2026 –. Gaming has hit an all-time low. After the soaring feverish heights of the pandemic, the industry has equally fallen to – arguably – some of its lowest of lows. From the inside, development studios writhe wildly. Poked by the electric prodding-rods of capitalism, studios release new projects out of self-indulgent impulse. There was a time where EA was the fool in the stockade – the black blemish on the market, to be spurned, shunned, as some unkillable cancer, unregressable, unprogressable – yet here we are now, when the name and works of EA have become but echoes subsumed by the maddening squeal of the gorging rest. Remakes. Remasters. Reimaginings. Regurgitation. Regurgitation after regurgitation after regurgitation. These were excused once – and still are by many – as being necessity. A quick way to levy the funds to pave way for the things that do matter. But – where is this? Studios appear to have made the means the end; these projects, previously cash-cows to cultivate the avante-garde, have grown and grown and grown . . . to what? This sickness, so perverse, that original works now begin to feel themselves like secret-remasters of corporate brainchildren, in the same way that one may reappropriate fertilizer for explosives, the tools of the remaster have seeped into the blood of the master. At the heart of all this rabblerousing, cynical raving of things that have fallen, there’s a contradiction I can’t quite reconcile – Why are “better” things worse? – and, perhaps the answer – Why can’t we have “bad” things? . . . Why do I miss bad things?
2011 –. A 22-year-old Davey Wreden (college student under, assumedly, none other than Dr. Pangloss) begins work on his new half-life 2 mod – despite being utterly clueless about the Source Engine. His brimming optimism is rivalled by his nativity and inexperience. Wreden is confused, unprepared – The playtesters confused, unprepared. He finds himself consulting fan-made wikis and community members for assistance. In this menagerie of maybe and oh yeah haha and oh no and huh and what bugs are reinstated as intended features. As Wreden himself puts it –
“It shouldn’t have worked. For example, when you go through the red door, I originally tried to bind keys to actions in the world so that the screen told you to do things and then it had a response, but I couldn’t figure out how to bind keys, so I flashed text on the screen and nothing happened. But then people were like, ‘I love how it tells you to push buttons but it doesn’t actually respond to your input!’ That actually was the benefit of designing a ‘broken’ game.”
Wreden
– Yet he persists, because, for all of the difficulty in the act, he is doing something strange, something very strange – he is enjoying himself. The mod is, eventually, released. It’s an underground hit. Stays in the sewers. Critically acclaimed. A success, if not a modest one. Davey Wreden graduates from college.
2013 –. GTA, The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite. Grab a drink – food – controller – headset – whatever; gaming is on the rise, and so is Davey Wreden, who, once again, as if expelling a natural accruement of ambition, begins work on his, and William Pugh’s, new game. Pugh is a fan of the original. Pugh is someone with far, far more experience in the Source Engine than Wreden, and Pugh is far, far younger in similar terms. They set out to work. And they do. They rebuild the mod into a game and from the game they add more gameplay and from the gameplay they add more commentary and from that more voicelines and more rerecordings and they have new playtesters who – now veteran – have new things to say so that they can only be confused by the now veteran developers more and now that they have all of these things they begin to have a game and then they blink after toiling away for a night and then two and then three and then some subjectively-infinite amount and then they have a game. They’re nervous. They have a right to be. – This? A game? From a half-life 2 mod? Not revolutionary, no, but surely not certain either. Them in the moments before publishing staring at that enigmatic button-send-off-whatever like two Soviet submarine officers ordering a strike, their steel brows’ sweat slipping under the steel brow of the submarine’s silos – they twist the keys and publish. The Stanley Parable.
A dark horse, it succeeds at a near-unimaginable amount. Youtubers, Journalists, Developers, Players, Executives, everyone – like the ‘49ers – are clamboring over this new thing. It would be unapt to compare the impact of The Stanley Parable on the indie scene to anything less than the Tunguska event. How many people bought it? 1,000? 10,000? Try >100,000 in 3 days. Try over 1,000,000 in a year. They get asked questions. They get asked many many questions by many many interviewers. Say, Davey and William – What was development like, remaking the original? Say, Davey and William – Is it true that, as many have speculated, this route may be an allegory for . . . ? Say, Davey and William – What were some of your inspirations – influences? Say, Davey and William – How did you two meet, and why did you choose each other? Say, Davey and William – Say, Davey and William, Say, say, say… several spotlights are pointed at Wreden and Pugh, bright, beaming. They are extolled and exhausted. Their mouths are overcome with microphones; every rasp, sniffle recorded, shared. Is this inquiry or an autopsy? Can things exist? Must every butterfly be pinned in a glass case? Oh, but wait, but wait – there’s one question left. The reporters tell me it’s an important one. A very important one. Come on, Davey. Come on William – Tell us, can we expect any similar projects in the future? … Davey? … William?
2004 –. A former Facepunch Studios developer begins work on his new project – Facewound. A fired drop-out. As he works on this project, he develops a side-project for the Source Engine. It’s awful, truly – I mean no offense in stating this. It’s barebones. Clunky. Devoid. Empty. Sparse – any synonym of infantile and/or barren would fit the bill. There’s things like it already, as it is now. There’s things like it so much, in fact, that he will be accused of plagiarism in the future. For now, though, there’s not much to accuse of plagiarism as there is not much in general. Yet he continues, regardless. Even though games exist already which may fill his niche – which, through only a few man-hours of paid labor, may forever outweigh the time spent on this – he continues on making this thing because it is his. Like some self-servant sisyphus, he carves out his own boulder. He’s not Michelangelo, either. He struggles. He struggles a lot. Everything's just – it’s just so clunky and old – and the engine doesn’t do what you want it to – doesn’t do what you tell it to – and it takes so long to do basic things – and those basic things feel done so, shoddily, so so shoddily – and – and – and he’s doing it. He’s doing it. Powered by friends, by community resources, and by time and sheer effort, he slowly whittles away this little corner of jungle with nothing but a shaving-razor and grit. He gets attention. This little labor of his begins to go appreciated. Like a frame in a frame, a picture in a picture, people begin to post their little creations inside this little creation of his. He opens forms. They’re quickly populated. The attention brings accusations. Accusations of plagiarism – by a “JBMod”. As history has it, JBMod will ever only be remembered as the plagiarized. As history has it, this developer – a Garry Neumann – will carry on.
It’s been 2 years and Garry Neumann has released Garry’s Mod to Steam. A steam-powered locomotive, it takes off at breakneck speed. The highest-selling Source Engine game of all time is not Half Life. It is not Portal. It is not L4D2. The highest-selling Source Engine game, ever, becomes Garry’s Mod, an indie game not even developed by Valve. It can run on anything and anyone can run it. Bored? Unmake boredom. Make new guns. New maps. New playermodels. Vehicles. NPCs. Gamemodes. Make new games. Make servers. Make friends. Make everything – Alaska, Arizona; Birds, Spiders; Knights, Rangers; Forests, Moons; make it! – and so they did. Look at any Garry’s Mod player’s saves and what do you see? You don’t see a stagnant world stuck on a final quest, or a mission selection screen, or a coin insert or anything of similar likeliness. What you see is a dusted museum hall, their creations preserved in digitality, ready to be defrosted at a whim. Decades of history distilled in the Source Engine. In an era of the internet defined by exploration – at that perfect edge of new and aged, where so much was to be made yet so much to be rediscovered – Garry’s Mod sat, invitingly, like a sheening hammer, or a glistening scope; an originally awful tool for people to make originally awful things.
2026, again – and I’m awfully bitter and I don’t know why. New games aren’t awful. Are they? They seem awful. Maybe they are awful. But how can they be awful when they’re good? – This is the paradox and what I want to call a “creep of quality” throughout the years. It’s never been easier to make games. There’s endless precedent, presets; so many formulas to obey, proven successful. AI – enough said. Yet I want to differentiate quality. In videogames, I believe there are two types of quality – artistic quality and technical quality. Technical quality is graphics (in a sense of mimesis). Technical quality is performance. Budget. Scope. It is the efficiency of the input-dopamine exchange and of the dollar-to-fun-to-hour ratios. In contrast, artistic quality is the impartable unique qualia of a videogame, e.g. emotion, personality. I believe artistic quality and technical quality can be separated in a sense of execution. Technical quality exists as a measure of objective execution within a predefined system. In this sense, seemingly artsy things – like story – can be a measure of technical quality (a cliche, tropic story as an example). This is by no means a good definition, and I would likely be crucified by apt aestheticists, but I hope it illustrates the source of the “quality creep”. Game quality has, over the years, risen exponentially technically but has become devoid artistically. Why?
There are undoubtedly many, many ways this can occur, but for the sake of not simply rewriting Marx for some thousands of words I want to identify the immediately pertinent reason I believe this to occur. The artist must suffer. Yes, tropic, I know – the starving Bohemian begging on the streets of Paris, only 2 days from starvation, 2 days from finishing their Magnum Opus – but there’s some truth where tropes lie. As quoted earlier, Wreden says –
“That actually was the benefit of designing a ‘broken’ game.”
“Suffering builds character”, so we’re told, usually prefacing schadenfreude. Yet would a smooth Garry’s Mod or a smooth The Stanley Parable be better – would it even be possible? Would a qualified Garry Neumann still slave away for countless hours on his then shitty project, or would he, reasonably, gather his efforts for something grander (in that usual demeaning business sense) and reapply himself to, say, Facepunch? Would The Stanley Parable even resemble half itself had Wreden been doubly-qualified? And, perhaps most importantly – Would something perfect, or something made by someone perfect even be worth playing? The best book isn’t an instruction manual, surely. The best film isn’t a U.S Army guide to artillery guidance for the everyman. The best painting isn’t a photograph, nor is it a blueprint. In a vague sense, I believe that, to know what is truly good one has to be truly awful. If you start mediocre, and only ever pursue mediocre avenues, then how could you ever possibly imagine making something good? Luck – a stray stroke of the hand, painting the sistine? As much as I talk in the abstract, there are many, many real examples of exactly this – mediocre means rotting away aptitude. Take, for example, performance and efficiency. Most modern AAA games share seemingly no respect for your PC’s ability. Investing into a good computer is now akin to investing into gold with AI strangling the market. How do people even get into games anymore? Buy a PC? Is the stressed middle-class, already anxious of the current world, able to throw away the thousands needed for what was hundreds before? No. Obviously not. And this is exactly why we are seeing the degeneration of children’s spaces and games online. Where is this generation's club-penguin? This generation's neopets? Take Roblox as a case study – and weep. It is as easy to shit out games on Roblox as it is to consume shit. Utter desperate capitalist rancidity lines every fill-able crevice – and then some more, overfilling, an unemptied garbage bin. Look at the top titles and you will see those psychologically-speculated market phrases regurgitated through select words over and over, a soundboard for replacing sincerity. Solemnity is not a virtue, by any means – but it’s steadily becoming easier and easier to see, foolishly, how it possibly could be. The bright-pastel studded palettes of yonder being replaced by the thick bevel artifacted lines of AI thumbnails and endless, endless rainbow stimulation.
Where once were children drawing on walls are now glass cases, bronze plaques, saying, engraved with sharp-cornered lettering – “Someone once made something great here”, the admission fee $10. The young, without jobs, making things, only to grow old and get jobs making things. Professional videogame developers. All work and no play. Garry Neumann – the same frontiersman behind Garry’s Mod – released a new game, a new “modern” rendition of Garry’s Mod. S&Box. I played S&Box. Now, I knew to temper my expectations, as did Garry Neumann himself seemingly, him repeatingly reminding us it’s a spiritual successor. Spiritual, whatever that may mean. Regardless, I continued on. Wish I didn’t, truly. What I saw was a husk, however well-intentioned. AI-generated thumbnails. Derivative game formats, repetitions of the already existent, only existing to seemingly say that it can. Dota was a warcraft mod, right? Can’t we be too? Can’t we do that thing? I read before that the top creators were paid for their efforts. Mod makers, paid. – Hesitant, I loaded up gm_construct. I messed around for a bit, and something hit me. Like a western-front soldier receiving his fated telegram of recall – I left. I saw it. What did I see? I saw something alright. Alright. I saw something that, in technical measure, was okay. It did things. I could do things too, right? Other people clearly had. Other people made games. This is what you played Garry’s Mod for, right? To make games? To make things? Well now you can. You can make more things. You can meet more people making things. You can make newer things. You can make other things. You can make things in things. You can make good things. Why aren’t you excited? Why? Isn’t this what you wanted? To make what you wanted?
2015 –. Everyone is yelling. Metal Gear Solid V; The Witcher 3; Bloodborne; Undertale; Fallout 4; Assassin’s Creed; Call of Duty; Halo. Gaming is on the rise, again, spurred harder than ever before. And so is Davey Wreden. He announces a new title. In the aftermath of The Stanley Parable, everyone is clamoring. What will the magician's next trick be, they wonder. Like the smith dusting off the anvil, inspecting the familiar kinks and chips, holding his hammer parallel to his forehead, assessing, so does Wreden return to his hammer, Hammer. And while everyone is yelling, everyone is screaming, and the gaming world is fraying itself apart and fraying back together equal measure Wreden silently clinks his small hammer in his corner of the world. Like some hermit, Zarathustra, he returns with his work after a wait and releases – The Beginner’s Guide. A magnum opus. A quiet, quiet contemplation on the medium. While the sky is exploding; the flak cannons of industry detonating their 8.8cm anti-aircraft shells, the air ringing with silver and pointedness, clouds overcome with smoke and smoke overcome with the mass of project propeller-planes subsuming the sky, killing off the tiny plantlife below, Wreden blinks. He blinks and stares at the mortar-cavities in the soil where there once were playgrounds. He stares at the ruined buildings where once were schools. He stares at the angry, actioned people he knows, surely, are making great things – their busy callous hands never resting, always finding new objects of desire to fidget with. They’re making big things. Big worlds. Big worlds filled with big people. So many new dialogue paths! So many new gameplay mechanics! Count the beads of sweat on the showcased figures heads; Count the blades of steppe grass blowing in the digital wind; Hear the reverberation of cavewater falling from hanging stallacites. Isn’t this great? – They ask, he wonders. Yet while all of this observation and doing and updating occurs Wreden blinks and he looks at himself and looks at his shirt. This is The Beginners' Guide. On a matter of ontological videogameness, no other game I have played has aged as poorly and painfully. The world portrayed in The Beginners’ Guide is an alien, yet tantalizing one. A world of awfulness. Of sparsity. Of low-density low-action low-enjoyment low-hanging videogames. A world of sincerity. In 2026 – when the cavalcade of capitalist rancor continues trampling on that sacred ground to you, paving over it with concrete, performing premature funeral rites – how much I wish we had awful games.
The Beginners’ Guide sold well. Over a million. You did it again, Wreden. Magic Wreden with his indie touch-of-life. Congratulations. Critically, it was more mixed than its predecessor. Some critics lambast it – they remind him of “Show, don’t tell” (that all-too-familiar yet equally useless piece of advice weaponized by critics to preserve their own legitimacy). They say it’s too on-the-nose. Not subtle enough. Some even dare say it is unfinished. There’s too much interpretation, Davey – what am I supposed to think? To Feel? In the shadow of The Stanley Parable critics worry if his touch is diminishing. Back then, maybe these critiques were genuine, and even well-founded. But now I can’t help but feel bitter. The auteur is stabbed every day, bleeding more and more, dying, his rank and file left unreplenished – there is no more reserve, the draft long since concluding. Studios and teams, Studios and teams, pastiches of indie. Suffering has been subsumed into success. Nostalgia, an alien, hostage at Area 51, dissected, his autopsy repeated endlessly. Children don’t draw with crayons on the walls anymore. There aren’t any anymore.
I love The Beginner’s Guide.
