I’m stuck in an ever-looping series of rooms. No matter where I go, the same bare basement walls, the same doors, the same pipes meet my gaze. The whole time, a seemingly omniscient narrator mocks me in my search for an exit. The never-ending cycle comes about 20 minutes into my time as Stanley, and I’ve been lost and often confused the entire time. I simply continued walking until the narrator freed me.
Shortly after, I asked Davey Wreden if something different would have happened had I stopped walking and just let the unnamed narrator speak. He smiled and fired a question right back at me. “Would it be worth it for you to find out?”
We first saw The Stanley Parable as a mod for Half-Life 2 back in 2011, when it came onto the scene as a quick, humorous, and occasionally rather dark exploration of free will and how we handle being told what to do by the higher powers in games. Now, four years after he began working on the mod, Wreden is putting together a full game.
Both versions of the game start like this: Stanley comes to work to find that everyone in his droll office is gone. A charming British man speaks in his ear, telling him where to go. Soon, he comes upon a pair of doors. The narrator asks him to go left. More often than not, players go right. This represents the first choice in a long, winding series in which Stanley can obey or ignore the story’s beats.
The Stanley Parable is a game about making choices.
As a result, much of The Stanley Parable is about exploration and discovery. Wreden wants players to use what he’s created to discover something about how they feel about the games they play, much in the same way that he discovers how he feels when he makes them.
“If I don’t discover something interesting as I’m designing this thing, then it’s probably not going to be very interesting for the player to discover. So, it starts on my end,” he says.
To make sure that happens, he looks to his own life experiences.
“If anything, I think this game continues to be informed by relationships that I form with people. WIth the other designer I’m working with. Or with the game development community that I know now that I didn’t know before. Or the friends that I’ve made, the people I’ve lived with, the playtesters that I’ve shown this to…They are bringing a certain level of agency to the game. I want the game to respond to you. I want to throw the ball back in your court.”
The original version of The Stanley Parable had a very dark tone. Stanley’s story seemed hopeless, the narrator evil, and every choice looked to lead to Stanley’s demise or perpetual imprisonment. This time around, however, things are rather more whimsical. The narrator is sillier, the situations goofier, and the tone is lighter. Apparently, that’s indicative of how Wreden is feeling about his life.
“I think I’m just a happier person now than I was then. The original game was a lot more cynical than I feel now. To me, there’s just more humour in this game. To me, my life is just better, and I want to express something happier and more optimistic.”
But that doesn’t mean The Stanley Parable doesn’t have a dark side. “People still play this and come away thinking I’m still pessimistic and saying we’re all fated to die and why does anything mean anything.”
Despite the fact that Wreden knows how it all works – a fact he made very clear at the beginning of our chat – he’s intimately aware of how chaotic the game can seem at times. “Certain things are random. And certain things are not, but people project elements of randomness onto them. Or project elements of things being connected even though that was never our intention. People begin tying it together on their own and forming meaning out of those things.”
In the end, he just wants players to come away with something special. “I want people to come away from this happy and believing in something positive and able to connect to one another. And find something positive about the world, even when it looks on the surface bleak.”
The post The joy of choice in Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable appeared first on Edge Online.
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