Would an answer make you any happier?

The 21st century to date has been a procession of situations in which you’re forced to explain the readily explicable. Nothing is true, no lessons were learned, nothing can be taken for granted; thinking adults in 2025 are occasionally forced to argue with fellow travelers about such fundamentally obvious things as “you should have a baseline level of care for other people” and “bleach is not medicine.” Anyone who feels angry and insane right now is just paying sufficient attention.

That same disconnect lies at the heart of the furor over generative AI as a creative tool. On one side, an army of plagiarism robots that burn forests and drink the sea to create infinite pages from Thomas Kinkade’s How to Draw Manga; on the other, anyone who understands the value of human expression, emphasis on the human. Offshoring any part of your creative mind or soul to glorified autocorrect is an act of unsolicited surrender. You’ve volunteered for erosion. There’s less of you now, whether you acknowledge that or not.

If there’s one silver nugget in this septic tank, it’s the potential for a new appreciation of the elemental strangeness of being human. This is a messy, imprecise, unstable existence, and it’s the only game in town. In any form it takes, from disposable kitsch to a great national novel, art is a story we tell one another to try and make life make more sense.

This week, we’re celebrating that. These are games that we appreciate specifically because a large language model could never have produced them: they’re too weird, too horny, too specific. In an age where the entirety of pop culture is threatening to collapse into thin gruel, these are projects with a careful human touch. In 2025, that’s become more valuable than ever before, and worth celebration.

The Beginner’s Guide is a Rorschach test. It’s impossible to speak about its subject matter, specifically your interpretation of its subject matter, without leaving a lot of yourself on the table for other people to likewise pick apart. It asks you about your reactions to art, the artist, and the critic. It is the ultimate expression of the question plaguing media literacy discourse in the social media age: “What did the author mean when they said the curtains are blue?”

So let me tell you about my interpretation. 

The Beginner’s Guide is framed as Davey Wreden, one of the designers of The Stanley Parable, sharing the unpublished games of a person he knew named Coda. He finds Coda’s games deep and meaningful, and he wants to share his interpretations of them in the hopes it will reach Coda, wherever they may be. Right away, I’m making a distinction between Wreden, the person, and Wreden, the narrator of The Beginner’s Guide. Do not take my words here as condemnation of the actual flesh and blood person. I am choosing to see Narrator Wreden as a persona the same way I see Bo Burnham singing songs about wanting to kill himself as a persona. Determining the “reality” of The Beginner’s Guide is kinda the crux of the whole exercise.

Also, The Beginner’s Guide is one of those games where it’s better played blind so that the emotions wash over you. Don’t have your first time ruined looking for the same meaning I saw. This article is going to spoil the entire experience. With that established, my take is that Davey Wreden would be perfectly happy with AI-generated video games.

This may seem counter to the game’s prologue, where you wander around a Counter Strike map Coda made in their youth. Wreden remarks that he likes the random floating boxes and primary-colored walls because it feels like a person made them. But as you play more of Coda’s games and listen to his interpretations, it becomes apparent Wreden’s ideal person is an RPG party member with a set dialog tree that can be gamed for max affinity in order to get their life story.

Wreden has this deep fear of ambiguity. He’s terrified of not having a take on art, and that manifests when he’s confronted with art that he has no purchase on. Many of Coda’s games trigger this. Games with sudden ends, unresolved symbology, or intent to frustrate the player with “unfun” mechanics such as waiting real time to progress. Many times, Wreden will gleefully force the player past these segments, letting them skip huge sections of developer intent in order to get to the part of the game he actually has an interpretation of. 

Later, he lets slip he’s done much more than that. The games you’re playing have actually been modified to have much of their ambiguity removed. Symbolism and Meaning have been injected into Coda’s games so that Wreden feels more comfortable with talking about them. 

One of the more memorable games has you cleaning a house while having a pleasant chat with another housekeeper. It ends abruptly, ousting you so you can travel beyond the house, where a lamppost sits at the end of a trail. By the end of The Beginner’s Guide, you learn all of that was added by Wreden without Coda’s consent so “the game could have an ending.”

Suddenly you realize you have been robbed of any agency in interpreting Coda’s games for yourself. The whole experience has been Wreden acting as an unreliable narrator so you come around to his point-of-view not just on Coda, but on art in general. I think this fear of ambiguity is shared by many people. As someone who pays attention to media discourse, a surefire way to get people to call your movie or game pretentious trash is to leave them with uncertain emotions. You can even see this in the Steam forums for The Beginner’s Guide to this day.

Wreden’s fear actually extends beyond just art. He’s afraid of people. Of not understanding them and them not understanding him. Take this quote towards the middle of the game:

“This idea is really seductive to me! That I could just play someone’s game and see the voices in their head and get to know them better and have to do less of the messy in-person socializing. I could just get to know you through your work.”

The idea that you can know someone through their art is a pretty stubborn one in culture. It’s why there are conspiracies that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, and why JRR Tolkien had to make several statements that The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for WWII. In our social media age we have more interaction with our artists than ever and people are developing nasty parasocial behaviors where they take an artist’s work as gospel for their lived experience and mental condition.

Now add AI as a multiplier to that. Generative AI is basically a glorified auto-complete. They regurgitate the style and substance of what they’re trained on. No matter the complexity of your prompt, what you’re going to get back is basically the average of every piece of text that comes close to what you were asking for. Going back to the question of “why are the curtains blue?” AI probably could give a real convincing answer, but only because other writers have elaborated on the meaning of the color blue and the symbolism of curtains.

Now ask it what we can interpret about the author from the curtains being blue and suddenly things get a lot scarier. Because there’s also plenty of text for AI to ingest on how artistic expression equals lived experience. The idea of someone, no matter how well meaning, feeding any media I create into a machine for the purpose of decoding my life and diagnosing my mindset is frankly terrifying. Coda feels much the same way, which is why they eventually cut themselves off from Wreden.

The penultimate game from Coda we play is called “The Machine.” You play as an interrogator sent to break a machine called Coda. You chastise the machine for failing to make games. “Your work was what kept us alive,” one of the dialog options reads. The climax of the game is the player picking up a gun and destroying all the prior games Coda has made while declaring “Coda, I’ll make sure you’re known forever!”

Wreden sees this as self-destructive behavior, and it’s the impetus to get him to share and edit Coda’s work. 

My take is that the player in “The Machine” is meant to be Wreden. This abusive friend who feels he has a right to Coda’s games, and when he gets something he doesn’t like, he destroys it. The machine is called Coda, because that’s what he’s been reduced to in Wreden’s eyes.

Because that’s what happens when you have such a fear of uncertainty you think misunderstanding art is a personal failure. You reduce art to a function and artists to puzzleboxes you can solve for friendship points. 

The moment we codify a canon of symbolic meaning backed by AI, is the moment all artistic interpretation devolves into an algorithmic ouroboros of “The curtains are blue because X. If you’re writing about X, the curtains should be blue.” English professors giving AI-generated lesson plans filled out by AI-generated essays. It would be a world Davey Wreden, as he presents himself in The Beginner’s Guide, would find very safe and comforting. 

My goal isn’t to dunk on either side of the “Blue Curtains” debate. Honestly, I find the discussion boring because both sides are really just using it to air grievances about teachers they hated, or social media posts that set them off. I even have my own secret interpretation of The Beginner’s Guide, so who am I to judge?

My point is that people get built different. There’s not a cheat code for understanding art, just like there isn’t a cheat code for understanding people.

Sometimes the curtains are just blue, and sometimes them being blue has meaning.

Shit’s complicated.

And AI will never understand that.