Written by Justin Keever, Lecturer at Georgia State University

   I was disappointed by The Stanley Parable (2013) and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (2022), despite loving The Stanley Parable (2011), the modification of Half-Life 2 upon which the above game (and its remaster) were based. If you’re reading this special issue on videogame modding you’ve probably played some version of The Stanley Parable, but in case you haven’t, here’s the gist: you play as an office worker named Stanley who has discovered that his officemates have vanished. As you investigate, a narrator speaks, providing context and, more importantly, saying what Stanley is going to do in advance of the player making certain navigational decisions. If you follow the narrator’s instructions (e.g., when faced with a choice of two doors to enter, taking the door the narrator has said Stanley would take), then you follow a linear story in which Stanley discovers a massive disciplinary apparatus beneath his office and breaks free of the totalitarian structure. If you don’t follow the narrator’s instructions, then the narrator begins addressing Stanley directly, becoming increasingly fed up with him (and by extension, you) and placing Stanley in an increasingly ridiculous sequence of scenarios as punishment for not playing along with the linear narrative.

     Alongside Bioshock (2007), The Stanley Parable (Take Your Pick) is probably the canonical critique of narrative agency in games. Though Stanley is probably better understood less as a critique than as a delirious circling of the question of narrative agency. Every route in The Stanley Parable is accounted for in advance, pre-narrated, pre-planned. The game’s real cleverness is that it posits no alternative to the totalitarian nature of authorship: any attempt to escape the authorial hand of the narrator is anticipated by the authorial hand of Davey Wreden. There is no outside, there is no escape. The entire game is a reproduction of the narrator’s “proper” story, where following the linear path provides a sensation of freedom through constraint. But this limited imagination also makes The Stanley Parable an intensely nihilistic work, an empty exercise in metatextual playfulness with ultimately very little to say about games or game design outside of reproducing the core ideological function of the videogame medium.

     There is, however, one moment in the mod that points beyond this negative horizon. The Stanley Parable (2011) is a “total conversion” mod, meaning that it does not resemble its base game (Half-Life 2) in any way. Functionally, it is a distinct game. However, in the mod, if you are especially defiant towards the narrator, he will get fed up and plop you down in an emptied version of the first level of Half-Life 2, which is a train station that functions as a checkpoint for a totalitarian alien force that has taken over Earth. It’s a striking moment, akin to walking through an empty backlot. The characters are gone, the lighting is off, and all that’s left is a simulacrum of a disciplinary structure from another universe. If you look closely, you might see the trashcans that also populate Stanley’s office, in their original context. To walk around an empty Half-Life 2 is to be faced with the conceptual and material underpinning of The Stanley Parable as a mod: it is a disciplinary apparatus which is existentially and materially made of this stuff that we see in this empty level.

     When I played The Stanley Parable (2013), I was primarily curious as to how this commercial release would handle this moment. The 2013 release of Stanley does not drop you into Half-Life 2, but instead sticks you into a falsified version of Minecraft and Portal. The scene is more heavy-handed: you watch the narrator invisibly build a house in a little pre-built sequence and you’re forced to play the tutorial block puzzle from the first level of Portal. And yet these sequences (and the Firewatch and Rocket League equivalents in Ultra Deluxe) feel hollower than the mod’s Half-Life 2 sequence. But even if the commercial release contained that same sequence, perfectly reproduced, it would still no longer function properly.

     In becoming a commercial entity there is a semantic and legal shift that takes place around The Stanley Parable that empties these sequences of their meaning. These sequences don’t engage with the materiality of the medium. They are easter eggs, meant to generate noises of gleeful recognition in knowing gamers. What I feel when the narrator teleports me to Minecraft is the series of legal agreements that needed to take place to stick a simulacrum of that game into The Stanley Parable. What I feel is not the conditions of production of the work, but the legal negotiations that surround that work when it is captured as Intellectual Property.

     But maybe that’s the point. As Ian Bogost has demonstrated, the introduction of the game engine as a central toolset in the videogame production pipeline has created a scenario wherein making a game involves, almost always, the remixing of another game. He does not use these words exactly, but when he draws our attention to the fact that Half-Life is built in the Quake Engine (a software environment derived from id Software’s 1996 game Quake), he reminds us that the introduction of the game engine transforms game development fundamentally a modding practice (60). If we dig down to the codebase, we are left with the observation that there is not a material distinction between Quake and Half-Life. This existential indeterminacy, generated by the game engine qua advanced modding tool, means that “games agree to mediate their commonalities through an external structure: intellectual property” (61). If to make a game is to mod another game, then the existence of any given individual game text is no more than a legal discursive difference. The doors of The Stanley Parable (2011) suddenly address me not as material substrate but as free-floating signifiers of IP: the door signifies Valve’s ownership of the mod moreso than the tools that created the door.

     The three Stanley Parables together unveil that there is no distinction between the materiality and the legal identification of a videogame. It’s all a part of the same onto-epistemological field of global capital. Maybe my disappointment with the latter two Stanleys is my disappointment in games themselves, that we are all modders who are not parasitically enriching ourselves off mass culture, but inverse-parasites that are generating the works which function only to reproduce the legal power of IP. There is no work of art anymore. Creative freedom only reproduces constraint. Davey Wreden done got me again.
 

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT Press, 2006.