The Artist is Absent

As if this game couldn't be more meta... I posted about this game on the book face and how it made me feel (I too had a friendship rapidly go south so my reaction was similar to Ian's), and a friend who took the recommendation had an almost exactly opposite reaction.

You explained a bunch of ideas I was only passingly familiar with really well. I really loved this video thanks!

I can't believe you've made another video where, by the end, I am left thinking "how is this guy so good and how do I become him." I can see why it took you so long to write, though. Brief as the 'fundamentals' parts were, I can imagine each took quite a bit of time to research then simplify and truncate. I remember borrowing a semiotics book from the university library in college and it starting way too far of where I was. Then again, I was a science major, so what did I know. I actually had to sit here and think for a few minutes to remember what I took when I first played Beginner's Guide. I know I loved it, thought it was much more honest than Stanley, and made me feel that much closer and inspired by Wreden. At the same time, it sort of sealed for me the idea that people who make things on the internet may seem approachable, but they really should be given the same space I'd naturally have between myself and, say, Al Pacino. In the end, I thought it was about the frustrations of creation, of making something and feeling it is bad, or forgetting why you started and having to reconstruct its meaning to finish or continue with it, or it being perceived as a completely different story than what I intended it to be, and so on. The idea that this is just a sample from a relatively young medium of how far compiling and decompiling a work can go freaks me out. I'm a physics major, and I've always wanted to write (and enough strangers have complemented my writing unknowingly to know that I've got _something_ going), but learning about all of this makes me feel like I could never add to what has already been done.

Hey! When I first played Beginners Guide I was completely flummoxed at the online analysis of it. I found it all lacking, as if Game Reviewers™ realized they were facing something complex and layered and felt like pointing out that fact was doing it a service. Looking at it from the perspective of "is Coda real?" or "I dunno I think this game may be trying to SAY something" feels like monkeys looking at a black monolith and wondering if it's full of pudding.

I didn't know what to expect when the script kept growing but this was so good that I actually became very excited when you mentioned linking some further reading in your video description. Excellent work.