Stanley chose the door on the left... the LEFT.

It began like this:

JC: "You should really play The Stanley Parable. You'd like it. It's really interesting."
Andrew: "What is it?"
JC: "It's a Half-Life 2 mod. But I can't tell you anything else. It'll spoil it."
Andrew: "Cool!"

One week later:

JC: "Have you played The Stanley Parable yet?"
Andrew: "I don't know how to install mods! They scare me! I don't want to learn anything new! Bwah-ha!"
JC: "You really need to play it."
Andrew: "Alright, fine, whatever…"

The next day:

Andrew (to Adam): Have you played The Stanley Parable? You need to play it!
Andrew (to Zanda): Have you played The Stanley Parable? You need to play it!
Andrew (to Michael): Have you played The Stanley Parable…?

Alright, so yes, everyone needs to play The Stanley Parable, fine. It's one hour long, and unlike many game-related experiences you will be better off for having spent the hour, which is is about as high a compliment as you can give.

Here's what you need:

PC: Valve's Source installed and other stuff I don't know - I use a Mac, but apparently if you're on PC everything's sweet. Just go here and figure it out.
On Mac: you need Half-Life 2 installed and you need to have clicked Play in Steam so that the OSX binary appears in your Steam library. You can then download and run this super-easy Mac installer.

I have no idea how to install a mod, and I got it working in 5 minutes, so there's no reason why you can't do it. And if you don't have HL2 or Source, then… I don't even know what to say. I try to be positive but, man, you're making it hard... (Go to Steam and install Team Fortress 2 for free, I guess.)

So go play The Stanley Parable, and come back when you're done. We can debrief together. You're gonna need it.

Are you back? Okay.

In the Funhouse

So what the hell was that? Was that a good experience? Was it fun?

Yes. It was awesome.

Why?

The gameplay experience is simple. Walk down a hall. Listen to the narrator. Choose a door. Repeat.

But how many different emotions do you experience walking down those halls and choosing those doors? Curiosity, dread, alarm, guilt, panic, anger, laughter, hope, despair, resentment, resignation - all from a few halls and a voiceover.

How hard do other games have to work to create that range of experiences? How does Stanley manage to do all that, given it’s not even really a game?

Stanley, you so meta

Stanley is a game about games. It fits into a long tradition of meta-narrative - stories about stories that create these kind of recursive, kaleidoscopic, house-of-mirrors effects, that one minute can make it seem like you are in a state of profound reflection, and the next minute make it seem like you are trapped in an infinite series of heads stuck up arses. It can be hard to tell.

When you start playing Stanley, your first thought is that there is a mystery to be uncovered: where is everyone? But you quickly begin to suspect there is no mystery: the world was designed to be empty, and for you to be alone.

The next thing you think is that this is a puzzle, and it’s your job to crack it. So you follow paths and look for clues, then as the dead ends mount up you realise this isn’t a puzzle either.

It’s a trap.

You be the rat, I'll be the maze

As much as you want to “figure out” Stanley, it beats you at every turn. It anticipates every move you make, reacting to every combination of choices in a coherent, convincing and vaguely malevolent way.

You begin to realise that you are a prisoner, that the game is a locked box, and that every path ends in failure.

The really unsettling question is, is this just the game, or is this your life?

The emotional effect is strangely powerful; nobody likes to find out that they’re doomed.

One of the great touches of the game is that every ending makes you feel doomed in a different way. Take your pick: madness, trivial transcendence, sudden blackness. You can enjoy six varieties of existential crisis - for free!

Traditionally, a comedy is a story that ends in marriage (life), and a tragedy is a story that ends in death. Stanley is a Choose-Your-Own-Tragedy, where the doomed tragic is not Stanley, but you.

The carpet alone will kill you.

The Ultimate Boss

If you are the tragic hero of Stanley, then who is your nemesis? It’s the narrator, who turns out to be a far more sinister and powerful enemy than any tentacled demon boss. Because the narrator represents absolute author(ity).

You know what they call a genial, older man talking in your head? God.

That’s right, The Stanley Parable, set almost entirely in a timber-laminate hallway with cheap carpet, pits you directly against the Supreme Being. It’s like an even more compressed version of Shadow of the Colossus. And if you choose to take on God in a boss battle you confirm only this: he’s omnipotent, and brutal.

But you can’t resist, can you? If you follow the path of obedience you are apparently rewarded with freedom, but you know it’s not freedom at all, you know you’ve been enslaved, so at some point you defy the author, only to realise that your defiance is constrained by the rules of the world, a world created by the author in anticipation of your defiance. Once again, you’re trapped. You want freedom? You can’t have it.

Rock me, Bertrand Russell

But hang on just one second... Do you really want freedom?

Stanley has, somewhere deep in its design-DNA, the idea that freedom is an ultimate good, and that we should be horrified to realise that our freedom is an illusion, just like when Neo wakes up out of the Matrix to find himself in a cavern filled with millions of gooey pod-people. But here’s the thing, when that scene was first screened in cinemas it was watched by millions of gooey pod-people, who had all paid $10 for the privilege.

"Oh my god, he's living in a fantasy! That's terrible!" *munch munch*

Sure freedom is good, but it’s also great to submit yourself to a power greater than yourself, whether that’s an idea, a cause, a deity... or a piece of art.

When the narrator in Stanley begs you, in the lift, to just follow along with the story he’s trying to tell, he has a point. Narrative freedom comes at the cost of power. If you want freedom, if you want sand-box, that’s fine - you’ll have your own unique experience, but it will probably be ephemeral. If you want a really powerful experience, you have to submit to authorial control.

Stanley is it’s own evidence for this point: it’s powerful because it’s so short and tightly controlled.

Sit. Sit. Die. Die.

The developer of Stanley, Davey Wreden, is a film graduate from USC and Stanley wears a filmmaker’s heavy concern about narrative, about heroism and myth, the kind of concerns that maybe occupy players of narrative-driven forms such as RPG and adventure games, but are just kind of beside the point to everyone else. For everyone else, the boundaries in a game world are the very drivers of fun.

Crisis of meaning? Quit your bellyaching and play medic!

The whole point of playing a game is to learn a rule set. The rules, the constraints on your freedom, are not a deficiency - they are the game's purpose. We play to learn rules.

Stanley’s weakness is that it raises an alarm about a non-issue. Only young children and shut-ins enter a game-world thinking they are masters of their destiny. We all go in knowing that we are participating in an artifice, and the measure of a successful game is how much we feel rewarded for having explored and mastered that artifice.

The real danger that needs to be addressed is that of addiction: if the artifice is more rewarding than reality, what’s to stop you falling into it permanently? In that regard, Stanley is really an example of the pot calling the kettle black: it is both addictive (“Just one more ending before bed!”) and harrowing to the point that you’re more likely to go play Plants vs Zombies just to cheer yourself up.

This is the end, my only friend, the end

So that’s where we’re left with Stanley: a one-hour Half-Life 2 mod that brings on an existential crisis.

It may be ultimately pointless, but that’s what existential crises are all about. The main thing is that for a little while you had an experience that amplified your experience of the world, that made you more aware, more sensitive, more on your toes, even if just for a little while.

Not many artistic experiences actually succeed in doing that. Most just drug you, dull you, but Stanley packs in more emotion and more insight into an hour than... well, most game experiences manage to do at all.

Maybe it won’t change your rat-in-a-maze cheese-hunting ways, but it’s a great experience. It’s fun, spooky, disturbing, disquieting, a perfectly-voiced warning, like a talking bottle of scotch to a wino. It’s gaming as poetry, as rhetoric, as Greek tragedy.

What else have you played like that?