It is generally accepted that we can understand a person from observing the creative output of that person. A happy person is expected to create happy music, and thus if we hear happy music we expect the composer to be a happy person. If the music over time develops into something more aggresive, it’s not too far fetched to believe that something has changed inside the composer. In the “game” The Beginner’s Guide the narrator is probing into the mind of a friend, a hobby computer game developer named Coda whose creations were never intended for the public eye. We get to play through a number of Coda’s quirky and personal games while listening to anecdotes and analysis on the themes of his games, and the conclusion is…
The Beginner’s Guide is obviously an extremely pretentious interactive experience, but it works very well for me. It made me thinking quite a lot about how creativity works, its driving forces and the intentions of making a game at all. These were 90 interesting minutes inside another person mind, followed by additional interesting time within my own mind.