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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Spotlight on Games: The Stanley Parable

First things first. Go play the Stanley Parable. This is a game where the story carries the entire game, so I can't possibly review this without spoiling pretty much the entire game. I recommend that you play this, not because it's a fun or necessarily good game, but it's a very interesting game. It is guaranteed to give you something to think and talk about. A little bit about the price, it is a bit pricey for the amount of gameplay. I paid 8 dollars and still feel like I wasted some money, but then again I am really cheap when it comes to games. Watch the trailers and try the demo and you might be intrigued enough to buy it, but whatever you expect from it, don't. Go into it with an open mind or you will walk away disappointed.

Spoilers Begin Here

The Stanley Parable is an experiment. It's a look into the nature of gaming and story telling, almost a satirization of the way most games present choices and the illusion of free will. You control the character of Stanley while a narrator explains a story. However, you can deviate from the narrator's instructions and try and forge your own story. You quickly discover that the narrator is aware of the player, and the fact that he is in a game. The fourth wall is broken very early on when the narrator begins to directly address the player as a player. You also quickly discover that the creators were meticulous in their storytelling. Every choice you can possibly make is accounted for and followed through. This gets very frustrating, because the way the game is presented demeans and humiliates the player and the very nature of gaming. Trying to explain it like this is kind of vague and confusing, so I'll take this one element at a time.

The story, I must admit is superb in its use of symbolism and analogy. You begin as Stanley, office worker 427, a man who spends all day pressing keys at a computer that tells him what keys to press and how long to press them. This is an analogy for gaming, because technically gaming  is just pressing buttons at a keyboard. Stanley is perfectly happy with his existence until suddenly the computer stops giving him instructions and all of his coworkers disappear. Stanley is then prompted by the narrator to go explore. From that point, you come to a room with two doors, the first obvious choice you are allowed to make, and this is where the major gameplay element comes into play: choice. The narrator says the Stanley takes the door to the left, but the door to the right is open and it is simple to disobey and take it. On my first playthrough I began with the right door, so I'll do the same here.

Entering the right door, the narrator's voice becomes slightly irate and he changes the story and gives you essentially the same choice, go back onto the path of the story or continue disobeying. Continuing to disobey makes the narrator realize that you are in fact a player, and he addresses you as such. The interesting thing is, the more you choose to disobey, the less options become available to you, and eventually you are forced to follow the linear story that the narrator has set out, but a "broken" version, one you are unable to complete. 

If you choose to follow the story completely, relinquish all choice and let the narrator guide you, the story tells you that you have been under mind control the entire time, and eventually you disable the mind control device and you reach the only "good" ending in the game, Stanley goes free. The irony of this ending is palpable, freedom is obedience, you break free of the mind control by having someone else tell you what to do. It's by far the most satisfying ending, and says a lot about the narrative strategies in other games where straying from the storyline, trying to "break" the game is often unsatisfying and unrewarding. 

Yet The Stanley Parable is a game where the player is compelled to break the game, just to escape the grasp of the narrator. The most frustrating part is that everything you try, every action you take has been accounted for and laid out. You can try and kill yourself but the narrator just keeps on narrating and the game restarts. You can try to escape through a window, you can fall out the map, every way you try and break the game, you think you've won but suddenly the narrator just keeps on talking, and the frustration mounts. This is the message of the Stanley Parable: Control.

The defining moment of this theme of control is the countdown ending. You're in a very boss-battle like room, littered with buttons and monitors that drop clues to which buttons you're supposed to press to stop the countdown. The only thing is, it's impossible. The buttons do nothing, the clues mean nothing, as soon as you choose this ending you've already lost. As you run around the narrator taunts you for trying to beat the game, taunts you for thinking that you actually have any control over the narrative. This is the truth the Stanley Parable conveys, the truth it reveals about any game you play, your decisions mean nothing. You only have the illusion of choice, of free will, you are trapped in the game. As long as you play the game the game has complete control over you. Yet, in another ending, you can torture the narrator by repeatedly throwing yourself off a stairwell, trying to kill yourself rather than live in safety with the narrator. The narrator pleads you to stop, but the only way to advance the narrative is to continue.

This is the symbiotic relationship between the player and the game, the viewer and the art. Art is meant to be taken in, experienced, and The Stanley Parable, does an excellent job of portraying how much the narrator, the game needs Stanley, how much art needs someone to appreciate it. Without the viewer, there is paint on a canvas, mere lines of code, but with a viewer, a player, someone to appreciate and understand it, there is art, there is meaning, there is a message, there is more than meets the eye.

Yet this relationship has some troubling implications. The narrator implies games are mind-control, a prison, a place where the player has no control, yet it is a prison that the player voluntarily enters, and as long as they are there they have no control. The Stanley Parable criticizes the pastime, saying gaming is living someone else's fantasy, there are times when it seems the narrator is addressing Stanley when the narrator is actually addressing the player. The narrator tries to tell Stanley that he isn't in fact experiencing this world, but pressing keys at a keyboard, but as I played through this part I was oblivious to the fact that the narrator was in fact describing me. This is the genius of the Stanley Parable, it immerses you while trying desperately to break you out. It makes you ignorant to the lack of free will you have in the game, and the free will you have in the real world.

The only way to beat the Stanley Parable it to stop playing. There is no satisfaction to be found in any of the endings. This is not a game you play for pleasure. Hell I'm even hesitant to call this a game. The Stanley Parable is an experiment of the mind. It's a message addressed to Stanley but meant for you. It asks questions without questioning them, it points out incongruities and hypocrisies without pointing at them. The goal of the game is not to win, it is to send a message, to convey an idea. This is not a game, it is an art. Not satisfying, but visceral, not enjoyable, but interesting.

As a game, I hate the Stanley Parable,
but as art, it was beautiful.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Pens, Quizzes, Papers and Love: A Short Story

Third period was my Teacher's Aide block. I graded papers. I sorted files. I made copies. I was at the beck and call of the Freshman History teacher. I would spend an hour each day of the week at a desk, doing whatever she needed me to do. It wasn't bad, actually. To be honest I sort of enjoyed the time. It gave me the sense that I represented something official in the school, and that what I accomplished during that period was important and helpful. The teacher was pleasant to talk to, and we had some interesting conversations on recent events, politics and other similar topics. My TA block was not necessarily always pleasant, but I never particularly dreaded it.

Nothing particularly noteworthy ever happened. Not until one perfectly normal, and uneventful day when something perfectly normal happened, it should have meant nothing, yet for some peculiar reason, it meant so much more to me. Too much. I was grading tests. Thumbing through the stack of mildly handled papers that represented these students' futures in history (some promising, some, not so much), I realized I was bored. Glancing at the clock, I sighed with resignation and got to work. Pen in hand, I followed little imperfectly, but fully filled bubbles and compared them to the quick coffee-driven squiggles of the teacher's answer key. Down each row, and to the next, then down again, and to the next, marking sharp crosses on the wrong answers and leaving the rest unpunished. Five papers in, I started noticing patterns that allowed me to grade faster. Ten papers in, my hand began cramp mildly and my mind wandered, likely giving some hapless student a lower (or perhaps higher) grade than they deserved. Exactly sixteen papers in, a student had drawn a heart.

I paused for a moment, looking at the doodle. The heart lay next to the name of its illustrator. In wide, smooth curly letters, Jessica Grime's signature adorned the top of the page. For a brief moment, I considered the unfortunate surname in such a prim font. The name seemed familiar, and I remembered the freshman that had added me as one of the thirteen hundred hundred friends she already had on Facebook. I assumed she had simply added me because of the amount of mutual friends we shared, going to the same small-town school, but perhaps she had actually...

No, ridiculous, I pushed such adolescent notions out of my head and focused back on the paper, giving it an unceremonious grade at the top and letting the decorated paper drop to the top of the already graded papers on the floor by my feet. I glanced at it once more, with a subtle sense of regret, but returned my focus to the papers ahead.

Several days of copying and sorting passed before I received the opportunity to grade papers again. As I worked my way through the papers, a small sense of apprehension grew, while my logical side reproached me for it. I dutifully continued my task of grading until paper number seven. There she was, with her graceful slim-lined letters tracing her name, Jessica Grime, and her telltale heart by her name. Again, I paused rolling the name in my mind; Jessica Grime. Jessy Grime. Jess Grime. Such an unfitting name, yet, somehow, endearing. Realizing what I was doing, again I reproached myself, and continued grading, but not before carefully inscribing an immaculately kerned grade at the top of the page.

This pattern continued for weeks, and by the end, whenever an opportunity to grade came up, my heart fluttered as my mind rolled its proverbial eyes, and I took it, just to see the prim heart, the curvy letters, just to feel the paper she touched. Was this love? Had I fallen for mere text and a heart? Or was I merely infatuated? My line of thought circled in a mess of meta-contemplation as I tried to derive a reason for my irrational obsession. No, I told the papers, this can't go on any longer. It's not you, it's me, we have to stop this now. I let another paper fall to the finished pile with yet another carefully lined grade adorning the top of the page, right next to the heart.

Every day of grading, some part of my mind grew ever more desperate. Was she noticing my subtle efforts? What were the chances? Perhaps she compared her paper to a friend's and noticed the difference in care when I penned the grades at the top, perhaps she noticed the careful crosses that marked her careless mistakes. I was on my best behavior grading her tests and her quizzes, but was she perceptive enough to see it? My rational mind stepped in, of course not, it's too subtle of a clue, to quiet of an outcry. Even if she did notice she would have no idea what to make of it, she doesn't even know the teacher has an aide.

I decided then that I would have to definitively sever my ties, the only way to return to normal was to start somewhere, but the fact of the matter was, it only got worse. I tried to return to the unceremonious, scratchy grading that I used on all the other papers, but my self-awareness progressed too far. I became even more careful to make sure my grades looked sufficiently careless, and began to panic that she would notice this change as well. I could not longer tell if I still loved her or if it was merely the expectation I set for myself to not think about it that caused me to think about it, and consequently fall back into this circular meta-cognitive trap.

I asked myself, how careless is careless enough? Should I skip her paper once or twice? But then I'd have to skip others to avoid rousing suspicion, but would she really be suspicious, of what? Of the teacher's aide the fell in love with her name? No, I said, this has gone long enough, this has to stop. It's not you, it's me, its over. Done. Finished. No more. I dropped that TA period at the end of the semester and hoped for some peace of mind

That same day, as I walked to my new third period class, Jessica Grimes bumped into me in the hallway and slipped a small paper into my hand. I stopped walking, and looked at it. It had her number, a heart, and a little message in prim, curved handwriting that said "I noticed". I turned around and watched her walk away. Her graceful steps matched her graceful font. She tilted her head back at me and gave me a sly smile and wink.

I threw the paper in the trash.