The Stanley Parable
Jan. 7th, 2023 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI’ve been interested in The Stanley Parable for almost a decade now. It was recently ported to the Nintendo Switch, so I was finally able to play it. I spent about an hour with the game, and I got seven of the (I think there are nineteen?) endings.
People say that talking about The Stanley Parable will spoil it, but I don’t think that’s true. The basic premise of this game is easy to describe, and there’s not much to spoil. Also, I don’t think there’s any need to ascribe some sort of mystical depth to a short game created by two college-age men as a portfolio demo back in 2011. The Stanley Parable is interesting, but I want to try to explain why it left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Stanley Parable is a walking simulator in which you play as Stanley, an office worker at a boring office job. One day, Stanley realizes that everyone has disappeared from his office, so he leaves his desk and goes to investigate. Stanley’s thoughts and actions are described by a David Attenborough style narrator – the work of professional actor Kevan Brighting, whose performance is phenomenal.
The narrator will tell the player what to do as you navigate the office building, and his narration changes based on whether you decide to follow his suggestions. Your job, as the player, is to try to figure out a way to leave the confines of the story that the narrator is attempting to lay out for you. Even though the layout of the office is very simple, there are numerous ways you can go off-path, each of which will lead to a different section of the office, which will in turn lead you to a different ending. Some of these endings are wild, but they all present a different aspect of the relationship between the player and the game.
So, essentially, The Stanley Parable is a game about the experience of playing a game. Neat!
What I don’t like is The Stanley Parable’s basic message that playing games is a waste of time. I think what it’s reacting to is the “git gud” culture of online gaming at the time, specifically the culture of FPS war games hyper-focused on skill and system achievements. The Stanley Parable tells the player, over and over and over again, in a variety of different ways, that you need to put down the controller and go outside. You can’t “win” The Stanley Parable, supposedly because the act of playing a video game is just as mindless and repetitive and meaningless as Stanley’s boring office job.
The ironic thing about The Stanley Parable is that it was supposed to be released on consoles in 2020, but then the pandemic happened. Although I’m sure the developers faced various hardships – as did we all – I suspect the real reason the game’s release was pushed back by several years was because the message of “if you play games instead of going outside then you’re a loser” wouldn’t resonate on quite the same frequency while everyone was in pandemic lockdown mode.
And I think that underlies the short-sightedness of The Stanley Parable. The developers were really young, so perhaps they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to develop the sort of empathy that would allow them to envision the life circumstances of someone who didn’t share their specific positionality. There are any number of people to whom it would be extremely offensive to say “just go outside,” and these categories of people aren’t even minorities. Like, what about people with long commutes? What about parents grabbing a moment of rest while caring for small children? What about people who are sick, either with a cold or with, idk, cancer? What about elderly people who are perfectly healthy but have limited mobility? Are you going to tell them that they’re “losers” for wanting to spend time in a virtual world?
This in turn illustrates another major limitation of the viewpoint of the game’s developers. Namely, different people play different games for different reasons. With the exception of The Last of Us, I have never in my life played a FPS game, and I have never once cared about mechanical skill or system achievements. To me, games are a medium for storytelling and art, and I engage with them for the same reasons that anyone would engage with stories or art. I play games to make my experience of being alive richer and deeper, and to share experiences that I otherwise wouldn’t understand or have access to. And I don’t think I’m alone! Other people play games because they enjoy exploration, or puzzles, or learning new systems, or role-playing, or the opportunity to share time with friends.
In other words, to imply that people who play games are merely mashing buttons mindlessly while following the path laid out by the game design without question feels almost aggressively small-minded. Like, I’m sorry the developers never talked to – or even considered the existence of – anyone who didn’t think and behave exactly like them. I can see how that would be frustrating.
So, to me, The Stanley Parable is actually a game about its developers being self-involved young men reacting to a very limited social context while denying the viewpoint of anyone who didn’t belong to their own specific culture. Maybe The Stanley Parable made sense ten years ago, but now it’s just cringe, and what perhaps came off as clever back in 2011 now feels borderline mean and spiteful.
Also... I keep reading that The Stanley Parable is a “comedy” game, but I don’t understand where that categorization is coming from. I laughed at two specific lines delivered by the narrator in a dry tone of unamused exasperation, but I think “creeping horror” or perhaps “existential horror” is more of an appropriate genre description. This isn’t a Jonathan Blow style Auteuristic Masterpiece™ that takes itself way too seriously (thank god), but it didn’t strike me as particularly funny.
I would say that The Stanley Parable is still worth playing, but I don’t think it’s worth the $25 that the developers are charging for it. That price tag is actually kind of insulting, especially given the message of the game.
Also, for half the price you could play What Remains of Edith Finch, another narrated walking simulator that is genuinely beautiful (and substantial) and asks many of the same metadiegetic questions with much more sympathy, nuance, and self-reflection.
People say that talking about The Stanley Parable will spoil it, but I don’t think that’s true. The basic premise of this game is easy to describe, and there’s not much to spoil. Also, I don’t think there’s any need to ascribe some sort of mystical depth to a short game created by two college-age men as a portfolio demo back in 2011. The Stanley Parable is interesting, but I want to try to explain why it left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Stanley Parable is a walking simulator in which you play as Stanley, an office worker at a boring office job. One day, Stanley realizes that everyone has disappeared from his office, so he leaves his desk and goes to investigate. Stanley’s thoughts and actions are described by a David Attenborough style narrator – the work of professional actor Kevan Brighting, whose performance is phenomenal.
The narrator will tell the player what to do as you navigate the office building, and his narration changes based on whether you decide to follow his suggestions. Your job, as the player, is to try to figure out a way to leave the confines of the story that the narrator is attempting to lay out for you. Even though the layout of the office is very simple, there are numerous ways you can go off-path, each of which will lead to a different section of the office, which will in turn lead you to a different ending. Some of these endings are wild, but they all present a different aspect of the relationship between the player and the game.
So, essentially, The Stanley Parable is a game about the experience of playing a game. Neat!
What I don’t like is The Stanley Parable’s basic message that playing games is a waste of time. I think what it’s reacting to is the “git gud” culture of online gaming at the time, specifically the culture of FPS war games hyper-focused on skill and system achievements. The Stanley Parable tells the player, over and over and over again, in a variety of different ways, that you need to put down the controller and go outside. You can’t “win” The Stanley Parable, supposedly because the act of playing a video game is just as mindless and repetitive and meaningless as Stanley’s boring office job.
The ironic thing about The Stanley Parable is that it was supposed to be released on consoles in 2020, but then the pandemic happened. Although I’m sure the developers faced various hardships – as did we all – I suspect the real reason the game’s release was pushed back by several years was because the message of “if you play games instead of going outside then you’re a loser” wouldn’t resonate on quite the same frequency while everyone was in pandemic lockdown mode.
And I think that underlies the short-sightedness of The Stanley Parable. The developers were really young, so perhaps they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to develop the sort of empathy that would allow them to envision the life circumstances of someone who didn’t share their specific positionality. There are any number of people to whom it would be extremely offensive to say “just go outside,” and these categories of people aren’t even minorities. Like, what about people with long commutes? What about parents grabbing a moment of rest while caring for small children? What about people who are sick, either with a cold or with, idk, cancer? What about elderly people who are perfectly healthy but have limited mobility? Are you going to tell them that they’re “losers” for wanting to spend time in a virtual world?
This in turn illustrates another major limitation of the viewpoint of the game’s developers. Namely, different people play different games for different reasons. With the exception of The Last of Us, I have never in my life played a FPS game, and I have never once cared about mechanical skill or system achievements. To me, games are a medium for storytelling and art, and I engage with them for the same reasons that anyone would engage with stories or art. I play games to make my experience of being alive richer and deeper, and to share experiences that I otherwise wouldn’t understand or have access to. And I don’t think I’m alone! Other people play games because they enjoy exploration, or puzzles, or learning new systems, or role-playing, or the opportunity to share time with friends.
In other words, to imply that people who play games are merely mashing buttons mindlessly while following the path laid out by the game design without question feels almost aggressively small-minded. Like, I’m sorry the developers never talked to – or even considered the existence of – anyone who didn’t think and behave exactly like them. I can see how that would be frustrating.
So, to me, The Stanley Parable is actually a game about its developers being self-involved young men reacting to a very limited social context while denying the viewpoint of anyone who didn’t belong to their own specific culture. Maybe The Stanley Parable made sense ten years ago, but now it’s just cringe, and what perhaps came off as clever back in 2011 now feels borderline mean and spiteful.
Also... I keep reading that The Stanley Parable is a “comedy” game, but I don’t understand where that categorization is coming from. I laughed at two specific lines delivered by the narrator in a dry tone of unamused exasperation, but I think “creeping horror” or perhaps “existential horror” is more of an appropriate genre description. This isn’t a Jonathan Blow style Auteuristic Masterpiece™ that takes itself way too seriously (thank god), but it didn’t strike me as particularly funny.
I would say that The Stanley Parable is still worth playing, but I don’t think it’s worth the $25 that the developers are charging for it. That price tag is actually kind of insulting, especially given the message of the game.
Also, for half the price you could play What Remains of Edith Finch, another narrated walking simulator that is genuinely beautiful (and substantial) and asks many of the same metadiegetic questions with much more sympathy, nuance, and self-reflection.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 08:58 pm (UTC)There's a lot to be said about "git gud" mentality and how gross it is, but this isn't it.
Thank you for confirming my decision to have Edith Finch on my "buy when I reduce backlog" list, and not this.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 01:47 pm (UTC)