Reading the Calling Cards in The Beginner’s Guide
The Beginner’s Guide opens with a confession. The Counter-Strike level looks like a desert town, but it is littered with floating boxes and bright cubes that have no business being there. Davey Wreden calls them “calling cards”: reminders that the game was made by a real person. “They are all going to give us access to their creator,” he says. “I want to see past the games themselves. I want to know who the real person is.”
The joke is that the game immediately does this to itself. The audience does not just want to learn about Coda, the purported author of the levels; the game is also a portrait of Davey, the narrator and editor. And since Davey is a character voiced by the real Davey Wreden, the whole structure folds inward once more. Whatever the fictional Davey tells us about the fictional Coda, the fact that the real developer chose to build this narrative says something about his own interest in authorial intent.
Motifs and Their Interpreters
The game repeats several visual motifs: labyrinths, unsolvable puzzles, unreachable domains, floating shards, self-doubt, and communication. Three artifacts appear often enough to stand out. The triple-dot pattern is supposedly Coda’s, and Davey openly wonders what it means. The door puzzles are also attributed to Coda, but here Davey supplies an interpretation without hesitation. The lamp-posts are different: Davey admits he inserted those into Coda’s levels himself, a calling card that Coda explicitly rejects.
The attribution of meaning is the game’s real subject. Davey never treats all the artifacts the same way. Some he questions, some he explains, and one he owns outright. The pattern is not random; it tracks who has authority over the work.
The Machine Does Not Fit
The Machine levels stand out for another reason. Davey reads Coda’s search for The Machine as a quest to recover creative drive. That interpretation sounds plausible on its own—the fear that one’s best work is behind them, that current work is hopeless. But the gameplay does not match the reading. The player interrogates the machine, intimidates it, denounces it in public, destroys their own work, and finally destroys the machine itself. Clicking through those dialog trees is perplexing. Who attacks their own creative drive in front of an audience? As a portrait of a blocked artist, it rings false.
The resolution comes late, after the game is over. Davey frames Coda’s games as messages Coda sends to himself: solipsistic, thousands of unsent “internet comments,” conversations with a former self, a performance of social anxiety followed by withdrawal. But the games do not look like self-talk. They look like a conversation between two people—specifically, between Coda and Davey—and the conversation is about Davey’s progressive violation of Coda’s boundaries.
Davey comes on strong at their first meeting. He is seeking inspiration at a dark time. He breaks Coda’s games, skipping labyrinths and hacking past puzzles. When he asks for more playable work, Coda responds with hundreds of empty games. The more Davey searches for meaning in the work, the more explicit Coda’s rejection becomes. The Islands are not Coda searching for their own creative Machine; they are Davey searching for Coda. When Davey becomes a mediator, presenting the work to the public and seeking validation, Coda produces a Machine level in which Davey captures, interrogates, and critiques Coda themselves. Davey’s revenge speech to the public is accompanied by literal holes blown through Coda’s worlds—increasingly intimate spaces, mirroring the way Davey hacked through labyrinths, jail cells, staircases, and tower puzzles.
The Machine is Coda. And the player is not, as Davey argues, Coda’s own hand. The player is Davey.
The Tower and the Audience
The conflict between an unreliable narrator and an absent subject becomes explicit in the Tower level. The level spells out Davey’s violation of Coda’s privacy in literal terms. The player, through curiosity, has become complicit in that violation and is now present in an uncomfortable, intimate exchange between two characters. The scene reveals an ugly truth to Davey, but it also destroys any remaining trust between the narrator and the audience.
The signs were there earlier—Davey becomes unreliable somewhere around the Comments level—so the Tower’s emotional peak is somewhat diminished on a first reading. Still, it works, because the breach is not just narrated; it is enacted on the player.
After the Tower, the narrative collapses. Davey drifts away with vague justifications and mutters something about working on himself. Coda is absent. The question of who built the remaining levels—Coda, Davey, the team speaking as neither—is left open. The player commits suicide in the game and finds, again, a labyrinth.
The distinction matters. A labyrinth has no branches and no choices; the path is one-way, meant for reflection. That is what Davey offers the player at the end. The artifact in the game is not actually a labyrinth at all. It is a maze: branching, deceptive, and full of dead ends.
