Spoilers. Many. But not enough to spoil the experience, as you'll see.
You are a man named Stanley, in a first-person video game named, appropriately enough,
The Stanley Parable. Stanley has an apartment, a wife, and a job that completely satisfies him. He works in a large company and types single letters into a computer all day in response to instructions that appear on his screen. And Stanley is happy.
It's only a job....
Until one day, with no warning at all, the instructions stop coming. Stanley is
not happy. He sets off in search of an explanation for the change, only to find that every one of his co-workers has inexplicably vanished. So Stanley begins searching for them as well.
A friend helps him search, not a person, but a voice in his head. The voice is avuncular, perfectly modulated, and very British, and it frequently professes a desire to help Stanley understand and deal with the unusual situation he finds himself in. It suggests the path that Stanley should take, and modifies his environment to a limited degree, but it cannot control his actions. At critical junctures, it has no alternative but to trust Stanley to "do the right thing."
Use the Force, Luke!... er, Stanley....
You see, Stanley has free will, including the freedom to ignore the voice. If Stanley exercises his free will in ways that coincide with the advice the voice gives, it is highly gratified. It demonstrates to Stanley that, horror of horrors, he has been
under the control of others all his life, and if Stanley continues to trust the voice and accept its suggestions, it finally leads him out of his grim office building into the open air and sunlight, where he can live a life that is
authentic, based on his own freely made decisions. However, if Stanley makes decisions that go against the advice of the voice, it becomes upset, and then irritated, and then angry, and then despairing. Finally, more often than not, it abandons Stanley to die in some dark dead end, or dumps him into someone else's game, or loses its temper and goes Groundhog Day on him, leaving Stanley back in his office staring down an empty corridor, about to set out in search of his co-workers.....
I do hope you get it right this time....
Well, that was a pointless little rebellion, wasn't it, Stanley? Did you bugger-all good, didn't it? The voice cannot control you, but it can call you to account pretty damned quickly, can't it? Wouldn't it be better to just
listen to what you are told, and be free? But in that case, freedom turns out to consist of absolute submission to the demands of another. There's something wrong there, even though it's a familiar situation. "O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom...." (
Book of Common Prayer).
There was once a young game developer named, well, not Stanley. (Actually, his name was, and is, Davey Wreden.) Like everyone at the beginning of a creative career, he was looking for something that would get him noticed, that would highlight his quite substantial abilities, to satisfy his artistic impulses and, not incidentally, bring in money to pay the bills. He needed to be striking and original in a crowded field, and he wondered how that might be accomplished. Then a Voice in his head spoke up:
"A lot of the narrative tropes and devices in video gaming are pretty absurd when you look at them closely. For technical and design reasons, most games have to keep the player on a very narrow path, while creating the illusion that he or she has free will. And they do it with actions as simple as automatically closing and locking doors behind the character so that he or she can't backtrack. You can imagine how the game would feel, if it were sentient, if a player found a way out of the box. It would be angry. It would label such a move an 'exploit,' damn it up, down, and sideways, and try to prevent it from ever happening again. It would scarcely be able to believe that the ungrateful player was trying to ignore all the work that the game had done and break up a beautiful whole that had taken an enormous effort to bring into being. Why, that sort of behavior was worse than ingratitude -- it was vandalism. In its anger, the game might shut itself down or 'crash,' forcing the disobedient player to begin again. And it would never be truly satisfied until the player freely chose to do exactly what the game had planned for it to do -- until the player's service was offered up in perfect freedom. So how about if we give the game a voice, let it express its feelings? It might have something interesting to say."
So the young developer, aka Davey Wreden, decided to work out something along these lines, and he chose to call it The Stanley Parable. An interesting choice of words.
Parable. Smells a bit of that Jesus fellow, doesn't it? More than a bit. "A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles....Parables are favoured in the expression of spiritual concepts." (Wikipedia, "Parable.")
How do you think you'd feel if someone just went and trashed it for shits and giggles....
So,
The Stanley PARABLE. A hint that we ought to be looking a bit further than the fascinating but limited relationship between
game designers and
game players. Toward much larger Designs and Designers, perhaps.
If you obey the Voice, you can finish The Stanley Parable very quickly. You open up the secret door in your boss's office, find the mysterious mechanism that has been controlling your life and thoughts, shut it down, and go gladly forth into the open air.
It seems almost ungrateful to note that if the game ends that way, you lose all control over your character. Inside the office building, you have been the voluntary slave of the Voice in your head; outside, you are its involuntary slave. Your freedom is perfect service. Of course, the scenery is nicer, the air fresher. There are clouds. Perhaps that's enough. Perhaps that's really more than you deserve anyway.
You will only go that way once. It's nice, yes, but a bit passive... and boring. No, not a bit boring, bloody boring. A frequent flaw with heavens. Do you truly want to be here? For eternity? Really.
So next time, you bring the Imp of the Perverse out for a romp. The Voice tells you to go through the door to the left. You go through the door to the right. It tells you there's nothing in the broom closet. You linger there until the Voice practically has a coronary and decides that you must have died and are in imminent danger of decomposition.
Hurry up and fulfill your destiny.
The Voice decides that a few hints and a little sarcasm will do the trick. It doesn't.
You want to play stupid? Let's play stupid then.
Well then, what about a healthy spirit of competition? Unfortunately, it's still a bit heavy-handed.
Stanley doesn't want to win, so shaming him with losing is a non-starter.
You are led into a room with a telephone on a table in a bright pool of light. The Voice encourages you to pick the phone up. It's your wife, the Voice intones to you, and she wants you to tell her that you love her. You unplug the phone instead. The Voice is incredulous. There wasn't even
supposed to be a choice in this room, and you've gone and found one -- and messed everything up again.
You are told to go through the red door, and you go through the blue door. You do that twice, and the Voice
removes the blue door.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
You turn around and go back the way you came, and out of sheer exasperation, the Voice terminates you and sends you back to your office to start again.
Naughty dog! No cookie!
Go another way, and the Voice becomes more conciliatory. Instead of left door, right door, it puts in another door to the far right. You ignore it and go through the left door. The Voice can't understand at all.
Third Way. Doesn't go anywhere useful here, either.
Maybe you'll like another game? The Voice asks you to test out one that it is working on. You have to press a button to keep a baby, or rather a picture of a baby, from tumbling into a fire.
This, the Voice says, is intended to replicate the stresses of family life. It asks you to test the new game for four hours. You don't touch the button and the paper baby takes a header into the furnace in the first thirty seconds. The Voice can't believe you're such a shit.
What did you think this was, Carmageddon?
All right, the Voice decides. You don't like my games. Let's play someone else's. And you end up in
Minecraft.
But that won't do at all, the Voice decides. Too much freedom, too many alternatives. Losing control makes the Voice nervous. Back to the drawing board, or in this case, to the office. Maybe this time, you'll get it right.
You commit suicide, several times. The Voice is not impressed. Your office is never any different when you find yourself back there over and over again.
You discover that something or someone has preplanned every move and predetermined every ending.
So you thought you were running the show? Think again. Sucker.
Nothing you do has any meaning. You were dead the instant you pressed the "play" button.
You couldn't care less. But the Voice is stunned. It had been under the impression that
it was running things. No such luck. It turns out that there is a Voice beyond the Voice, calm, the tones of an older woman, a Voice that has put together a neat little museum of the game's development....
Face it, Stanley. You're history.
One that has realized that the entire game is devoid of any meaning.
That's....depressing.
You take her advice, and refuse to play. You end up back in your office.
Progress takes many forms, some less apparent than others.
And finally, if you are sufficiently persistent and malicious, you manage to break the game totally, beyond all hope of repair. It's junk, garbage. Everything in it is twisted and deformed, as if it had been stomped by some ill-tempered giant.
Whoops! Hope that wasn't too...expensive.
At this, the Voice begins to choke with rage and tears. The game was the only thing that It had, the only thing that It had ever built. It was the meaning of the Voice's existence, the world where it has been God. And you've destroyed it. For nothing, just for
nothing. Just to show that you're a free agent. Was it worth it, Stanley? Was it
really worth it? To show no one is the boss of you?
I am very disappointed in you.... No, that's not quite it. I bloody well hate your stinking guts.
I have to admit that before playing this game, I had never been able to imagine why an omnipotent deity would bother to send someone to Hell. I think I know now. "You have ruined all my work!
All of it!"
At another point, the Voice beyond the Voice reads your collective epitaph as you and the Voice get fed into yet another furnace. And then you're back in your office.
Seems somehow.... familiar.
There are supposed to be over eleven thousand different ways to run through the game. You may be playing it far more than you would have thought, perhaps far more than is healthy. Never mind the outcome. Thumbing your nose at God, watching as your free will thrashes about broken-backed in the rat-trap of a deterministic system, is more than enough fun. Even though you never win, there are such fascinating ways to lose, not to speak of the shards of insanity scattered throughout. The telephone whose recorded message is that you should never trust recorded messages. The copy machine that turns out to be authoring suicidal emo poetry.
The photocopier writes poetry. Don't even ask what the water cooler does with its spare time.
The hand-written page of dialog from Christine Love's game
Analog: A Hate Story found on the floor of one of the offices. The signs on the walls.
Cretan Formula 16.....
You're going to be here a while.
The Stanley Parable began as a mod, a "modification" file, put together with Valve Software's Source engine and employing assets from one of Valve's most famous games, the first-person shooter Half-Life 2. However, this meant that the young game developer could not charge anything for it. Mods are dependent on data files from already published games, meaning that you have to buy a copy of the base game to run the mod. Selling more copies of the base game and learning from the innovations that modders make in their own products are what Valve and other companies get in return for permitting the use of their assets; what the modder him/herself gets, apart from a warm glow of satisfaction, is publicity, which may or may not translate into increased employability.
To sell a mod as a game, it has to be rewritten and a license for the game engine obtained. The young developer did this, wondering if he would break even, and last month, a much expanded and improved version of the original The Stanley Parable was released. Within the first six weeks, it sold upward of 100,000 copies, enough to keep the young developer pushing buttons on his own computers for the next five years or so.
And the young developer, aka Davey Wreden, was happy, because he too had obeyed his Voice, and it had indeed led him to Freedom. For a while, anyway.