on the shoulders of art is to imagine that each artwork must save the world. Which is once again to succumb to a deeply conservative theology that divides the world into two sides and places them at war.

The Beginner’s Guide is trying to foremost demonstrate its power through negation - by denying community, history, and critical thinking.

Though perhaps dispiriting at first glance, that is precisely why we should listen to Anselm Kiefer, the great German artist whose works have often broached the incredibly traumatic Nazi past his country, who intoned, “You could be seduced to think that art can redeem the world; It cannot.”

Here in The Beginner’s Guide, we have a game which is trying to foremost demonstrate its power through negation. But by denying community, history, and critical thinking, it places itself in a double-bind since it has no way to calibrate or judge the efficacy of that power or even to envision a role for art in the world. The goal is not to save the world, or even make the world, but it is to be part of the world, which is messy and troubling and filled with uncertain outcomes.

In her essay titled “On Ghosts, or why I never want to be anybody’s muse,” Cara Ellison has observed that what art gets made is deeply tied to the social preconceptions of who is supposed to have a voice in art. Specifically, that young white males with money have far and away the most agency and expectations to publicly make art, so their stories tend to dominate at the expense of other voices. Here again, we have a young, wealthy, male lead, standing up to martyr themselves for our education; to show us how to delineate the binary parameters of creation; to defend themselves against the outrageous slings and arrows of the messy social world; and if necessary to call down the apocalypse itself.

Continuing in the apocalyptic vein, Kris Ligman has famously called The Beginner’s Guide a, “neurotoxin for critics,” and whether that toxin was the intentional weapon or a byproduct of the game’s defensive mindset, its inevitable use is quite telling not just about the results of the The Beginner’s Guide, but about why the whole class of meta-ironic art objects are so problematically self-serving. The game seems to be defense mechanisms all the way down, but because critics (and dedicated fans) are some of the first responders to any art-minded video games, this means they are first social group that the game will have to neutralize so it can reach its martyrdom uncorrupted.

The Beginner’s Guide serves to reinforce and entrench the self-segregation of video games from art; from culture; from the rest of the world’s societies.

Through framing the critical community of people who talk and write about games, with their attempt (albeit imperfect) at plurality and context, as the primary location of “the video game problem,” The Beginner’s Guide only serves to reinforce and entrench the self-segregation of video games from art; video games from culture; of video games from the rest of the world’s societies. “The first rule of video games is don’t talk about video games.”

By front loading a pre-refusal of all criticism, like the cat in the video knocking every object placed near it off the table, The Beginner’s Guide is choosing to bat away dialog, community, and anything that is part of the human social sphere. That is, it is pre-refusing anything small enough to fit on the table. You can buy The Beginner’s Guide, and have your interaction outside of it, just like your non-interaction with your Ikea shelf called “Lack.” The perfect hyper-capitalist spectacle.

In the end, these sorts of over-clever, self-congratulating, self-negating works of art seem radical at first. But similar things have been around for years. Admittedly, they were a particularly wonderful way to escape the deeply entrenched classism and nationalism that defined art in the 1800s. But now, in an era of hyper-capitalism, the commitment to defensiveness only serves to shore up market position as the primary source of legitimacy. By denying any sort of model of art that is inclusive to the vast field of conversation and community, the art work is by default embracing the abstraction of the market.

Simply put, the market gives no fucks about whether or not you want to talk with it, and the market is far too big to knock off a table (in fact it probably sold you the table). It only cares how it can use the object-idea to further extract resources. Then the market is happy to show off how valuable these non-objects are as a beacon for the world to stand in awe of, and mutely emulate. They are the yin and yang of global capitalism. So in the end, these sorts of hyper-clever defensive works of art (think Jeff Koons) merely serve to shore up the market as the primary source of legitimacy, comprehension, and valuation.

While young nerds can see it as a rebellious virtue that The Beginner’s Guide can absorb and withstand any criticism thrown at it, these amorphous, ironic objects are in actuality the perfect expression of art as a commercial pursuit. Because nothing critical or social can affect them, they are a one-way-path that can ultimately do nothing but take, absorb. They are completely compatible and complicit with the most egregious excesses of globalized wealth. In fact, as Andrea Fraser has pointed out in “L’1%, c’est Moi”, a huge percentage of the top art collectors in America are actually hyper conservatives who seem to, for instance, have no problem buying a giant Christmas tree butt plug from Paul McCarthy while working to remove gay rights and replace artist studios with million dollar lofts.

Wreden was already a part of that global financial elite before he made The Beginner’s Guide, becoming a millionaire off of The Stanley Parable (as the New Yorker has pointed out). But here, the relationship between creator and fan-consumer may even be more insidious. Unlike the monied elites of the art world, the people who spend $15 on the game are probably way less rich than Wreden. Which makes hyper-defensive works even more problematic since if no reaction to art can be effective the resulting world is far from a jolting revolutionary blast, and instead a vision of the world held forever in an icy status.

While the game certainly deserves some respect for broaching some of these issues of shifting narrative identity, artistic negation, and apocalyptic imagination, it is hardly a model to emulate. Indeed, it seems to begrudge and belittle the audience at every turn, and turn reticent and petulant when it is engaged in any sort of critical dialog.

The world of The Beginner’s Guide assuredly has a few rich veins of artistic thought that could be selectively mined to great effect in future works, especially through foregrounding discussion and criticism as viable topic for making art. But any audience, especially the young male artists it has positioned as a core audience either through intention or accident, would do well to try to understand how many of effects the game’s selfish and defensive propositions lead to stunted and restrictively negative vision of the social and artistic world.

The Beginner’s Guide settles into the natural state of hyper-defensive artworks: as abstract systems which gather more resources for their creator and investors.

After the initial pleasant tingles of danger, bluster, confusion, vainglory, and apocalypse, The Beginner’s Guide settles into the natural state of hyper-defensive artworks: as abstract systems which gather more resources for their creator and investors. These projects then consume a portion of that capital, monetary, social, and artistic, to produce more artworks which are inevitably designed to ever-better defend themselves and to negate everything else in society and community that interfaces with it, no matter the cost.

With these sorts of conservatively dualistic and combative art-systems taken as core values, video games like The Beginner’s Guide construct a toxic vision for the creative world. A world fixed in place like the pre-Copernican heavens, with art-nobility re-entrenched by their inscrutable, monumental, infinitely defensible artworks. A universe of sweet angelic puppets built in the image of their gilded creator-god, fixed all around the celestial sphere, with nothing to do feel sing their sweet nothings forever more. Amen.

The complete long-form essay can be found here. All English features on VGT can be found here

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Mi. 19 Okt 2016 - 20:43 Permalink

Hook, line and sinker. Thank

Hook, line and sinker. Thank for this deep look under the surface of the dead water that is TBG. I am conflicted now.

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 3

Eron Rauch — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 06:04:31 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 3

Eron Rauch Mo. 17 Okt 2016 - 08:04

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the third part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one and two can be found here

“One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.“ -Catherine Opie

In last week’s installment of “Sin, Apocalypse, Cash” I discussed ways that replaying The Beginner’s Guide provides expanded choices for audiences to interact with the game, and how those supposed choices are still mired in a simplistic and antisocial framework for art. Yet, let’s approach The Beginner’s Guide again from another angle to see if there is perhaps another, less obvious, social interface that is happening.

First let’s take stock of what the game has going for it: Well, this video game-cum-art project certainly manages to come across on the surface as too clever for the “norms”, and frightens them because they think it is (probably) a trap. What underground fan doesn’t like a little bit of projected danger? By almost all critical accounts the game has a few striking visual images worth scrutinizing. The Beginner’s Guide also seems to have a nice air of rebellion about it, since it seems to be designed to sow doubt on the critical establishment. On top of that, like any good horror film, it possibly has one big conceptual flip if we're willing to say that that first screen about audio is worth considering. It also foregrounds the avantgarde ideas of unreliable narrator and updates them a bit for the digital era.

I, at 35, shrug and go “Whatever, man. I know all this shit already. Get your head out of your ass.” But maybe I’m not its audience. Maybe after play-through number three The Beginner’s Guide should make me feel bored and annoyed. Maybe it is so defensive because it needs the freedom to discover these ideas for itself, for its generation.

And maybe, more than a trap, more than conceptual art, more than a cheap trick, more than a failure, maybe, just maybe, The Beginner’s Guide’s is just a really naive and flawed attempt to build room for generations below mine; a true Guidebook for Beginners, a Beginner’s Bible, in the sense that it is trying to Begin Again with a new generation of gamers. This mindset is on clear display when you start to tally the incredible frequency with which the narrator asserts large parts of the game are not made for you-the-audience.

To frame this new perspective on The Beginner’s Guide more specifically, maybe I’m just too old. After all, the creator is about 10 years younger than me, and I certainly went through a world of problems in my mid 20s. Maybe his angst is real. Mine was (even if it seems misguided now). Maybe his fans, younger again than the creator, give him conciliatory blow jobs in convention hotel rooms hoping to cheer him up. Maybe they think he’s smart and serious and deep-as-fuck. I mean, that’s certainly a narrative that is par for the course with most of the other arts from music to theater to painting to poetry.

Maybe, everything else aside, this game is aimed at people who think Sephiroth is a really relatable #edgelord. Specifically, the narratively reimagined hand-writing of the Wreden-narrator aside, Wreden’s real-life company is no Tale of Tales, who infamously quit the video game world to enter the broader art world. In fact, despite framing itself as a misunderstood outsider, The Beginner’s Guide won great critical acclaim, and made a number of best-of-the-year lists. It is a very successful game by most criteria. This is a game that can be seen as speaking to, or at least at, the video gaming community.

All bullshit hyperbole aside, if I played The Beginner’s Guide when I was 16 I probably would have thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was always wobbling along, being depressed, making art about being depressed, wrapped in deriving meaning from what I saw to be a masochistic emotional landscape existing simply to pile on pain and misunderstanding. I had all those same fatalistic Romantic notions of art and life and suffering and sex and mental illness that young male artists of the avantgarde tend to get told combine to form a properly serious artistic worldview.

The Beginner’s Guide might seem so defensive because it was designed to challenge and then annihilate all comers spectacularly.

If we were to step back a bit and disabuse ourselves of the assumption that The Beginner’s Guide’s audience is a mature art audience, despite its constant engagement with quaintly naive avantgarde tropes. But what audience would be so egotistical as to be able to completely ignore all of the unending protests and tirades about being “not for you” and still internalize that, yes, it is all about them? Which is to say, any precociously artsy nerd teenager.

Even more, maybe we can see something much grander from the simple observation that this video game, made by a 24 year old, seems so defensive because it was designed to challenge and then annihilate all comers spectacularly. What if The Beginner’s Guide is explicitly a giant “fuck you” to your (my) Marios, to your Lego Star Wars, to your Sonics, to your Final Fantasies, to your Dooms, and to the whole of the festering, constipated bowels that has become the game “industry” and “fandom”?

The Beginner’s Guide might just be a move straight out of Phillip K. Dick at his worst: an apocalypse happens and everyone’s body and spirit are destroyed but are reformed in some virtual space and has to go on living with new rules. With a whole new group of gamers who start, begin, a new lineage of games rediscovering these (to me rudimentary and juvenile) meta-art understandings. The whole game is the trigger for an honest but painful mushroom cloud-swirling-formation, the remnants of suns forming into new suns.

I’m not saying that it is a particularly new or even a particularly useful thing to do, but what generation doesn’t have a dream of inserting itself as the new zero A.D. of the cultural calendar? God knows, if I was that age or younger I would be seriously disappointed in what my and the generation older than me has handed them in video games. I would see all the bullshit hyperbole-cum-advertising that passes as game journalism, the viciously entitled core fandom, the cliche pandering of the industry, and want to burn it to the ground too. I certainly felt that way about most mainstream music and comics in the 90s.

But before we bask in the glow of the new-video-game-earth, no matter your age, imagining that any indie-game apocalypse would solve the problems of video games is ahistorical thinking at its most dogged. Perhaps the plan goes off without a hitch, laying the video game landscape as a sheet of blasted glass. Perhaps the feral children will survive and build their Voxel tree forts. But like The Onion headline “Man Thinking About Just Packing Up And Making Exact Same Mistakes Someplace Far Away,” thinking that knocking apart the community around an art would fix all of the [perceived] problems does nothing to prevent those outside of the blast zone from rushing in to implement their ideologies.

The old neo-con dogma of "crisis capitalism" outline by the Rand Corporation - which led to the endless American Middle East wars after 9/11 - specifically states that any apocalyptic moment can be leveraged for profit by the people with the most power.

Wreden's utopia is one without games critics, without fans, without communities of thinkers, without intentioned makers.

If The Beginner’s Guide is a trap-cum-trigger that starts the apocalypse for game history, starting with a specially tailored neurotoxin for critics, then creeping to fans who want to talk about the game, then people who play the game, then people who have only heard of the game, and onward like the oh-so-cliche-but-fan-beloved-zombie-apocalypse, then its vision for the next world is a utopia without games critics, without fans, without communities of thinkers, without intentioned makers. What is left in this new world are but the vast shibboleths of Nintendo, Sony, Apple, and Walmart as the only game in town. They will assuredly survive any small art apocalypse.

The other parts of this essay can be found here

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 2

Eron Rauch — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 08:02:32 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 2

Eron Rauch Fr. 14 Okt 2016 - 10:02

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the second part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one can be found here

“Why, impervious to both affirmation and negation, why in the world this insistent, subsistent, irrepressible, pure repetition be it of nothing, why a picture? Why this picture?” -Jacques Roubaud “Some Thing Black”

In the first portion of this essay I examined why players of The Beginner’s Guide often perceive the game to be a trap, and the ways in which the game’s internal logic leads it to formulate art as martyrdom. But what if I’m approaching the game from the wrong angle? What if I overly focused on the naive macho egotistical vision of art and the purifying flames of antisocial creative angst? There certainly seems to be a radically alternative way to approach the game in a second play-through.

Remember how the narrator implores you to make sure you have audio enabled? I certainly just double checked my headphones and moved on the first time through.

What if we refused to obey the narrator’s most rudimentary commands – like the very first one to enable audio?

After all of the bellowing and moaning and self-flagellating of the last third of the game, it is interesting how I now notice that, restarting the game, the game really takes some seriously awkward time up-front to insist that the player has the audio enabled.

If your annoyance and distrust of the narrator’s emo tomfoolery was anywhere near the amount of mine, by the end of the game you would basically go out of your way to do the opposite of what he says. Even if your reaction wasn’t so visceral (indeed, I’m dramatizing what was simply exasperation and distaste), the narrator, and even the game itself, has been shown to be highly and multitudinously suspect. So why would a player listen to even the most rudimentary commands?

Or to put it more directly: a savvy audience member would leverage that distrust and read that as a cue ignore the [highly unreliable] narrator, which would mean muting the audio. And leave it that way…

…for the whole game.

Just walk around most of the spaces and explore. A player probably can’t easily finish the whole game without the narrator on the first play through, since there are a few button sequences that are verbally cued, but it would be quite easy enough to remember or to write them down for a second play through. All said, simply by muting the audio, it would be easily enough to have a long pleasant meander around some well-realized, oft-romantic, and subtly surreal spaces in the game.

Viewed in this light, perhaps The Beginner’s Guide’s blustering surface is hiding a much more interesting conversation about aesthetics and tactile understanding, and our assumptions about the broadness of choice we’re given in any art work or game.

But if we were to indulge in a reading about authority and choice, we would need some clues, since simply noticing that muting a game makes the game different is true for many video games. But in The Beginner’s Guide, there is a highly distinctive split. The audio is ironic, fragmented, and contemporary. The visual imagery is romantic, symbolic, and rooted in the past. With the audio on, there is a tension between the rambling disordered dialog, and an impulse to see some poetic reflection of existential crisis in these fragmentary digital landscapes, which is also a direct topic that narrator character addresses repeatedly.

Lest you think I’m being facetious, the reason I think playing without audio is a totally valid option, not a gimmick, is that as I mentioned above, the narrator is very specifically set up as an unreliable narrator. But this is only half true. One of the most intriguing innovations in the game is that more than an unreliable narrator, the Wreden-narrator-character is specifically an unreliable programmer.

For example, we know the narrator has ostensibly added lampposts (a rather overly literal symbol) and will happily modify another programmer’s level at will. He has re-developed these games he was supposedly promised to never show, or that were designed to be unplayable. So in the paradigm of unreliable programmer, having a narrator bluntly ask a player to do something rudimentary like turn on the audio would be qualified as really bad design in traditional video game development. It is clear that not only is this creator-character unreliable and whiney (oh so whiney) but they are also set up as a “bad” designer. Indeed, within the most rudimentary chronological narrative logic of the game, the audio, even more than the lampposts, must have been added well after the fact.

Touching again on the player’s impression that the game is a trap, part of what makes the game suspicious is that the imagery seems set up as a more sophisticated and self-aware foil for the verbose hyper-earnest narrator. All of the space the player explores becomes an even more potent counter-argument to itself if players actually treat options that are traditionally non-choices, such as audio, as choices.

To use a crass phrase, at its most fundamental the “core mechanic” of The Beginner’s Guide might actually be all tied to that decision to leave on or mute the audio. It might be the most significantly impactful choice a player can make aside from not playing the game.

What if, upon playing through the game once and being belligerently verbally grandstanded at, then having chosen on the second time through to play with no audio, there is now a third play-through that combines both insights. The Beginner’s Guide, at its core might be best understood as an art work that is designed to specifically train people to free themselves from the sanctity of narrator-cum-artist-cum-critic-cum-curator.

Rather than, say, jumping harder jumps, or shooting faster enemies, The Beginner’s Guide could be seen as teaching players to ignore ever more emotionally charged personal information about "creators.” About learning to ignore the “intention” of the creator, no matter how ferocious or facetious, and to have our own opinions. From this perspective the game could seems to be a full embrace of critical independence and a celebration of the death of the author. Which would be basically the exact opposite of what we perceive to be the trap on the first play through.

The Beginner’s Guide might be about learning to ignore the “intention” of the creator. Or maybe not.

While it is fun to propose playing The Beginner’s Guide without audio, and may well have been an intended way to experience the game on a second or third play-though, it is hard to avoid growing suspicious again puzzling through the results further imagined future playthroughs. Whether it is narrative martyrdom to show the audience the purity of the creator, or the meta-martyrdom of training the audience to forget the creator, the core function of the game is still rooted a vision of the universe with art as an act of martyrdom, and the viewer as sinfully complicit. This is a world founded on binary opposites.

Even when the game is at the most self-referential and meta-critical it has a very conservative, pre-modern way of understanding and interacting with the world by putting things in opposed categories. In a basic way, it is very akin to the Protestant dualistic universe: creator/audience; critic/artist; naive/savvy; internal/external; known/unknown; happiness/angst; healthy/sick; creation/destruction; success/failure; public/private; and most fundamentally, perfection/sinfulness, a fundamental formulation of right and wrong that forces judgment on thoughts, intentions, and preponderances alongside actions.

This oscillation between physiological states might simply be brushed aside as the game dealing with a conflicted subject, which can help to give a world depth. But the game shows an understanding of conflict in a far more literal-ist way. The Beginner’s Guide seems to propose that these dualisms are very real and indeed are in a vast celestial war with each other. Whether we-the-crass-audience are choosing by fiat, or the game is a divine oracle, only one can survive; only one is right.

But what is it trying to win? What is this battlefield? What is this apocalyptic war it seems to envision itself as being the ultimate weapon in? Treating art as akin to war is an explanation for so many of the problematic aspects of what the game does: It lays claim to ownership of a wide swath of radical thinking, but then tries to “win” at art by any means possible; wallowing in defensiveness, irony, reductiveness, shell games, contrarian spats, and a cryptic outmoded vision of art based on sin/perfection dualities. Someone has to win, and that brutality leaves no place for the civilian: no place for society nor for conversation; no place for art nor culture.

The Beginner’s Guide seems most concerned with erecting a monument to honor itself for protecting itself from the messiness of other people.

The initial impression of The Beginner’s Guide as being some meta-criticism of art in the age of smart phones, VR, micro-transaction, and DIY gene sequencing always gets bogged back down in its Puritanical militant world view. The Beginner’s Guide’s vision of art, even if it really is trying to train its audience to engage in new and drastic ways with authorship, is at the end no different than a Call of Duty mission in a museum: a binary mindset that vastly limits the experience of the player to a series of survival choices tied to predefined categories.

But this world of cleanly defined combatants is the inverse of the open-ended mode that characterizes deep artistic experiences which is an acknowledgment of more than simply the unknown, but of polyvalent grandeur and the vast, wondrous, and often painful, unknowability that is other human beings. Swathed in static dualisms and a defensive wartime mentality, The Beginner’s Guide is deeply un-radical because at its core, it seems most concerned with erecting a monument to honor itself for protecting itself, and by egotistical proxy all art, from the messiness of other people.

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Sa. 15 Okt 2016 - 05:12 Permalink

http://www.renemagritte.org

http://www.renemagritte.org/empire-of-light.jsp

Drigs Mo. 7 Nov 2016 - 08:16 Permalink

You can actually turn the

You can actually turn the narration off in the menu after the first playthrough and experience the so-called Coda Mode. You cannot skip any parts of the game this way.

Brett Sa. 24 Dez 2016 - 17:16 Permalink

I disagree with an assumption of this piece

I do not believe this idea of dualism is inherit in the game, no more supported than the belief that Coda is a nihilistic and depressed person. I think the game is a narrative of someone seeing something in a work that isn't there, delivered more effectively by leading the player to experience it with the narrator, only to expose their misconceptions. Its a good lesson, and encourages thinking critically about media, even itself.
Of course that reading invalidates itself, hence the difficulty of talking about this game, but regardless I'm just trying to say I think you're reading too much into it, are you, hell if we'll ever know, but that's the point.
Bloody hell this train of though just goes round in circles.

On another note, Lay off the narrator, he fulfilled his role in the story, very convincingly in my opinion.

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 1

Eron Rauch — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 10:45:12 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 1

Eron Rauch Mi. 12 Okt 2016 - 12:45

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the first part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide.

“What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again.” -Gabriel Orozco

When I mention that I’m working on an article about The Beginner’s Guide, first there is a pregnant pause, mouth slightly open, then a lingering awkward silence. Then the seemingly inevitable question follows, “Did you play The Stanley Parable?” eyes narrowing, moving side to side, as though scanning the horizon for the shadows of danger.

Amongst video game fans and critics alike there seems to be great trepidation about voicing an opinion about The Beginner’s Guide. The impulse seems to be to treat the jolly fun of Davy Wreden’s unexpected smash hit first game The Stanley Parable as a safe vista from which to view the thorny and problematic The Beginner’s Guide. Given the very public torrent of ennui that Wreden expressed at the success of his first game, and how the standard narrative is that his internal struggle with fame led to the creation of The Beginner’s Guide, it is probably expected that most fans look beyond the gates of The Stanley Parable and see the path beyond grow narrow and haunted. After all, as it is told, they should be suspicious, since it is their fandom and love that drove the creator to his future darkness.

While perhaps The Stanley Parable was a bit of good smart fun that skewered the tropes of first person shooter video games with devious Monty Python-like aplomb, players and critics seem to suspect that Beginner’s Guide is akin to one of the many chess openings your overly-clever friend in junior high learned from a musty book and then used to beat you over and over until you found some other friends to play Dungeons & Dragons with. An opening planned from the beginning of Stanley Parable, to trap… beginners.

Aside from the reviews by the video game press which pen the game as, “neurotoxin for critics,” or, “the only way to win is not to play,” the building suspicion that the game is a trap is foregrounded right in the overly ironic name. I mean, why would you trust any sort of “Beginner’s Guide” from the person who made The Stanley Parable, a game that took vast glee in undermining as many of the player’s fundamental expectations as possible?

Based on the conversations I’ve had and articles I’ve read, the assumption seems to be that The Beginner’s Guide is a trap laid with the bait of the broad success of The Stanley Parable. I mean, the date demarcated for the final fictional game presented in Beginner’s Guide is the same date The Stanley Parable was released. How nice and neat is that for any critic or any player?

Obvious.

Like a trap.

But while The Beginner’s Guide certainly feels like a trap there are many other social models we have that we should also use to see if they fit the bluster of The Beginner’s Guide: For instance, magicians who do a card trick with too much setup. Or maybe it’s more like a band that talks too much during their set breaks. Or someone that explains their own joke before telling it. These are all mannerisms designed to hide insecurity and manage expectations.

In the Internet Age, there is a deep tendency to overuse these artistic buffers under aegis of kitsch and irony, but with a misunderstanding of the radical potential of those terms seemingly born of Alanis Morrisette’s classic song and an un-ironic love of Family Guy’s comedy-as-oneupmanship. When you are worried that the audience might not be into your magic/music/art/game, why not adopt an ironic, but ultimately highly defensive tactical shift that effectively moves the conversational point away from the work with a wink-and-a-nudge?

So what is actually going on here with The Beginner’s Guide? Do we have any clues as to if the game is a trap or not; if it is an earnest or ironic trap; if it is a naive or sophisticated trap; if it is intentional or not? How would we determine these parameters; and most critically why does it seem like most of us are predisposed to make a very narrow set of assumptions about these parameters once we have experienced our first playthrough of the game?

If the game is a trap, or even some sort of milder prank, there would have to be some sort of reasonable harm threatened, and at least an outside chance of something foul happening. What kind of trap, if any, are we dealing with here?

The most obvious case for a meta and ironic video game like this would be that we would be tricked into expressing an opinion that would embarrass us with our friends. One similar tactic I’ve seen throughout my life as a music fan is in the guise of the overly-ironic friend that makes up band names and asks people if they have heard of them, pontificating “they’re so great!” with a wink. Nothing like a little emotional shell game to negate some anxiously imagined onslaught of criticism that would come with actually engaging with other people.

But given the overly literal linkage between The Stanley Parable’s release date, the deluge of high-school macho-ist Fight Club versions of suffering artist, and all of the banal slurry of metaphors of creation unleashed at us, it seems like that trap never springs. After all, as I noted earlier, the first question everyone seems to ask in a conversation about The Beginner’s Guide is nicely historically rooted, “So did you play The Stanley Parable?”

Maybe the trap is to waste our time with something meaningless? But that two-ish hours I spent with The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t bother me nearly enough to feel deliberate when I’m yet again suckered into playing what must be my 1,000th game of League of Legends. Not even within a couple orders of magnitude of wasted time. Besides, most folks, including myself, seem to have found a few interesting moments in the game. So the stakes are too low for this to really matter, especially given the vast scope to which Wreden and his team were willing to play with the “Art Ending” in The Stanley Parable, which is achieved by pushing a single button for four hours straight.

Maybe this game is not really a trap, but just self-insertion fan fiction

I suppose a variant of this trap is that we would be suckered in to giving him money for something we assumed would be meaningful because of our preconceptions and then it wasn’t worth the money. This seems the most likely trap so far, but making the game took a whole lot of time and money, so it would have to be a really long con which, as noted above, goes against the game’s overall scale and sales model. Besides, making worthless art is pretty much impossible in the age of Youtube and Tumblr, since any random bit of detritus we find drifting around the world can be reworked, remixed, and reused in interesting ways.

Maybe the trap is being exposed to an opinion we normally don’t hear. But the various models of art and games in The Beginner’s Guide are pretty much the dominant pop-cultural stories about struggle, the creative process, and the moral perils of success and fame that we’d read about on The Huffington Post: A young dude, now wealthy, struggles with the way a vastly larger audience than intended responds to his work, has to deal with the emotional fallout, and makes an observation that fans tend to assume they know him. That’s not really a trap, that’s just self-insertion fan fiction.

Maybe the trap is more naively literary, where we’re supposed to really, earnestly, trust the narrator. But while the highly amateur performance of the voice-over might lead us to think this is a possibility at first initially, the game repeatedly shows us how unreliable and unknowable the narrator and his curated world is. It is clear within a few minutes that we’re not meant to trust this person, nor his opinions, nor to envision that anything within the game is as what it claims to be, which gives the audience almost unlimited license for interpretation and criticism. Yes, that means doing and thinking the opposite of what the fictionalized pseudo-Wreden instructs us, but from within the story, that seems like a perfectly reasonable, and in fact probably the most common, response to such a character.

Upon exploring all of these possibilities, it seems clear that whatever is happening, our perception that the game is a trap has nothing to do with its ability to do us harm. We aren’t Futurama robots whose heads will explode after hearing a paradox. We can always quit playing. It’s not a virus that deletes our hard drive if we quit. It is clear, and if anything a bit too naive, about its reference points in art and culture.

Our initial predilection to view The Beginner’s Guide as a trap is because so many of elements of the game seems to be behaving in a selfish, defensive, ahistorical, and antisocial way. Which denies our personal experiences, denies conversation, and as such denies our role as viewers/players.

I know that might seem like a bit of a jump, so let me use an analogy: We don’t perceive arguing with someone about the moon landing being faked as a trap because it might trick us into suddenly believing the conspiracy. We perceive it to be a trap because the conspiracy theorist isn’t willing to engage with any reality outside of themselves. It is not a trap because we waste our time arguing (after all, we often argue about the same old shit with our long-time friends) but because we quickly realize that the mental and conversational model of the moon-landing-denier is built exclusively and selfishly around themselves as a god-king arbiter of reality. It is a trap because if we chose to engage with their phony logic systems, we are necessarily devaluing ourselves and placing ourselves in a subservient relationship to an egoist.

Specifically, the phony logic systems of the The Beginner’s Guide are its models of art and creation. Whether stated or implied, whether ironic or earnest, all of its versions of “the artist” and “criticism” and “creativity” and “the individual” are pretty much tethered to a pre-modernist sensibility couched in dramatized art-cliches stolen from Hollywood movies, urban fantasy novels, video games, and anime. Any mention of other ideas, models, or approaches, academic or personal, artistic or social, are dismissed as being part of the conspiracy.

The Beginners Guide demonstrates only the most rudimentary and rigid vision of the relationship between art and life.

The Beginner’s Guide is so suspicious because while it blusters naively about complexity and unknowability, it at the same time demonstrates only the most rudimentary and rigid vision of the relationship between art and life. The game seems to be built on the premise that the audience will never be able to grasp the deep arcane secret that the David Bowie we see in Labyrinth both is and isn’t himself. He is both his stage persona and acting as the Goblin King at the same time.

In this way, the trap we intuit is not aimed at us-the-audience, but it is the inevitability of the game getting caught in its own logic trap, convinced to the heavens that it is the first to notice and run through the wringer these curious tensions between art, artists, celebrity, society, money, and audience. Without any desire to engage with anything outside of itself the game is left with but one option - to position art production as a form of martyrdom.

This is a game that has become trapped through making a virtue of its artistic isolationism. Not only does the The Beginner’s Guide seem to flaunt its dismissal of the audience’s savviness, it frames this break from isolation as a wearily needed excursion to explain to us our [art] sins and to take up the mantle of [creative] martyrdom for our sake. It is nothing less than a form of art colonialism. In fact, the internal logic of the game seems to naively imply that knowing or exploring ideas developed by other people, whether players or artists, whether audiences or critics, is a honied trap that lures an artist away from a life lived in true purity. Like sex to a saint, this predictably leaves us-the-audience as the ultimate sinful trap for a creator. Art, in The Beginner’s Guide, is framed as inherently pathological.

Part 2, 3 & 4 of this essay can be found here.Also, check out VGT's other English Features

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Do. 13 Okt 2016 - 01:14 Permalink

Outstanding Labyrith/Bowie

Outstanding Labyrith/Bowie reference. I litarlly did not see it comming. Nice one. Wreden deliberately taking on both sides, so we may fall for his work as much as he falls for coda's. Gap/Trap... The beginner's guide left me mostly speechless and again, I'm in awe. I don't know if it's internal logic is binary like perception or intention, the artist and audience relationship being a purly pathological one. But I know how traps work. Once you're in, you're doomed.