The Stanley Parable: A step in the right direction

                  The Stanley Parable is a Half Life 2 mod that allows a player to take control of worker 427 ,otherwise known as Stanley. While controlling Stanley an invisible narrator details everything Stanley does and the thought processes of why he does it (while also giving critical pieces of information to the player). I think this game (I know it's just a mod, but it still it could be considered a game) is a great guinea pig for demonstrating how literary theories can be applied to gain a deeper understanding of how a video game is functioning.

Warning: This game relies on the inexperience of the player, making it have a very short replayability peroid. I would suggest that anyone who is serious about trying something new, downloads the game at http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable and plays it before reading what I'm getting into. The game takes at most 20 minutes of your time and is completely free (you do not need to download Half Life 2 to play it). Make sure you also have Steam downloaded and downloading Desura makes it much easier to access.
                 Let's start with the opening scene of the game and the narrator. The game begins by introducing the player to Stanley by name (through the voice of the typical british accented narrator [refer to the invention of lying for a good example of this]). Then the narrator tells the player that Stanley is worker 427. This creates a nice parallel between the individuality of the character (his name) and the drone like nature of the character (worker 427). It immediately helps the player understand what the possible theme of the game might be. From this information the player knows that the game is probably going to revolve around the struggle of the individual and the group. And lo and behold, the game puts Stanley on a crash course to convene with his co-workers in the lounge. See how powerful a good intro can be for a game? In a few sentences the game was able to give the player all the necessary information they would need to understand how the game is trying to compel them. You might be thinking that most players don't really notice these things, but you'd be surprised. Even if you don't consciously pick up on these things, I assure you your brain does. And players who replay the game (like I said, the game can't be replayed for a long period of time, but it definitely has a few replays in it), which is encouraged by the games different endings system, find themselves picking up on these things the third or fourth go around.
             This process in literature is usually referred to as setting a "theme" or themeing", but in an English course I was in, my Professor coined another term that he took from the Pulitzer prize winning writer, Jennifer Egan. The term was "preoccupations". The reason this term works much better than the term "theme" is because the trope of a theme has become so over used and generalized that we find that almost any theme can be applied to a novel indiscriminately. Also, preoccupations take away the finality the word "theme" seems to imply. Overall I like the term and continue to use it, so I'm going to use it in this review in the hopes that others use it in their conversations concerning literature (or any medium for that matter) as well. Continuing on, one of the preoccupations of the Stanley parable is that of the group vs the individual. And it's conveyed to the player in a manner of increasing complexity. I know that sounds like over intellectualized boredom, but let me explain! It's actually pretty amazing when you think about it.
             Let's start with the simple example, the name vs the worker number. That is the first piece of dialogue the game initiates with the player and it's pretty direct. It doesn't require much thinking or doing on the player's part. They can just sit back an assimilate the information. As the narrator continues with the introduction it lets you know that Stanley is doing a job that most people would find boring (group think talk), but Stanley finds it very rewarding (even tailor-made). Now you might hear this statement and think it's just a small bit of background information, but it actually deepens the complexity of the preoccupation by conveying to the player what the issue is behind the individual vs the group (the archaic way of talking about this in literature is usually denoted as "man vs society" but I dislike using the masculine form to encompass all people whenever I can help it). If the job Stanley is doing is meant to represent life in the group and most find that life unrewarding, then the game is communicating the well held view of a group think society being unrewarding due to its drone like nature. But it immediately counters this point of view with the fact that even though most people would be discontent with the job, Stanley finds it rewarding. This statement creates the conundrum of the individual vs group for the player to wrestle with. If Stanley is enjoying this drone like job, even though most people don't, is his participation in the job a mark of individuality? Why does Stanley feel like this job was made for him? Now to be sure, many of these questions are answered by the game, but the important thing is that the player is given a chance to be introduced to this conversation before the game begins dictating how it should go. If the player was told beforehand that Stanley was actually being controlled by a device (which is revealed later on in the game), then the player wouldn't have considered how hard it is to explain away the individual vs society conundrum.
       

I can go on and on and on, dissecting this game and explaining why the game just adds layer and layer of complexity to the preoccupation of the individual vs society. But I'm not going to. I want you to play the game (without reading this, so if you have read this and have not played the game, stop reading and sulk for not heeding my above warnings ) and then after reading this, play it again, trying to see how the game is working with the player to demonstrate more and more how complex the preoccupation of the individual vs society is. You just might find it even more rewarding than your first play through.




Before I end this post, I want to point out that the game, while having an arguably biased viewpoint on on the aforementioned preoccupation, allowed the player to do some mental lumberjacks before forcing its biased view on them. This is the beautiful thing about video games. Instead of simply force feeding a concept and an answer to a player, the video game allows the player (if done correctly) to experience the very issue at hand. This is far more compelling than pushing your opinion on someone and I argue that video games are a medium best suited for this kind of hands on teaching.The power of the video game does not come from the ability of the developer to guide and control the player, but instead comes from the near infinite amount of "art pieces" that can be produced by the tandem of the player and the developer.