Are You Playing the Game, or Is the Game Playing You? — On The Stanley Parable and Video Games

Prefatory note: This essay was a prizewinning submission to Lab on Roof’s Rags Drum 2020 Pre-Festival + Post-Festival.

I admit my mistakes humbly, reflect on them deeply—and flatly refuse to mend my ways.

The Stanley Parable is a first person exploration game. You will play as Stanley, and you will not play as Stanley. You will follow a story, you will not follow a story. You will have a choice, you will have no choice. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. This world was not made for you to understand. — Official description of The Stanley Parable

Introduction

For many people, playing games has long been a useless pastime, a waste of time¹—and every so often, games are saddled with the slur “electronic heroin.” But why are they seen this way? Because they contain violence and sexual content? Literature and film have plenty of those too. Because games seem to be made for clueless children or teenagers with nothing to do? Children’s literature, by contrast, seems to be taken seriously. Because gaming is just an idle diversion? That is all watching films and television amounts to for most people, too. On the other side, players have long defended games as the “ninth art,” though for some this is merely an excuse to let themselves off the hook. Video games do have a short history compared with literature or painting, and their body of theory still needs developing.² Film went through something similar in the last century. But time alone will not develop a theory of games for us: that takes sustained exploration and thought. The Stanley Parable (2013) is just such a game: a video game that explores its own medium.

1. Metagames: Games about Games

Where ordinary games concentrate on imitating reality, metagames—games about games—emphasize the “mimesis of process.” Rather than depicting a virtual world, they are concerned with depicting the process by which a virtual world is depicted. Their form is their content. In doing so, they expose how other works are constructed, bringing conventions hidden in the creative process out onto the stage. They also reveal the relationship between players and the work, drawing our attention to the very form we ordinarily take for granted.³

The main menu is already full of metagame elements. Above the title The Stanley Parable is a small line of text: “You are playing.” The computer screen beside it is, in fact, the player’s own screen, with further screens nested inside it, on and on. This little trick already hints that we are dealing with a game about games.⁴ Better still, we can count the player’s real-world monitor as another screen in the sequence. Here the boundary between the real world and the game world begins to blur.

After most endings, the game restarts automatically. The loading screen reads “The end is never the end,” hinting at the illusory nature of the game’s endings.⁵

The opening narration introduces the backstory through an oblique act of self-reference. Stanley is Employee 427 at a company. His job is to press keys on his keyboard as instructed by his computer screen, and this dull, tedious work gives him enormous satisfaction. We hardly have to think about it to recognize the mechanisms of video games in the narrator’s description: follow the game’s instructions, press the right button at the right time, do what the game demands. Different games simply wrap all this in different mechanics and narratives. At bottom, it is still what Stanley does.⁵ In the Apartment ending, the screen explicitly tells the player to press particular buttons to make Stanley perform particular actions and advance the plot. The player following these on-screen instructions has now become the very Stanley described at the beginning.

In the Explosion ending, the game gives the player a countdown to an explosion, comments on its own design, and points out that no mechanism for preventing the explosion has been built into it—all while mocking what the player is doing. In the “meat-patty” ending, the player enters a museum documenting the game’s development, blurring the boundary between reality and the game world. In the Games ending, the player strays into a part of the map still under development. The narrator asks the player to “suggest improvements to this game” and introduces other games, including Minecraft and Portal. (Intriguingly, this route asks us to choose between a red door and a blue door—like the pills in The Matrix.) All this reinforces The Stanley Parable’s character as a metagame. Unlike games offering an “immersive” experience, it makes players attend not only to what the game presents, but to the game itself, prompting them to reflect on the medium through their experience of playing.

The main—or rather, the only—mechanic in The Stanley Parable is choice. In terms of gameplay it belongs among walking simulators such as Firewatch and The Painscreek Killings. You cannot even jump. All you can do is walk around and operate a handful of interactive objects. Yet choice gets to the heart of games: whether we are playing a first-person shooter or a fighting game, our inputs can be understood as particular choices made at particular moments. Simple mechanics also let us concentrate on the questions the game wants us to consider. Precisely because there are no other challenges here, the real challenge is to understand the game itself.⁶⁵ At the same time, a game without any “mechanics,” whose only gameplay consists in “matching wits” with the narrator, poses a considerable challenge to existing definitions of games and frameworks for analyzing them.⁷ Other games layer metagame elements over other mechanics; while this enriches the playing experience, it inevitably dilutes their reflection on games as a medium.

Another interesting point: although the narrator sometimes appears “surprised” by our choices, we know perfectly well that all this has been designed in advance. As a metagame, The Stanley Parable tries to show what it was not designed to show, tries to run code that has not been written, tries to tell stories that have not been written. We know this is impossible. Yet aesthetically, it accomplishes the impossible through metaphor.¹

2. Stanley and the Narrator: Who Is Running the Story?

When we leave the room, the narrator follows us, still speaking from an omniscient, God’s-eye perspective. Yet a subtle tension emerges between him and the protagonist we control: the narrator speaks in the past tense, but we can change Stanley’s actions at any moment.

This tension reaches its first peak at our first overt choice, a room with two doors. The narrator directs us through the left-hand door. If we follow his instructions all the way, we reach the “deception” ending.⁸ Throughout this route, the narrator maintains a distance from our story appropriate to his omniscient position, without ever letting the necessary tension lapse. In the boss’s office he announces the boss’s passcode as though nobody were listening. When the player enters it correctly, he patches up the account: “Incredible! Stanley had entered four numbers at random and guessed the code.”

Something similar happens if we deliberately defy the narrator at that first choice and take the right-hand door. He tries various ways of repairing what he has just said: “Perhaps Stanley just wanted to go to the lounge.” Once we arrive, he starts praising the lounge as a place well worth the detour, with a distinctly mocking edge aimed at the player. If Stanley stays too long, the narrator turns self-reflexive: “Stanley sat waiting for the next line of narration. He thought the game was trying to tell him something.”

The more the player disobeys, the further the narrator moves from his original position outside the narrative, all-knowing and all-powerful, and the more actively he intervenes in the game. His words also become more ambiguous: is he speaking to Stanley or to the player? Is he referring to something in the game world or in the real world? If Stanley takes the right-hand door and keeps going instead of returning to the meeting room, for instance, the narrator starts speaking to Stanley directly. If, on the way back to the meeting room, Stanley suddenly decides to take a lift downstairs—the Confusion ending—the narrator begins to hesitate and lose track of the plot. We can hear him turning pages, as though consulting a reference book. We then discover that he knows he is in a game and can manipulate it, opening and closing doors and even restarting it outright. Up to this point, although he speaks directly to Stanley, he retains his omniscient, omnipotent position. As the Confusion ending develops, however, we discover that he is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful: he seems not to know everything the game contains. At the end, when he learns the truth about the Confusion ending, he is astonished and declares that he will defy the game’s plan and refuse to restart it. (The game restarts anyway.)

In the “meat-patty” ending, a female narrator appears alongside the male one. She first mocks him, then leads the player—yes, the viewpoint here is no longer Stanley’s, but “the player’s own”—into a museum showing how the game was made. As we leave, she asks us to quit, because “this is the only way to beat the game.” In the Escape Pod ending, we can even turn around the moment we enter the boss’s office and close the door, locking the narrator inside.

This might bring to mind polyphonic narrative or the unreliable narrator in literature, but neither precisely describes the narrator of The Stanley Parable. Certainly, he makes statements at odds with the facts of the game world: which door Stanley went through, for instance, or his insistence in the Confusion ending that we study a potted plant that will be crucial “later in the story.” Certainly, he can intervene in the narrative. But the crucial difference is that his position is determined by the player. He shifts between being outside and inside the story, omnipotent and not omnipotent, reliable and unreliable. All these shifts depend on the player’s chosen route, and continue throughout play. In the “heaven” ending,⁹ for example, he begs Stanley not to jump from a height and end the game. We can do it anyway. Yet earlier he has shown us both his power to change the game and his awareness of living inside one. Either his pleas to Stanley are a deception, or he has lost his power to control the game here, or there is some other reason. Whatever the explanation, this clearly demonstrates how complex and changeable the narrator’s position is. The uncertainty concerns not what he says, but the narrator himself.⁵

Like Kafka’s parables, The Stanley Parable resists any single reading that would encompass its meanings; it is even full of contradictions.¹⁰ That ambiguity is precisely its appeal. (Of course, the simplest explanation is the one suggested by the Madness ending: Stanley is mentally ill and all this is his fantasy.⁵) So all I can offer here is my own view, one possible reading, and admittedly one that grossly oversimplifies the relationships within the game: the tension between player and narrator reflects the tension between player and game designer.¹¹

When discussing literature, film, and other arts, we often call the author the “first author,” the person who creates the text. Once completed, however, the text becomes an object separate from that author, open to interpretation by the reader as a “second author.”¹² Games make the role of this “second author”—the player—more conspicuous still. Game narrative can be understood as a kind of procedural narrative: it requires active interaction between player and game to be completed. A game can express itself only through being played, and the narrative text of any one playthrough will often change in response to the player’s actions.² Games themselves have developed from early examples such as Pong and Pac-Man, with almost no narrative, to games such as Mass Effect and The Last of Us, with rich, complex stories. There are games like The Painscreek Killings, which use the medium’s distinctive interactivity to tell nonlinear stories through their environments, and even games like Dear Esther, which simply use an environment to create atmosphere, without a narrative.¹³ There are White Album 2 and Detroit: Become Human, whose main selling point is that the player’s choices change the plot, and open-world sandbox games like the GTA series, which sell themselves on freedom.

But we should notice that even in environmental storytelling, not every object is interactive. The Painscreek Killings also limits the order of exploration to some extent by locking doors and making players find keys. In galgames—Japanese romance or “beautiful girl” games—we can choose only from the options on offer. Nor are open-world sandbox games entirely free: some places remain inaccessible and some objects cannot be interacted with. Developers today seem to promise players ever more freedom, but certain restrictions are indispensable if the narrative and the designer’s self-expression are to be realized. Anyone who thinks games can be completely free of restrictions—quite apart from whether that could be programmed—has misunderstood the medium of video games,¹ or indeed all artistic media,¹ or even reality itself.¹⁴

As we have seen, the narrator is central to both the experience and the meaning of The Stanley Parable. Without the tension between narrator and protagonist, the game would become dull.¹⁵ Everything the narrator does is aimed at steering the player toward what he regards as the ending: the “deception” ending. As we stray further from that course, he becomes more agitated and more involved, resorting to sarcasm and even changing the available options outright to get us to complete the narrative. After the first restart in the Confusion ending, we return to the room that should have only two doors and find six. If we wander through one at random and explore as we please, the narrator is initially silent, then suddenly announces that “this is the worst adventure he has ever experienced; there is no story at all.” After the second restart, the room has no doors whatsoever. The narrator now takes us straight to a location and announces that we have “won”—sarcastically, of course.

In the first case, players have a degree of freedom beyond the designer’s control, but the designer cannot provide a narrative or expression to match, and playing becomes dull. In the second, stripping the player of all agency—there are no doors to choose from—makes it impossible for the game to continue at all.¹⁶ And when we merely follow the narrator down a path and are promptly declared “victorious,” it feels hollow: there was “no real challenge” to winning. This can be read as the game’s own acid satire of the majority of players, who think only of winning, dutifully following instructions to victory without thinking about the game itself. It also exposes the meaninglessness of winning.¹⁷ The leaderboard that appears later in the Games ending likewise mocks the way contemporary games rank players by score to keep them playing over and over.

We should also notice that, although the narrator has some control over the game, he is not omniscient or omnipotent. There are parts he does not quite understand—in the Confusion ending, his mistake leads the player to the boss’s secret surveillance room ahead of time—just as designers make mistakes and omissions when designing a game. He can also be surprised by what players do: in the Choice ending, unplugging the telephone astonishes him, just as real players keep inventing ways of playing that designers never thought of. In that ending, the player’s unexpected choice leaves the game with scrambled textures and other problems, while the narrator complains that we have ruined it. This resembles the complaints and anger designers may feel when players refuse to follow their intentions.¹¹ He badly wants the player back on his prescribed route, and he does have some power to change the game, but he still leaves us a measure of freedom, whether because the big Other limits him or because he deliberately allows it. In the “heaven” ending, for example, the player can jump to their death while the narrator begs them to stay—even though he could stop them simply by closing a door. In the Confusion ending, he pleads for the game not to restart, but it restarts anyway. The same holds in real game design.

The female narrator can be read as another concept, one standing above both the male narrator (representing the designer) and Stanley (representing the player), yet closely bound to the game as an object: the big Other. In Lacan’s account, communication between individuals is never direct; it must pass through the intervention of the big Other.¹⁸ Communication between designer and player takes place through the game as an object, and naturally the big Other intervenes here too, entering into the game’s expression in forms such as ideology and social discipline. The big Other alters what the designer originally meant to express, just as the narrator never considered why a room with two doors should have six one moment and none the next. Red Alert 2, for instance, was designed with plenty of swipes at the Soviet Union, yet many players already sympathetic to the Soviet Union came away liking it even more. The designers of Frostpunk meant players to experience the value of the individual, but many players also saw the power of discipline or faith and the importance of the collective.

In the “meat-patty” ending, the female narrator takes us around a museum of the game’s development, suggesting that the big Other was already involved in making it. Her remark—“The male narrator mocks Stanley so much, works so hard to see the game through, but whatever happens, the player need only click Start and everything is back as it was”—seems to voice the creators’ self-mockery about their work, as well as their complaints about players who give games neither thought nor respect. Once we leave the museum, she begs us to quit, because “this is the only way to save Stanley and the male narrator.” Here the big Other’s intervention leads the game to propose canceling itself as a way of expressing itself. This looks like a contradiction, but it is not. If stopping the game allows it to express itself, stopping is naturally one of its endings too. The Steam achievement “Go outside,” earned by not playing for five years, does exactly this.

The game expresses itself as the player plays, but the tension between designer and player is present at every moment of that expression. Players always want more freedom, more involvement, and more control, while designers must always devise obstacles and restrictions to achieve their intended artistic expression.¹⁹ Without either side, the experience is incomplete. Above them both, the big Other profoundly shapes their interaction. It is precisely this tension that makes the player’s experience possible.

3. Illusory Freedom: Power Relations in Games

The first crucial choice we encounter is between two doors: left or right? A succession of choices follows. As we have said, choice is the key to The Stanley Parable—or, indeed, to all games.²⁰

In The Stanley Parable, the player can jump out of an office window and enter an entirely white map. The narrator says: “At first Stanley thought he had broken the map. Only when he heard the narrator did he realize that this, too, was part of the game.” Here the game shows us how illusory our choices within it are. Every available choice has been designed in advance. We are free only to choose among the options the game offers, and that is not real freedom. In GTA, the NPCs we can interact with and the places we can enter are all predetermined. We cannot discuss today’s weather with any random NPC or ask them for directions: the designer has not written that conversation. In galgames, the dialogue options are also written in advance. Faced with two extreme responses, the player has no chance to talk their way toward a clever compromise. In Street Fighter, every character’s moves are predetermined. We cannot move a character’s body as freely as our own.

It takes no close investigation to see that all freedom in games is illusory. The choices we can make have all been designed beforehand; we are free only to pick this or that. In the Explosion ending of The Stanley Parable, the player struggles in vain to stop the bomb, while the narrator mocks us: the game has no such mechanism, so there is absolutely nothing we can do. When we jump out of the office window, he mocks our belief that we have discovered a bug and broken through the game’s restrictions. The illusory freedom of the game’s choices could hardly be pointed out more directly.

After an ending—with the exception of the Choice ending—the game restarts automatically. “The end is never the end,” says the loading screen, and we are back at the beginning. A single route is short, usually between ten and twenty minutes. Having reached one ending, players will often try for the others until they have tried them all. Likewise, few people finish one route in a galgame and leave the rest of the story unread. The Stanley Parable even encourages its readers to try every ending.⁵ Whatever we choose, we end up seeing all the game’s endings, which further strips choice within the game of meaning. The experience as a whole resembles If on a winter’s night a traveler, a novel about novels in which the novels within the novel keep breaking off and starting again, telling a story at once the same and different.¹⁷ We find ourselves in this situation: we think we are making choices, but both the process—all the options have been designed in advance—and the outcome—we generally try every possible storyline—tell us that these choices are illusory, all laid out by the author.

The second point, involving the game’s capacity to restart indefinitely and reset time at will, has rich implications of its own. The subject and length of this essay require us to leave them aside.²¹²² But the first point makes us ask: do we really have so many choices in the real world? It is easy enough to see that our real-world choices are restricted too. There is only so much we can say to a stranger in the street. Not every move is allowed in a fighting tournament. When we list our university preferences after China’s national college entrance examination, all sorts of considerations leave us with a very limited range. Taking real life as our point of reference, we can, from a Foucauldian perspective, view the game as a power structure and the relationship between game and player as a power relation.²³ For Foucault, a power relation is a relation between two individuals, neither good nor bad in itself; it is precisely within power relations that subjects are formed.²⁴ (Below, we will also treat the game’s protagonist as a subject.²⁵)

When someone launches a game, they accept this power relation. They know what is permitted and encouraged, and act according to its rules—just as we do in the real world. The act of playing brings us into a relationship with the game as an object and, through subjectification, produces the player as a subject. Our reflections on freedom of choice in games are precisely reflections on freedom of choice in reality. In games and in life, the freedom we concern ourselves with today is often a formal freedom of choice. Actual freedom, however, is not merely the freedom to choose: it should also include the freedom to break down the conditions that restrict those choices.²⁶ The restrictive power relations in games are necessary to artistic expression.¹ What about those in real life?

It is worth noting that the circular surveillance room in the boss’s office, which appears in several endings, strongly recalls Foucault’s panopticon—although the surveillance here is one-way.²⁷ The whole game can even feel like a dystopian work,¹²⁸ if we read the omnipresent narrator and the entire system of game mechanics as external power, and Stanley’s exploration as an adventure in recovering his status as a subject. (On this reading, some of the narrator’s seemingly ineffectual behavior becomes still more intriguing.²⁹)

4. A Meaningless Search: Absurdism

Setting The Stanley Parable in an office was a remarkably shrewd choice. The first time I played, on a summer afternoon, I still felt a chill. The game has no real horror elements, yet it conveys unease and tension. This unease is unlike what we feel in the open wilderness of Firewatch, the deserted town of The Painscreek Killings, or an outright horror game like Five Nights at Freddy’s. Why should a setting from everyday life make us so uncomfortable?

That subtle unease reaches us from the very beginning. All Stanley’s colleagues have disappeared, suddenly throwing us into an unfamiliar situation in familiar surroundings. Alone in a huge office, Stanley searches everywhere for a reason. The game never gives us one. Like a protagonist in Kafka who is inexplicably arrested or turned into a beetle, we will never know why. This is a classic absurdist device: a character suddenly finds the surrounding world incomprehensible. At the same time, the office—a setting distinctively marked by modernity—is where modernity’s alienation of human beings is most fully on display,²⁸ like the court in The Trial or the castle in The Castle. The game does not even try to hide this. The graffiti on the wall of the boss’s bathroom, the meeting-room whiteboard, and the text on the slides clearly express discontent with modern capitalism’s oppression and exploitation. All we know about Stanley as a character is his job. We know nothing of his family, interests, or personality, which makes his alienation all the more pronounced.

Stanley’s story resembles Camus’s description of the arrival of an existential moment:³⁰ “Suddenly, everything collapses. Getting up, commuting, four hours of work, eating, commuting, another four hours of work, eating, sleeping; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, always to the same rhythm—this is how we get through most of our lives. But one day we begin to ask ‘why,’ and everything begins with this weariness tinged with wonder.” At first, Stanley blindly taps his keyboard as his monitor instructs him to do. It is the daily routine of the modern office worker, facing a computer and getting the work done, day after day. Then, at a particular moment, Stanley is suddenly “thrown into a desert, searching for meaning in a place without meaning.” This unease comes from our deep-seated terror at the absurdity and meaninglessness at the heart of real life.

Absurdist works use such devices to force us to ask “What is happening?” and, from there, to consider the meaning and nature of existence. The Stanley Parable similarly prompts us to ask “What should I do now?” and then to consider the meaning and nature of choice (within a game). Its branching design bears this out. There are many branches, but the causal relationship between most choices and their outcomes is unclear. It is difficult to understand why a given choice should lead to that particular ending—much as with many choices in real life. The Broom Closet ending is more interesting still. Stanley can take refuge in a broom closet along the way. Most office doors in this game will not open, but this one does, with no special marking to tell the player so. Many of the choices are designed so that we can find no meaning in them, or so that they bear no relation to their outcomes. Yet precisely this design intensifies the game’s absurdity and the narrator’s black humor.

After most endings, the game automatically loads the beginning again. “The end is never the end” on the loading screen recalls the ceaseless repetitions of Beckett’s absurdist play Endgame.³¹ Stanley and the narrator each make the other’s existence possible, much like the mutually dependent characters found in so much Theatre of the Absurd.³¹

5. Who Is Stanley? How Players “Enter” a Game

We have discussed the tension between designer and player, but there are many ways for a player to “enter” a game. Some games, such as Street Fighter and The Last of Us, have us control a character. Others, such as Civilization and Cities: Skylines, do not. Either way, the game world requires the player’s presence: we must have some way of perceiving its surroundings or events.³² When playing, are we completely immersed, experiencing everything as though it were happening to us? Or do we play at a distance, as detached spectators who do not put ourselves into the action?³² If the immersion were complete, everyone who had played the white-phosphorus massacre of civilians in Spec Ops: The Line would presumably need a long course of psychological counseling. It is easy enough to see that we need not think of ourselves as soldiers to play Rainbow Six. We might play galgames simply to see the CG artwork or work through multiple storylines, without thinking ourselves into the protagonist’s position. Yet understanding and accepting Joel’s choice at the end of The Last of Us clearly requires considerable identification with him and empathy. And to be frightened by Five Nights at Freddy’s, we must to some extent imagine ourselves in the situation the game creates. Different players, in different games and at different points in them, therefore occupy different positions between these two states, much as readers and viewers “enter” novels, films, and other art forms. But how does the interactivity peculiar to games affect our experience of them?

At the close of the Apartment ending,³³ the narrator suddenly realizes that Stanley is controlled by a player beyond the screen. The viewpoint shifts from first person to third person, and we lose control of Stanley. We can now see him standing before the two doors where we made our first choice. The narrator urges Stanley to choose for himself, but naturally Stanley cannot choose anything. The game ends and the credits begin to roll. This is also regarded as its “true ending.” (Yet once the credits finish, the same loading screen appears and the game restarts, obliging us to keep those quotation marks.) Here the game makes it clear that player and protagonist are not one subject but two independent subjects connected in some way—a connection that can be broken at any moment. At the same time, these two subjects make each other possible. Without the player’s control, the protagonist can accomplish nothing; once we lose our connection to the protagonist, our vehicle for entering the game, our identity as players also ceases to exist.

With first-person games such as CS:GO, or even online text role-playing—such as the Chinese practice of yǔ c, writing in character—it is easy to understand how we put ourselves into a game. After all, we look through our eyes and respond accordingly, like a real person. But what about games in which we control a character from a third-person viewpoint, or even a character who is entirely independent, as in Ace Attorney or GTA? We can control these people, but they plainly have backstories, personalities, and other qualities we do not determine. How do we connect with them? Lacan’s mirror-stage theory can help us understand the process.³⁴

Lacan’s account runs as follows. We tend to learn who we are through the outside world, especially in infancy. When we first see ourselves in a mirror, we notice that the image responds by following our movements and recognize it as our reflection. But this image is not our real self. It is an idealized self: a whole, coordinated image, unlike our experience of our own fragmented, uncoordinated body. The misrecognition involved in this identification makes us want to approach the self in the mirror, a more “mature,” more “powerful” self, and fit our inner self into the world of that reflected self—although this is forever impossible. Yet it is precisely through this mirror recognition that we can establish a relationship with reality as individuals.³⁵ Mirror-stage theory has been used in film criticism: the cinema screen is like a mirror. Why should the computer screen be any different? We can control game characters, but we can never become them. We need them to establish a relationship with the game world, and they possess abilities in that world that we lack. Though their backstories, personalities, and so on seem to lie beyond our control, this does not prevent us from identifying with them, treating them as a second body while we play and thereby “entering” the game. Outside play, we can still see them in fan works or spin-off series as independent characters with thoughts and personalities of their own.

Many games naturally aim for this identification, whether for commercial or artistic reasons. But not all games make players identify with their protagonists. Some instead create estrangement as a means of achieving their own distinctive expression. Spec Ops: The Line is one such game. Hallucinations and delusions frequently intrude on the protagonist’s view of the game world. At this level, the game forces us to notice the gap between two subjects—ourselves as players and the protagonist—as well as the separation between that protagonist and the world he inhabits.²⁵ The object with which the player directly interacts and forms a relationship is not the protagonist but the game itself. The connection between player and protagonist is made through that object. (From a particular angle, we can even regard the game as a subject.²⁵) Some games, as objects, function as “mirrors”; others do not. The result is a hybrid identity that belongs wholly neither to the player nor to the character.⁶ Another ingenious piece of design appears in the white-phosphorus bombing of civilians. As the protagonist operates a drone to fire the phosphorus, the game screen becomes the drone’s control screen, reflecting the protagonist’s face. But the computer screen also reflects the player’s face. In this sense, the game reveals the connection between player and protagonist.²⁵

Žižek once made the following observation about video games:³⁶ “People often say that we treat video games too casually, but in fact we take them too seriously. Take an example: in a game, someone can play a sadist, a rapist, and so on. The idea goes like this: in real life I am weak, but in the game this false persona is strong and hedonistic. This person in the game is precisely my true self, able to do things I cannot do in real life because of social constraints and so forth. Because it is only virtual, a false persona, I can be more truly myself in the game.”³⁷ I do not want to pass judgment on this assertion of Žižek’s here. But given the complex relationship between players and characters discussed above, the premise hidden in his analysis—“the player identifies completely with the protagonist”—is not as “self-evident” as he assumes. It calls for more careful analysis and discussion.³⁴²³³⁸ At first glance, for instance, we control the characters and use them to fulfill our desires, whether in the virtual world or the real one. But when we spend time, energy, and money “building up” and “leveling up” our characters, it seems we are no longer using them to fulfill our desires: they are controlling us in turn, making us fulfill theirs within the game.³⁹

A brief digression. As games incorporate more and more social elements, we should also notice that social interaction is, to some extent, becoming more like a game. We can see this in the many ways people fashion an image of themselves on social media, leaving aside some users who do so for profit. When we post on WeChat Moments or Weibo, we are often constructing a self somewhat different from who we are in everyday life: another self we would like to become. Follows, likes, and reposts work like a game’s feedback mechanisms, constantly stimulating social media’s players. With digital capitalism increasingly dominant, there is even a concept of the “vir-body” to describe our second body in cyberspace.⁴⁰⁴¹ People often urge us to “keep the virtual separate from the real.” Yet our reality includes these virtual things, which in turn construct our reality. If we lose the virtual, we lose reality too.³⁶

6. Being Truly Human: How to Be a Good Player

If we follow the narrator’s instructions from beginning to end, we finish by switching off the control device in the boss’s office, walking out of the building, and gaining our freedom. But we realize that this “freedom” is precisely the result of unfree choices. A freedom obtained by obeying the narrator completely can only be illusory: from start to finish, we have not made a single genuinely free choice. We have done nothing different from Stanley at his office desk—follow instructions from a screen and feel inexplicably happy about it. This is therefore not the game’s real ending, nor can it be called “victory” in the usual sense. What is relatively “widely accepted” as the game’s “true ending” can, in fact, be reached only by defying the narrator. Yet the Confusion ending mocks the meaninglessness of victory itself.

Then there are the Steam achievements: one for not playing for five years, one for playing during a particular period, one for clicking a certain door five times (the narrator mocks you for doing this, too), one for restarting the game. The only reason you would do these things is that the achievement system tells you to. Here again, the game satirizes the meaningless, absurd nature of achievements.⁴² And, as we noted earlier, the “meat-patty” ending makes quitting the game part of the game. If we regard games as a means of artistic expression, there is only one way to win in earnest: grasp what the game is trying to express. As one short review of The Stanley Parable on Douban puts it: “My computer ran out of power and shut down while I was playing. I counted that as one of the game’s endings too.”

Winning and losing are merely ways for a game to express itself. September 12th: A Toy World, for example, is a game you can never win. The player has to attack terrorists, but killing civilians by mistake creates more terrorists. The designers have arranged things so that attacking terrorists inevitably harms civilians. The game can therefore end only with the battlefield in ruins and everyone turned into a terrorist. Designed to make us lose, it expresses itself through defeat, here plainly addressing a particular political event.² In some competitive games, meanwhile, players will choose a character out of affection despite that character’s inferior attributes—Ryu, the protagonist of Street Fighter V, in the version current at the time of writing, for example. Clearly, these players care about more than winning and losing.

The story of Spec Ops: The Line can, to some extent, be considered a video-game version of Apocalypse Now. By the end, the protagonist has lost all his comrades and fought his way to his original destination. Another character confronts him: all those soldiers killed, all those comrades sacrificed, all those civilians brutally slaughtered—it was all just so he could play the hero. Had he abandoned his advance at the outset, none of it would have happened. These words address not only the protagonist but also the player on the other side of the fourth wall, just as the point made by Apocalypse Now is meant not only for its characters but for its audience. Here, as in The Stanley Parable, the game wants the player to complete its self-expression by not playing.

A similar tension exists in GTA IV.²³ Its protagonist, Niko, repeatedly says that he came to America hoping to start a new life. Of course, advancing the plot requires the player to make him go on breaking the law. The player thus faces a choice: have Niko commit crimes and move the story forward; ignore the main story indefinitely and wander Liberty City, forget the protagonist’s past, turn over a new leaf, and become a good, law-abiding citizen; or simply switch the game off and end the relationship with the protagonist. But recognizing this tension does not necessarily mean we must choose either of the latter two options. Once we recognize it, the first choice actually gives GTA IV more to say. The protagonist wants a fresh start, but a force beyond his control drives him down this road. In our lives, that force might be the external world; for a religious believer, the god they believe in; for Niko, the player beyond the screen. Similarly, the “Mind Control Facility” controlling Stanley’s thoughts in The Stanley Parable, though part of the game, may also stand for the whole game: the game itself is the “device” that controls Stanley’s mind.

Taken together, all three choices are permitted by GTA IV, all can allow the game to express itself, and none is necessarily better than the others. Yet the additional dimension of real-world morality opens up further readings of the choice. As in the trolley problem—kill five people, or change tracks and kill one—each option has arguments in its favor. What we want, however, is this: whatever we choose, we cannot be wholly convinced that our choice is absolutely right. We must constantly remind ourselves of everything sacrificed for it. Whatever we choose, we must recognize that these choices correspond to different expressions of the game. At this point I cannot help imagining how much more interesting the relationships among the subjects in The Stanley Parable would become if, alongside the narrator’s voice, we gave Stanley lines of his own and a corresponding (outwardly expressed) subjectivity—and how much more bewildering it would all become for the player.

We have said that quitting can be part of a game’s expression. But does the game stop expressing itself once we quit? The Steam achievement “Go outside” requires us not to play The Stanley Parable for five years, suggesting that even while we are not playing, the game continues to express itself. One obvious example comes from player communities.²³ Most games generate communities of one size or another. These can feed back into the game—through modding, for example, or through discussions of factors affecting balance in competitive play. They can also generate subcultures that circulate independently of the game, such as memes and specialized vocabulary. From this perspective, once you have played a game even briefly, you are its player for life: closing it does not cancel your relationship with it. Even the increasingly common practices of “finishing” a game by watching videos and being a yún wánjiā—a Chinese term for someone who engages with games indirectly, often through videos—show how complex the identity of “player” is.

So what does it take to qualify as a player? The answer offered by The Stanley Parable is probably never to stop thinking.²⁰ Never let the game’s design lead you around by the nose—the “deception” ending. The point is not to win—the Confusion ending—or to find a brief escape from reality in a game’s narcissistic narrative⁴²³⁸—the Apartment ending. It is to understand what the designer is trying to express through the game, and even to go beyond the limits of its programming to read meanings in it that exceed the designer’s intentions.⁴³ Even when the designer has not deliberately tried to express anything in particular, we can still read something in the game from the perspective of the big Other. Just as we can find the tension between nostalgia and modernity in a toaster,⁴⁴ and just as Žižek can read the philosophy of everyday life in every piece of mass-produced Hollywood trash, an insightful player should find meanings in a game that reach beyond the game itself. We play not to chase illusory numbers and hollow victories, but to realize the self-expression of all three: the designer, the game itself, and the player.

In the Art ending of The Stanley Parable, the player is asked to play an obviously very boring game. We must keep pressing buttons to stop a baby from burning to death and a puppy from being eaten by piranhas, for four straight hours. Obviously, very few players will even attempt this ending. But if we really do as the narrator says and play for the full four hours, the screen turns white and a black monolith appears, resembling the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the designer’s words of appreciation for the player beside it. At first this seems to reward and affirm the player’s persistence. On reflection, though, it looks like satire: designers treat players as unthinking creatures blindly following instructions, tack on supposedly “artistic” elements, and call the resulting games “works of art”—while designers and players alike congratulate themselves and get all misty-eyed over the result.

From another angle, though, what if a player really did arrive at a reading of their own through four hours of tedious button-pressing? They might reflect on the monotonous repetition and essential meaninglessness of everyday life and work, or on the blurred boundary between work and games.¹ (It is particularly interesting that the computer is both the most common modern tool for productive work and the most popular gaming platform; in the Apartment ending, the game asks us to press keys to accomplish all manner of everyday tasks.) They might find a new way of thinking about what a game is: What is the point of mindlessly pressing these buttons over and over? How are other games different from this one? Would writing a program to press the buttons automatically for four hours affect what the game expresses?⁶¹ They might question the meaning of spending so much time and energy pursuing victory in games. Or they might even find grounds for mocking this game and its players: just as we have drawn so much from (over)interpreting this thoroughly boring button-pressing game, perhaps the author and players of The Stanley Parable are merely flattering themselves.⁴⁵

But once we have drawn these reflections from the game, can we still insist that it is meaningless? Even now, many players want games to be recognized as an art form, yet object to criticizing them as we would novels or films, dismissing it as pointless overinterpretation. Isn’t that a contradiction?⁴⁴ This final game is, in fact, like Desert Bus or the film Empire: the meaning of playing exceeds the meaning of the game itself, and the meaning of interpreting it exceeds the meaning of playing. All of it reminds us what it takes to qualify as a player.

References

25. Lan Jiang. 电子游戏世代的存在哲学 [A philosophy of existence for the video-game generation; title translated here] [G/OL]. 《信睿周报》 (Xinrui Weekly), 2019(20190912)[2019-09-12] thepaper.cn↗