Dave Critiques - The Beginner's Guide: Is it anti-critic?

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I’m going to be discussing The Beginner’s Guide for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers (and this is a 90-minute game that has quite an impactful narrative revelation), please pause the video, and play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

I’d like to start this off with a quote by Ed Smith over at Kill Screen on The Beginner’s Guide.

“Everyone wants to look like they “get” games, or that they respect art, but ultimately their displays are hollow since they’re more interested in intellectual credibility than actually just speaking honestly about and enjoying the work.”

This quote may not have had the emotional impact that the end of The Beginner’s Guide does, but it affected me on a much deeper level. Such a quote brings into question the purpose of what I’m doing. Am I writing about games simply because I love games and want to express this love, or am I looking for intellectual validation? “Oh that Dave guy, he writes some smart stuff about games.” Heck, one of my favourite things is to share work I find intellectually stimulating or funny with others, to see reactions. I attach myself to the work I share, and get a measure of joy when someone reacts positively to it. I am aware that the work is created by another person, but I gain a measure of satisfaction from being the person who let someone else know about a piece of art I enjoy. It’s safe to say that I was very sympathetic and understanding of Davey Wreden’s motives and plight during this game.

It would also be disingenuous to say that I don’t enjoy the creation of these videos. Unlike sharing work, my criticism is the combination of two hobbies: playing games, and writing about games. Actually throw in voiceover and video editing in there as well. Basically, I found a way to turn playing videogames into its own form of artistic expression. Some people see critics as parasitic, attaching themselves to art to serve their own ends, but criticism is indeed its own artform. It’s part interpretation, part translation, and a whole lot of guess work. Half the fun of writing about games (or any art really) is choosing the angle you’re going to be writing from. Most often this choice is dictated by the uniquely human experience of the writer. I tend to focus on my emotions and choices when playing games, but then fall into discussing aspects of the games themselves I find interesting. It goes to show that with any piece of art, the finished product might not have been able to meet the artist’s intention.

It’s entirely possible to read The Beginner’s Guide as being anti-critic. Davey isn’t just walking us through the games of Coda, he has altered them to suit his pre-determined conclusions. His blatant disregard for the wishes of his friend lead to the game’s conclusion, and shows a lot of what I’ve just discussed turmoiling around in Davey. This need for external validation by sharing the work of another is one thing, but what about actually changing the art itself? Critics often are criticised themselves for the connections some make to support an interpretation, but there is a difference. An interpretation that causes any audience to think that the critic is stretching themselves past breaking point to justify said interpretation; such an interpretation can be argued, ridiculed, or ignored. It invites discussion and response just like a piece of art does. If you change the art to make your point however, well The Beginner’s Guide takes the position that there is a real problem with that and it can do a lot of harm to the artist.

Coda is not making games for an audience, he is making games for himself, and he has chosen to share them with a small group of people, Davey being one of them. That the games are mostly unplayable on purpose is part of the art that Coda is making. This is a dilemma that might be unique to videogames. Not only a piece of art that can’t be finished, or that forces the audience to spend more time than they thought they were going to, but a piece of art that can be changed by another person to circumvent these problems (if you even see them as problems in the first place). If someone makes a 5-hour long movie filming a streetlamp, an audience member can fast forward it, or if it’s on YouTube, skip around. This doesn’t change the original video in any way. If you share that video with only one friend, they could edit it before sharing it with others. They could add sentences to your written story, they could change your painting with their own brushstrokes. Writing this now I wonder if The Beginner’s Guide is making a comment how once art is made it no longer belongs to the artist, or perhaps that’s only true when an audience is introduced, even if that audience is only one person. It does seem to take Coda’s side on the matter though. Like the relationship between artist and audience cannot coexist alongside friendship.

I don’t think The Beginner’s Guide is anti-critic however. As said earlier, Davey isn’t just interpreting Coda’s work, he is changing it. He is effectively making his own work on top of Coda’s and then reading into it to make himself feel validated as the audience of this game agrees with his views. That is if you believe what Davey is telling you. One of the core questions of the game that has been discussed a lot is how much of the game is actually real. Is the Davey Wreden of The Beginner’s Guide a fictional character, or is this an actual depiction of a betrayed friendship between two game designers that took place in the years around 2010? If the answer is anywhere on the spectrum between these two positions, then how much can we believe, and why? There are a lot of inconsistencies with the story. For instance, if The Tower was Coda’s final game, what is Davey playing in the epilogue, and how many of Coda’s games didn’t he show us to support his own findings. How many games didn’t Coda send to Davey? What if there never was a Coda to begin with, in reality or fiction? Why does The Tower seem to be Davey in real time when he needed to have played through the game to change it for you as the player?

While The Beginner’s Guide isn’t anti-critic, I think it speaks to the dangers of trying to understand an artist as a person from their artwork. You can gain glimpses into what they were thinking or feeling at the time they created the work, but even speaking to them about it won’t likely give you the whole story. The university game is the best example of this. You never know what other people are going through, why they do what they do, and why they create what they create. As a critic, the best you can do is interpret and make a case for a point of view. Since the criticism is filtered through your unique life experience (especially if you enjoy writing from a subjective viewpoint), then those that are the audience for your criticism encounter the same problem in understanding you as a critic from what you wrote. It’s interpretation all the way down.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - The Silver Case: It doesn't matter what it's about

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be talking about The Silver Case for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest you pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

In 2007 I played Killer7, and I think it changed my perception of what games can be. It’s kind of weird to say that and not have it be hyperbolic. Despite the unintuitive rail shooting, odd controls, and scattershot plot, when it finished it was like nothing I have ever experienced in a videogame before, or likely since. Heck, it made me read a 50-page plot FAQ to understand an interpretation of what I just went through. Granted I haven’t encountered many stories overall that play with characters being representative of more than one thing, but definitely not in a game. It made me a fan of Suda51 as a game developer. The year after, I bought No More Heroes, and while it wasn’t as grandiose in its ambition, it cemented my fascination with the man’s work. Also, it was one of the few games to really think about the controls of the Nintendo Wii in a genuinely creative manner. I’ll always remember the smile on my face during the first cell phone conversation with Sylvia Christel.

Over the years I’ve kept up with his work and have enjoyed it to varying degrees. Subversive elements are hidden in big budget action titles like Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, and Killer is Dead is the closest I feel we've gotten to recapturing some of that Killer7 magic. I even played Flower, Sun, and Rain when it was rereleased on the DS. That one is hard to get through. A groundhog day visual novel where the solution to every puzzle was hidden in a guidebook about the island your character was spending his reoccurring day in. It seems the further you go back in Suda’s work, the less user-friendly it is. You have to be willing to endure some levels of obtuseness or tedium to fully engage with the interesting elements. If anything, as Suda has made more games, he’s been able to hide the most interesting elements under the surface of mechanics and user interfaces that are more accommodating to your average player. With this in mind, I was fully expecting to have a difficult time with the remaster of The Silver Case; Suda’s first game under his own studio Grasshopper Manufacture.

The Silver Case like Flower, Sun, and Rain is a visual novel. You play a silent protagonist that is part of a special forces unit that gets slaughtered by a master serial killer who has escaped from a mental hospital. After this happens, you find yourself working at the heinous crimes unit of the police force and engage in some cases that all have something to do with Kamui the serial killer or the strange circumstances surrounding him. During this time you get to know most of the members of the force relatively well, but this is only half the game. The other half is following a journalist who has been hired by a mysterious benefactor to investigate Kamui. These episodes run in-between the case files and usually follow the events that you just played through as the heinous crimes unit. In some cases, your investigation spells out what just occurred during the case. This was beneficial during the case titled Parade where the CEO of a corporation gets kidnapped, and the background of why was very ambiguous in the case itself (or I just wasn’t able to put it together as I was playing it). Tokio’s section afterwards put the pieces together and made the whole thing a lot more impactful. Of course when the story kind of spirals inward on itself at the end, I found Tokio’s last section kind of confusing. The game doesn’t end in a satisfying manner. I won’t say there are more questions than answers as that actually isn’t the case. The story does wrap itself up nicely, but a lot of the details confused me. Either because they were introduced too late or I didn't see threads that might have been woven through the whole story. I think The Silver Case is one of those works of fiction that would benefit greatly from going through it a second time, if just to understand what’s happening as it happens.

The thing that you sometimes have to ask yourself playing a Suda game is if the annoying elements are there on purpose. For instance, Tokio’s investigative sections can become overly tedious. The only interactivity in these chapters is to walk to your computer to check your email, talk to your pet turtle, or answer the phone. It echoes the sections of the case files when you find yourself in your apartment, although the special forces character you play exits the apartment after checking his email or looking in the mirror to go work the case. That leads to more interactive opportunities, limited as they may be. Tokio just gets to walk around his apartment. When he goes out investigating, it’s a cutscene. The player is stuck in almost a Groundhog Day repetition of waking up, walking to the computer, checking it, and having the plot move forward. Perhaps this idea is what lead to the creation of Flower, Sun, and Rain, which uses these repetitive elements to increased thematic effect. The tedium still stands in both cases though. Is purposeful bad game design to make a point still bad game design? If not, how do you tell the difference? Papers Please was pretty overt in that the tedium of your job is part of the point, but when does a developer gain the benefit of the doubt in these matters? Is it when they have something interesting to say?

I will admit, there were times I thought about not continuing with The Silver Case. The plot had me lost, the interactive elements were almost non-existent, and boy is the game long for what it is; around 12 hours. There was something that kept me going though, and I think perhaps it was the ideas at play. I want to say it can’t be the characters. The reason I want to say that is that they’re written in such broad strokes. There are about as many uses of “motherfucker” as you’d expect in a Quentin Tarantino movie. There’s this veneer of machismo, that what makes a man tough is saying “fuck” every second word, and then threatening anyone who makes a joke at their expense. When we first meet Tokio and senior detective Kasubi, this is the impression we have of them. As we spend more time with these characters, we do see that this is a facade that they use to hide the real issues plaguing them, or perhaps it’s a response to the horrors that they have to deal with in their line of work. It doesn’t make it any less adolescent, but you start to accept it a little more because you know where it’s coming from.

But we do get to know these characters, or at least we thought we did until the end. All bets are off in the end. The whole plot is a vast conspiracy and it seems almost everyone is a part of it in some way or another. The corpses pile up in the last couple of cases, and even the epilogue suggests that the murder count and cause of all the problems are far from over. After all, the character you play is still alive. When serial killers are educated as children, brainwashed and controlled by the government, and you play a defected product of that experiment, well it probably would be a lot safer to not let such a person be walking around. Although I do wonder if that’s even what the game is about. There’s talk of crime as a virus, and how even the most abhorrent ideas can be praised by society. As the game was made in the late 90s, there’s a lot of talk about how the internet is going to affect people’s lives and society in the new millennium, and the ideas and concerns don’t seem altogether that dated. Hell, it even has a similar reveal as the first season of Psycho Pass as to what is actually needed to run this perfect system. It’s just a little more ludicrous.

And it’s not a style over substance thing either. Even though one thing that struck me was, I have never seen a videogame that looks like this before. The background movement, the colour schemes chosen for different cases, the portioning off of the screen for small pieces of animation, or the use of video along with the mix of 2D and 3D art. It definitely makes an impression. There is substance here. It’s just not told in a straightforward manner, and the game 's not really as engaging as one would expect a game to be, even a visual novel. I think it’s more interesting as an entry into the games of Suda51 to see a style and sensibility start to emerge. To be able to track that from the beginning, to where the gameplay becomes more important, and yet how the ideas have not been sacrificed.

Thanks for watching.