‘Turn back from this cave’: The weirdness of Beginner’s Guide

This article pursues a deep dive into various enigmas presented by Davey Wreden's second effort, The Beginner's Guide (2015), moving beyond the vexed question of whether the work can count as a game to the perhaps more interesting subject of how the work intervenes in game culture and what it says about the nature of game poetics. The ultimate focus is on the structure of the game, especially in its adoption of a logic of coda, to which the article relates the Derridean notion of supplement.