Anybody have anything to say? Now that I think of it, this would have been a good week to talk about The Stanley Parable, but nobody read the first post, so let’s talk about that. You really shouldn’t read it anyway. I sacrificed substance for a gimmick, and it wasn’t all that clever to begin with…
Moving right along, The Stanley Parable is a pretty interesting experiment in game storytelling. It’s a mod off the classic Half-Life 2 engine, but it’s not really anything like that game at all. Like some others this year, it’s not really a game, more a meta game if you understand what I mean. It’s a game that gives an overview of games with choices, in a sense. I’ll try to explain.
Stanley is a boring man, with a very boring life. He sits on his chair with a keyboard in front of it, and presses buttons when they appear on his blue screen. Only one day, no words appear, and he finds that nobody else is in the building with him. A narrator talks in his head, telling him to go to the staff lounge, and how he should get there. You may either obey what the narrator tells you to do, or defy him, which lead to different results:
“But why a setup so elaborate?” he asked. Was this simple surveillance, or something even more?
If you obey the narrator the entire way, you’re faced with a shocking revelation. All of Stanley’s life, he’s been monitored, controlled. A machine behind his boss’s office has buttons that make him feel different emotions when pressed: happy, sad, disappointed, apathetic, it’s all there. Then the machine powers up again, and Stanley climbs up a huge catwalk to be faced with a choice: turn the controls off, or activate the machine again.
Naturally, our most obvious inclination is to turn the generator off, and if we do we get the good ending. Stanley leaves the building into a bright city and never looks back, or so we assume. Turn on the generator, however, and the narrator is a little annoyed. You were supposed to turn it off; you messed up his story. Thus, he starts a two minute countdown, after which the entire facility will be destroyed.
As the narrator reveals, it was all a lie. Stanley never had any choice. The real controls were always with the narrator, and Stanley could only ever do what he was told to do, or else be punished. Once the countdown timer is activated, you can do whatever you like: run around the room, turn on lights, press buttons, it’s all for naught. There is no escape, there is no exit. Just some random lights that turn on for a few seconds, and the narrator’s chiding tone.
In fact, he even points out that you’re clearly in a video game, but in this case you have no weapon, no vehicle, no means to save yourself. In a sense, The Stanley Parable is making a comment on the nature of gaming itself. The game may give you a choice, but if you go too far outside its boundaries, it pushes you back in. In that sense, the narrator is a symbolic representation of the game itself. He tells the story, lets you know where to go, and decides what happens when you make a decision. The controls on the screen may look like they’re doing something, but ultimately they only matter if they are allowed to by the one who’s truly in control.
So, what are we trying to say here? Ultimately, gaming has whatever value we choose to imbue it with. Similarly to literature or to film, nobody would notice that great bit of satire in Huck Finn, or the significance of the shadow in Citizen Kane if they weren’t already thinking about the media in a deeper light. I suppose, if anything, that’s what you should take away. All media have the potential to convey messages, and ultimately the man (or woman) behind the message dictates what depth they want to place in it.
As Samuel Johnson once said, “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” Video games and other interactive media take this concept to a whole new, more literal level. The game is nothing without the player, which is why you can’t merely play a game if you want the full experience: you have to engage with it, pay attention to it, start looking for the narrative threads that were woven together to make it. Only then can you discover the true potential of this, or any, medium.