Machine

**The Machine**

Level number
15

Date of creation
May 2011

Preceded by
Island

Followed by
Tower

**Machine** is the fifteenth chapter of *The Beginner's Guide* and the last chapter to feature a lamppost.

## Description

### Level

This level begins in front of a building's entrance, with a guard next to it. The guard calls the player "ma'am", suggesting they are female. The guard says "the machine" has been captured and is ready to be interrogated, adding that someone called the press and the machine calls itself Coda.

The next part is a corridor with several journalists labeled "press". They ask several questions about the machine. In the next room, the player confronts the machine, which has the three dots symbol on it. The player asks the machine several questions, saying that it stopped and needs to apologize, but nothing is answered. The player then exits the room and tells the watching press that the machine will not do what they wanted and it (or its creations) needs to be destroyed.

In the next part, the player holds a gun similar to that seen in Whisper and shoots several of the previous games' scenarios (the gun creates white spots as if it was erasing the content). Finally, the player confronts the machine again in a small room with a lamppost. The machine tells the player to drop their weapon, but they instead aim it at the machine and start shooting against it, producing smoke and ending the level.

### Narration

*And of course, it's the machine.*

(If the player does not move after the door opens) *Look around here, you can step back out the door you came in through.*

(If the player does not use the gun) *Remember, you can click to fire the gun.*

*So now the work is becoming self-destructive. And I'll tell you, at the time I first played this game, shortly after he made it, here's what I'm thinking to myself:*

*I'm thinking that Coda's stuck in his own head and that it's having a very negative effect on him,*

*and that all he has to do is just start showing his work to people! To get some actual feedback on his games!*

*It might get him out of isolation.*

*As so, as I'm thinking this, I realize that I could be the one to initiate it.*

*Because it would never occur to Coda to start actively soliciting feedback, so what if I did it for him?*

*If he could see the difference it would make to have more actual conversations with other human beings,*

*would that bring him out of his mental spiral?*

*Would it give him confidence in himself, would it bring meaning back into his work?*

*So I started showing Coda's work to people.*

*I took this one, the islands which you just played, the theater, the notes, the housecleaning game, and some of the prison escape games,*

*I brought them to people I knew and trusted, I asked their opinions. And the great part is that they really loved his games!*

*You know the point of it all was just to give him some external reference point, but they genuinely loved his work! There was nothing for him to be afraid of!*

*Can you see why I felt like this was the right thing to do?*

*Because it's the thing that I always feel like I need, to be told that my work is good, that I am good.*

*When someone really connects with a thing that I've made, when they see themselves purely in my work, there's nothing that feels better.*

*And I got to give that very same feeling to my friend. I did something...*

*I really felt like I'd done something good, like I was a good person,*

*I felt like there was a friend who was in trouble and was unhappy and maybe didn't like themselves, and I could fix it!*

*If I could give him this gift, maybe I could fix the problem!*

*When they told me how much they enjoyed his games it was the best feeling, the absolute best feeling, it made me feel so happy. So beautifully, beautifully happy.*

*Um... So anyway, Coda finishes this game, and then really he just kind of...takes off for a while.*

*So this is June of 2011, and I didn't hear anything from him for several weeks, I guess. Uh, and so out of nowhere one I day I get an email, and it's got a private link to a new game of Coda's.*

*This one is called the Tower, and to my knowledge it's the last game that Coda ever made. So... let's take a look.*

## Trivia

A "Whisper Machine" is a central problem in the level Whisper.

The Machine is the second of Coda's games to make use of the seamless transitions available with the *Portal* versions of the Source engine, showing off the fact that *The Beginner's Guide* runs on a *Portal 2* base. Given that the previous game already features seamless transitions in-universe and *Portal 2* had still not been released yet, it would make more sense for Coda to have implemented the feature here, given that in May 2011, *Portal 2* had already been out for a month.