The Stanley Parable: A videogame takes on traditional views of narrative

Just read this on the NPR All Tech Considered blog and had to share.

 

"This is a story of a man named Stanley. Stanley worked for a big company in a big building, where he is known as employee No. 427. His job was to push buttons on his computer. He was given orders for which buttons to push, when to push them and how often.

 

This is what Stanley did, day after day. Until one day no orders came, and Stanley ventured out of his office to find out why." 

I'd never heard of The Stanley Parable game (here's the whole blog article), but now I'm dying to play it.  Just to get you on the same page, let me quote the game homepage, which explains things...enough:

The Stanley Parable is a first person exploration game. You will play as Stanley, and you will not play as Stanley. 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.

But as you explore, slowly, meaning begins to arise, the paradoxes might start to make sense, perhaps you are powerful after all. The game is not here to fight you; it is inviting you to dance.

 

 

Are you as intrigued as I am?

While I suggest reading the entire NPR blog article, this subversion of traditional narrative storytelling is fascinating. The narrator tells the player what Stanley is doing, thinking, etc., but the player is allowed to basically ignore or contradict the narrative to do what they want, turning the "official" narrator into an antagonistic force at times. If he gets really ired at the player, he even has the power to restart the game, restoring Stanley to his original state of button pushery in his cube.

 

The game is both exploration and storybuilding, but it's also a not-so-subtle jab at game design which often still "runs on rails" with little opportunity for players to define the storyline or venture off on their own accord.

 

If you're interested, there's a free trial download on The Stanley Parable game website (first link above), or you can buy it from Steam for $15.