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thisrocksandwhy · 5 years

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The Beginner’s Guide: Can I write the same thing twice?

Recently I watched Ian Danskin’s video essay on The Beginner’s Guide called “The Artist is Absent.” In it, he uses (and flawlessly explains) theories of art, language, and storytelling such as semiotics, death of the author, and enunciation theory to propose his reading of the game. Danskin suggests that the game is warning us not to mistake The Beginner’s Guide’s author for its narrator. In other words, a work of fiction should not give a reader the sense that they now know about the person who wrote it; they only know about the work itself. And I agree with this reading wholeheartedly. However, I still stand by my analysis of the game, that Davey the Narrator represents an ego that constantly criticizes the self while Coda stands for the artist’s persona that is challenged by societal norms, audience expectations, and even their own ego’s chatter. So, to reconcile the two, I’d like to make some amendments to my past article.

But first, rather than simply editing the post, I’d like to discuss whether I have a right to change it, since this idea is thematically relevant to both the game and Danskin’s video essay.

To illustrate the concept of authorial intention, Danskin asks if The Sopranos’s creator David Chase should retroactively be able to determine that Tony dies at the end of the show. Danskin’s answer to his thought experiment: “Fuck this guy!” If Chase wanted to explicitly convey this in the first place, he should have put something in the show to indicate it rather than the vague ending he did write. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the ending of The Sopranos, but we don’t need to have seen it to get the concept. Stories are meant to be interpreted by their audiences, and authorial intention doesn’t have to be considered. People can come to conclusions just from the evidence in the text. However, historical and cultural context along with author biography are incredibly useful tools for analysis, so a text’s readings don’t always have to be isolated to the text either. This is a more complicated question of art theory that I’m not going to try to argue. I’m simply presenting the reader’s (assumedly your) perspective on this question of whether I can change my article. According to this train of thought, I could say what I now believe and would like to change, but you don’t have to consider it relevant and should judge my previous work as it was originally presented. Fuck me, right?

Now, if I were to use The Beginner’s Guide as my guide on this issue, I think the game would support an antithetical position. For interpreting and even changing his games, Coda says to Davey the narrator “Fuck this guy!” (my paraphrasing). The Beginner’s Guide questions the role of the audience in interpreting art and the artist’s responsibility to its audience. Art is usually thought of as something that is seen, something that gains value once an artist lets an audience see it. However, I suggest that art that is unseen by the public can still be valuable, specifically for the artist. Put simply, art is expression, and personal expression can be valuable without anyone to hear what was said. Coda makes games just to make them. But do I write essays just to write them? In some sense, I write these for others to read them, to express my thoughts to others and test their credibility and clarity. However, these essays are most valuable to me; I get to conjure up concepts and realize them on the page through language. I get to look back on these records of my thoughts and see how I have changed since I wrote them. These words are much more valuable to me, since I know exactly what they mean while readers will only ever get close to understanding – that’s not a knock on you, that’s simply the nature of language (Danskin simply and elegantly explains this concept as well in his essay). The Beginner’s Guide offers a similar view, that art can be valuable without ever considering its accessibility or an audience’s enjoyment of it. Here lies another complicated issue of art theory which I will not firmly debate, merely present a school of thought on the matter. With this concept in mind, though, I do have every right to improve my work so that I may more thoroughly enjoy it, and I shouldn’t have to consider you readers when I change it. Fuck you, right?

Hey by the way, I just wrote all of that, and now I’m realizing I don’t actually want to change anything. I brought up the whole “I don’t know Davey Wreden” thing in the article too (and in the title; I feel dumb).

Hi, Will here. That last bit may have come out of nowhere. Let me explain. I wrote all that at around midnight on October 2, 2016, and I’m currently reading it all again on May 30, 2019. This is gonna get meta. I’m now responding to an article I wrote about responding to an article I wrote about responding to a game (about a guy responding to a game designer). This act of responding is what I wanna talk about.

This article means something completely different to me now than it did when I started writing it. I’ve been thinking about how people reinterpret art as we gain new life experience, and how we engage in conversation not only when we create art but when we analyze it. I’m thinking about this more especially as I’m getting older, like when movies from my childhood feel very different because I’m reading into aspects I had never seen before.

Danskin’s video essay has, funnily enough, guided my thinking on this topic. His video has taught me about the audience’s role in giving art meaning and how subjective that meaning really is. Since I wrote the first half of this, I’ve rewatched that essay every few months, because it explains ideas that are fundamental to my current understanding of art. Please watch it. Really, I don’t care if you read the rest of this, it’s more important that you watch this video. Watch it. Now.

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So what is my article about? What does it mean to me now? It’s about the endless conversation good art can start between artwork and audience. If a work is complicated enough and speaks to a person’s experiences on a deep, profound level, that work can be interpreted an infinite amount of different ways. And each way can be just as important and meaningful to a person. On top of that, the responses to that art can be equally valuable. Maybe this response to myself is a bit self-indulgent, but I do think it illustrates my point. I look at The Beginner’s Guide differently now because of how I’ve reconsidered it.

This piece is also about a writer who constantly rethinks his work. He’s trying to improve his thoughts and compare them to essays and thinkers that he admires. This becomes a cycle of read, analyze, respond, repeat. I’m constantly re-reading what I’ve written and checking whether I still agree with myself. In this way I aim to improve my skills in presenting a position and convincing someone of its substance.

This process exemplifies the dialectic mode: thesis (presenting a thought) -> antithesis (questioning a thought) -> synthesis (a greater understanding of the thought and the next starting point, literally the “new thesis”). This process supposedly progresses humanity’s collective intellect, as if all thought moves us towards an end goal of “the truth.” I don’t agree with this idealistic notion of truth, because to believe that is to dismiss the subjective nature of individual interpretation like I was saying before. But I do think that my understanding has evolved since I wrote the first half of this, and it’s fun to enter my previous mind and see how I’ve grown since then.

Now, I do want to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this all: Should I or should I not edit my original post?

Right now, I say no.

All art is influenced by its moment in time as well as an author’s beliefs and experiences. That author can be one person or a collaboration of personalities, all contributing to a combined philosophy which comes across as one message to the audience. John Green once said in an interview that “Writing is always an attempt at radical empathy.” I’m gonna reference this in another article (coming soon), because this thought has defined the value I find in art. Even if just for me, this article can take me back to the moment I wrote it. And that is valuable.

So Will, next time you read this finished post, think about me, sitting in the corner of my mom’s living room, at the table you made into a gaming corner, having a kinda depressed day because I couldn’t get myself to do anything, until I starting looking through my folder of old “This Rocks” docs, and I was hit with a wave of inspiration to write this. Remember this feeling. Remember, things aren’t always as bad in your head as they are when you’re sad. Things get better. Just give it some time, and when you feel you can do something else, do it. It’s better to move on than wallow in the muck of a slow, disappointing day.

And to you, the reader that is not me, thanks for indulging me. I know this piece is really only for me. But if you learned something from this, or maybe had an issue with how I explained something, or thought about your own work or experience, or maybe you even enjoyed being in my head for a few moments as you read this, then you’ve engaged with these words, I’ve done my job, and art prevails once more.

Art is dead, long live art!

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