According to Steam, I spent 79 minutes playing through The Beginner’s Guide – the follow-up to Davey Wreden’s critically-acclaimed The Stanley Parable. Where the latter was a game that encouraged players to mess with a story, The Beginner’s Guide is the complete opposite. It holds you within the confines of its narrative and forces you to engage with the tale being told. Yet, people have been struggling with shelling out $10 for something that is ultimately a personal, anecdotal (and perhaps fictitious) interactive story. It’s a struggle that makes me question what it is that makes people justify the purchase of a $60-$70 game that comes nowhere close to moving a player like The Beginner’s Guide does.
I had this issue in 2013 when Gone Home was released for $20, an amount that seemed steep for a two-hour experience intended to tell a very singular story. However, once I played the game, I realized why video games do end up costing the price they do: you’re paying for an experience. It is easy to start comparing the price of Gone Home to the price of a novel or DVD, but that’s a relatively moot point to make. They are separate mediums and comparing them is weird in so many regards. The one aspect you can compare them in is what you got out of those titles. Gone Home reaffirmed my belief that video games can tell stories in ways that no other medium can, just as a documentary like The Act of Killing can leave me feeling the unjust practices of a world and contemplate the darkness of the human soul.
I spent that $20 and regretted it at first, but then discovered that I had played a complete story and one that moved me. One that had nuance in it because it was a video game. With Wreden’s The Stanley Parable, I found the price to be more than affordable because of the replyability the game offered. I could stomach $15 even if I have played 3 hours of it and replayed the game roughly fifteen times. There’s a sense of discovery when you turn on that game which few games can offer every time. I’m not the person who’s concerned with how long a game is, rather someone who is concerned with whether the story was satisfying and the experience was unique.
The thing with movies is that a lot of the experiences are unique, even if they seem formulaic. The story they are telling is usually different, and the way they tell it is key to that experience. You can remake Poltergeist, but you can’t try to copy the same scenes from the original film. Remaking something like Robocop might seem like a terrible idea, but then you realize that the themes of Robocop can be incorporated in a way that is thought-provoking and not just constant action and bloody squibs. So yes, I played The Stanley Parable over and over, but that doesn’t mean the experience was the same everytime. That justified my payment to Wreden.
Here’s where it gets a little trickier because we’ve only talked about small potatoes here. I could go on and on about The Order: 1886, but my main reason for why that game was not worth the $60 price tag it had was because it never finished its story. In fact, it introduces a secondary villain in its second act and then tears the game away from you before you even get to deal with the main villain. That is its biggest issue, and what makes it utterly disappointing. It’s a linear game and one that offers no replayability except in its different weapons which are few and far between. I could have justified that price more, though, if the story had been a) finished, and b) engaged with the player more.
Which is why I can safely say that The Beginner’s Guide justified its measly $10 price to me in just mere moments of starting the game. It outlines what its narrative is going to be, then takes you on a journey which requires you to engage with moments in the story and tells you something that is disarming. That really is the best word to describe how I felt after I finished the interactive experience. Would I call The Beginner’s Guide a video game? No, not particularly. I would call it an interactive story; a visual novel that is told with narration and minor interactivity. I couldn’t even muster up an idea of how to review The Beginner’s Guide because the only elements you could really discuss are story-based and that’s it. How was the pacing? What did the narration add to the story? Were you moved?
That latter question is something that makes The Beginner’s Guide something akin to a film. I spent $15 to see The Martian in 3D. Typically, the price is $12, but the $3 surcharge is for that technical achievement of three dimensions. I didn’t interact with anything other than to put my 3D glasses on. I sat down and let the movie tell me a story. I could tie this all into why video games feel like the pinnacle of storytelling by simply stating that the audience is active in them. When you read Heart of Darkness, you are also an active participant because the novel is trying to make you contemplate the darkness. Wreden essentially ends The Beginner’s Guide with a similar sort of audience participation. The added benefit is that he is a narrator that leads you on his own linear path, making you engage with what he wants you to engage with. If anything, being mad that Wreden charged $10 for his game is like being mad that you kept going on a roller coaster, despite having several attempts to get off.
“The Beginner’s Guide is a narrative video game from Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand.” – Product description on Steam for The Beginner’s Guide
Sure, you paid that flat rate of $10, but you weren’t misled about anything. The above quote is from the Steam page and outlines everything that will happen in the game — except for the twist, which I’m not going to reveal. As you open the game, you get more of an idea about what the story is going to be, but you know going into this that it is a story. The one thing I am not trying to do is persecute those who feel paying $10 for The Beginner’s Guide is too much. I get that people have different income-levels, as well as different pedestals they put story on. I value story greatly, and so getting a complete and satisfying story from any game immediately makes it a worthwhile experience. But if the game itself is bad and gets in the way of the story, I’m probably going to dislike it more.
My main point from all of this is that video games have the power to push storytelling forward as a medium in ways that we’ve never seen. You can get big-budget AAA games like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor that push narratives forward through mechanics like the Nemesis system, but you can’t get that in a film or book. The added benefit of interactivity is not something to ignore, which is why charging $10 for The Beginner’s Guide is probably one of the most sane pricing schemes I’ve seen. It’s a story that never dupes you into thinking it’s anything more than that. Yes, you control the camera, but you don’t control the story. All you do is control the pacing to a very minute degree. Its interactivity is what makes it have the impact it does on the player, though. That is why we shouldn’t berate The Beginner’s Guide for being $10 when most games can’t even competently tell a narrative – let alone by seamlessly integrating interactions with the player.