Understanding Stanley's Parable
All human-beings feel that they live on this planet with the gift of free will. To be in control of one’s own choices is what sets us apart as sentient, as our feelings become a part of our choices, as opposed to an android. The 2012 game, Stanley Parable explores this through its narration and gameplay. The game beings with a voice-over narrating the protagonist Stanley and his job within a big corporation. Stanley’s employee number is 427 and his job at the company is to push buttons. Stanley receives information on his monitor about which buttons to press and pushes them in the order that he is told to. His job is boring and excruciatingly monotonous. Along with that, him being given an employee number makes him look like another cog in the big machine that is his office. Despite this, Stanley is described as being content with his job and his life by the narrator. Here begins the first foray of the game in commenting on choice and free will as they describe a man to be happy in a job where he has no opinion or choice in his tasks and has to mindlessly perform them all year round. Though it can be said that Stanley feels at home in this environment where he is surrounded by his co-workers who have the same dull job as him. It can be easy to feel that you are doing the ‘right’ things in life if the crowd around you in living their life the same way. This makes one perceive that they are in control of their lives and why would they not be as everyone around them is happy and content as well. We as players are also accustomed to this as most video games only need to make us feel that we are in control to make us content without ever handing over the actual directions of the narrative. Even massive open sandbox games, which make a player feel in complete control of their actions, are limited and very linear as soon as we start a quest or the story line. This happens quite literally in Stanley Parable as well when a line is drawn across the office floor and walls for the player to follow.
When one assumes the role of Stanley in the game ‘The Stanley Parable’, it comes with a pre-conceived notion for us as players having some control over our character Stanley. The game delivers an excellent commentary on free will as you walk about through levels of a stale-looking corporate office and it presents a unique value that allows it to create an interesting perspective on the illusion of choice.
The game uses the narration to break the fourth wall and adds that to the narrative of the story which further in turn influences the processes of the player. In the game, the player is alone with only the voice of the narrator to guide him or her. In one of these settings the player enters a room facing two identical doors wherein the narrator says, “When approached with a set of two open doors, Stanley entered the door on the left.” We can choose to follow his directions and reach ending(s) where the player has a sense of achievement and ‘won the game’. Though this is only ironical as there was no skill involved on the part of the player and he or she were merely pushing the buttons they were told to do by the narrator just like Stanley does for his company. This is also mirrored in throughout the game when a player interacts with any object around the office space like a door or window.
Figure 1 A version of the Penrose stairs in the game
Instead of the sound effect of a knob or a latch, we get the sound effect of pressing a key on a keyboard, effectively making us the same puppet as Stanley is in his office. While this breaks away from the motive of immersion that is the golden rule for video games, it strengthens the meta-narrative of the game. The game makes an effort to not immerse us in the character just enough for us to start questioning our role as players within that set narrative. It makes us engage and feel active designers of the narrative itself.
But despite this belief of being able to write the script in the game, breaking away from the directions of the narrator either ends in dead-ends where the game is restarted (or has to be manually restarted) or in the death of the character. As mentioned before, the player has the choice to either accept the directions of the narrator or disobey him. If disobeyed, the narrator will correct himself to create the newly formed storyline. If disobeyed enough times, the narrator will start to grow angry with Stanley and start to do things to take back the control he feels he has lost. This appears to be a snarky comment on most of the AAA titles being released year after year, where the graphics and game engines are becoming better and better but the game narratives and directions are still very linear. There is a clear lack of alternative paths, in most of these mainstream video games, which are open-ended enough to create a new outcome and only end up becoming a very lead-you-by-the-hand adventure tale.
FLOWCHART FOR THE ALL THE ENDINGS OF THE GAME
(CONTAINS SPOILERS )
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Figure 2 Flowchart of the various narratives of the game
The game is ‘winnable’ only if you follow the path of the narrator. This means that any sort of free will that the player can clutch on to is merely an illusion. And while we are able to understand this as players taking on the role of Stanley, Stanley himself can’t see this because he is the one being subjected to it.
The description on the website of the game sums up the Stanley Parable perfectly.
"You will follow a story, you will not follow a story. You will have a choice, you will have no choice. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. This world was not made for you to understand."