World Design Exercise: Game #7 (The Stanley Parable)

When The Stanley Parable Demonstration was released many had cited the game’s critique on the video game industry through its blatant shattering of the fourth wall, as the player navigates through the levels they are accompanied by the disembodied sarcastic voice of Kevan Brighting, whose overall personality in some way depends almost entirely on the decisions made by the player as they experience the Demo.

First and foremost, the player will notice that The Stanley Parable is not a simple narrative driven adventure since right from the get go the Demo as it will demonstrate how the game is designed to completely subvert the player’s expectations time and time again; in the beginning the player discovers that instead of diving straight into the Demo, they are placed in a waiting room to partake in a behind-the-scenes sort of tester session for the Stanley Parable instead, establishing to the player that The Stanley Parable will be an unconventional and unorthodox gaming experience.

Fig 1. Central hub area of the Stanley Parable Demo.

After being called a sexual predator by the Narrator (in what appears to be a room comprised of buttons representing choice), the player will entire a facility warehouse where they can enter other sections of the Demo such as the Emotion Booths, a Wall Technology testing chamber and such, since here is where the player will learn about the inner workings of the ‘upcoming’ Stanley Parable game (and to an extent, practically other video games as well), how emotions are formed and implemented and how walls are representative of the types of game world confinement that players usually encounter respectively.

Fig 2. The infamous 8 Room, wherein the player can literally push the Narrator's buttons and essentially piss him off.

One of the more memorable portion of the Demo is the 8 Room, where the player is presented a button that quite honestly does nothing than display the number 8 whenever the 8 button is pressed. Here the narrator lambastes the player quite harshly should the player stick around and continue ‘playing’ the 8 Game, forcefully coercing the player to leave before they form any unwarranted impressions towards the full Stanley Parable game. On top of that there is a particular moment in the game where after the player leaves the testing facility, they trigger a narrative contradiction that breaks the demo, here the narrator gets really angry and scolds the player for deviating from the path and thinking on their own, both of these events are examples of the many instances where the game directly interacts with the player and of course the player’s actions interact with the way the game unfolds in a back-and-forth sort of manner.

The Stanley Parable Demo constantly shatters the player’s expectations by subverting the linearity of most narrative-driven games and is one of the strongest examples of interactive criticisms in video games.


REFERENCES:

Author Unknown. The Central Hub of the Stanley Parable Demo. Retrieved from http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/433780009363660034/71CB4488BDEC63912673FE15C423BCB89AEE1791/

Author Unknown. The Number 8 Room. Retrieved from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9VtGaMrkhYM/maxresdefault.jpg