Do You Play the Game, or Does the Game Play You? On The Stanley Parable and Video Games

Foreword: This essay was a prizewinner at the Rags Drum 2020 Eve Festival and After Festival organized by Lab on Roof.

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. —The Stanley Parable, official game description

Introduction

Playing games has long been regarded by many as a useless waste of time¹, and every so often it must even bear the insult of being called “electronic heroin.” But why are games seen this way? Is it because of their violence and sexual content? Literary works and films contain plenty of the same. Is it because games look like something made for naive children or idle teenagers? Yet children’s literature seems to receive serious treatment from the public. Is it because playing games is nothing but a dull pastime? For most people, watching films and television amounts to little more. Meanwhile, many players have long defended games by calling them the ninth art, though for some of them this is nothing more than a pretext for excusing themselves. Compared with art forms such as literature and painting, video games do indeed have a short history, and their theoretical apparatus still awaits completion². Film went through a similar process in the last century. But time alone will not complete game theory by itself; that requires continual exploration and thought. The Stanley Parable is exactly such a work: a video game that explores the genre of the video game itself.

I. Metagame: A Game About Games

Unlike ordinary games, which emphasize imitating reality, metagames put more weight on “imitating process”: rather than depicting a fictional world, they attend to depicting the process of depicting a fictional world. Their form is their content. In this way they show how other works are constructed, pushing the conventions hidden inside the creative process to the front of the stage; at the same time they reveal to players their own relationship to the work, making players notice the forms they usually look at without seeing³.

Open the game and we are met with the menu screen, and this menu screen is already full of metagame elements. Above the title The Stanley Parable runs a small line, “You are playing,” and the computer screen beside it is in fact the player’s own screen, with screen nested inside screen all the way down. This little trick already hints that this will be a game about games⁴. Better still, we can even count the player’s real-world computer screen as one more layer of the nesting: the boundary between the real world and the game world begins to blur here.

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

The narration that introduces the setting after the opening goes further, completing a self-reference by way of implication: an employee named Stanley is Employee 427 of a company, and his job is to press the corresponding keys on his keyboard according to the instructions on his screen—dull, monotonous work that nonetheless leaves Stanley feeling deeply content. We hardly need to think twice to notice that the mechanism of video games is exactly what the narration describes: following the game’s instructions, pressing the right buttons at the right moments, fulfilling the game’s demands. Different video games merely wrap all this up in different mechanics and narratives; in essence it remains the same as what Stanley does⁵. And in the Apartment Ending, the screen goes so far as to instruct the player directly to press the corresponding buttons so that Stanley performs the corresponding actions and the plot can advance—at that moment, the player following the on-screen instructions has become precisely the Stanley described at the start.

In the Explosion Ending (the Countdown Ending), the game gives the player a countdown to detonation while commenting on its own design, pointing out that the game never designed any mechanism capable of stopping the explosion, and mocking what the player is doing at that very moment. In what this essay calls the “Meat Patty” Ending (the Museum Ending), the player enters a museum that displays the process of the game’s own making, blurring the boundary between the real world and the game world. And in the Games Ending, the player blunders into parts of the map still under development, while the Narrator, inviting the player to suggest “what would have made this game better,” presents the player with other games such as Minecraft and Portal (amusingly, this ending asks the player to choose between a red door and a blue door—like the pills in The Matrix). All of this reinforces the metagame character of The Stanley Parable. Unlike games that offer an “immersive” experience, it makes the player attend not only to what the game presents but to the game itself, prompting the player to think, through the experience of playing, about the genre of games as such.

The principal—indeed the only—mechanic of The Stanley Parable is choice. Its manner of play can be classed with Firewatch and The Painscreek Killings as a walking simulator; here you cannot even jump, and all you can do is walk around and operate a small number of interactive objects. Yet the mechanic of choice seizes on what is essential to games: whether in an FPS or a fighting game, all of the player’s operations on the game can be understood as making particular choices at particular moments. And such simple mechanics better concentrate the player’s mind on the questions the game wants the player to consider—precisely because this game has no other challenge, the real challenge is to understand the game itself⁶⁵. At the same time, this play without any “mechanics,” in which the only way to play is to match wits with the Narrator, also greatly challenges the existing definitions of games and the existing paradigms of analysis⁷. By contrast, games that add metagame elements on top of other mechanics enrich the play experience, but cannot help blunting the reflexive thinking directed at the game itself.

Another interesting point: although the Narrator in the game sometimes appears “surprised” by certain choices of the player, we know that all of this is obviously designed in advance. As a metagame, The Stanley Parable tries to present things it was not designed to present, tries to run code that was never written, tries to tell stories that were never written down—we know this is impossible, but from an aesthetic standpoint, it accomplishes this impossible task by means of metaphor¹.

II. Stanley and the Narrator: Who Is Driving the Story?

When we leave the room, we find that the narration is still following us, delivered from an omniscient, godlike perspective—and yet we discover a subtle tension between the Narrator 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 when we arrive at the first explicit choice, a hall with two doors. The Narrator directs us to enter the left door, and if we follow his instructions all the way, we will reach what this essay calls the “Deception” Ending (the Freedom Ending). Along this route the Narrator always keeps a distance from our story that matches his omniscient perspective, while still maintaining the necessary tension. In the boss’s office, the Narrator announces the boss’s secret code as if no one else were there, and once the player has entered the correct code, his patch-up explanation is: “Yet incredibly, by simply pushing random buttons on the keypad, Stanley happened to input the correct code by sheer luck. Amazing.”

Something similar happens when, at that first choice, we deliberately defy the Narrator’s guidance and enter the right door. The Narrator tries by every means to patch up his earlier narration, suggesting that perhaps Stanley “wanted to stop by the employee lounge first.” Yet once we are inside the lounge, the Narrator begins praising it as a room well worth the detour to admire—in a tone, naturally, laced with a hint of mockery toward the player—and if Stanley stays in the lounge too long, the Narrator remarks in a self-reflexive way: “Stanley sat around waiting for more dialogue, but when a long time had passed and there was no more, he decided that the game was trying to send him a message.”

The more the player defies the Narrator’s guidance, the further the Narrator departs from his original position—omniscient, all-powerful, standing outside the narrative—and the more actively he intervenes in the game. At the same time, his words grow more and more equivocal: it becomes unclear whether he is addressing the player or Stanley, and whether what he speaks of belongs to the game world or to the real one. For example, if Stanley, after choosing the right door, keeps going forward instead of returning to the meeting room, the Narrator begins to converse with Stanley directly. And if Stanley, after choosing the right door, suddenly decides on the way back to the meeting room to take the lift down (the Confusion Ending), the Narrator begins to hesitate and to lose track of the plot; at this point we can hear the Narrator flipping through pages, as though consulting his materials. Next we can see that the Narrator realizes he is inside a game and even possesses the power to manipulate it: he can open and close the game’s doors, and can even restart the game outright. Up to this point, although the Narrator converses with Stanley directly, he still holds his omniscient, all-powerful position. In the later developments of the Confusion Ending, however, we learn that the Narrator is not omniscient after all; he does not seem to know the game’s entire contents. And in the final act, when he learns the truth of the Confusion Ending, the Narrator is utterly astonished, and vows to defy the game’s arrangement and never restart the game (yet in the end the game restarts all the same).

In the “Meat Patty” Ending, we discover that besides the male Narrator there is also a Female Narrator, who first mocks the male Narrator and then leads the player (yes—here the perspective is no longer Stanley’s but that of “the player in person”) into a museum displaying the process of the game’s making. When the player leaves the museum, the Female Narrator asks the player to quit the game: “Press ‘escape,’ and press ‘quit.’ There’s no other way to beat this game.” In the Escape Pod Ending, we can even turn back the moment we enter the boss’s office and shut the doors, locking the Narrator inside.

Some may be led from this to think of polyphonic narration in literature, or of the unreliable narrator, but neither can precisely capture the Narrator of The Stanley Parable. The Narrator does indeed make statements at odds with the facts of the game world (the door Stanley entered, for instance; or, in the Confusion Ending, telling the player to study closely a potted fern that “will be very important later in the story”), and he can indeed intervene in the narrative. But the greatest difference is that his position is determined by the player: his state lies between outside the story and inside it, between all-powerful and not, reliable and not—all of it determined by the path the player chooses, and continually shifting over the course of play. In what this essay calls the “Heaven” Ending (the Zending), for instance, the Narrator begs and pleads with Stanley not to jump from the heights and end the game—yet we can still do so. But the Narrator has already shown us his ability to change the game and his awareness of the fact that he lives inside one; so either the Narrator’s pleading with Stanley is a deception, or his power to control the game has here ceased to exist, or there is some other reason. Whatever the case, what is on plain display here is the constantly changing state of the Narrator and his complexity: it is not that we cannot pin down what the Narrator says, but that we are uncertain of the Narrator himself⁵.

Like the parables Kafka wrote, The Stanley Parable is a work whose implications no single reading can encompass—readings of it are even full of contradictions⁸—but this very ambiguity is where its charm lies (the simplest explanation, of course, is the one hinted at in the Insane Ending: Stanley suffers from mental illness, and all of this is his delusion⁵). So here I can only set out my own view and offer one possible reading, even though this kind of one-to-one analogy grossly oversimplifies the relations inside the game: the tension between player and Narrator reflects the tension between player and game designer⁹.

When discussing artistic genres such as literature and film, we are fond of saying that the author is the “first author,” the one who creates the text. But once the text is created, it becomes an object detached from the author, open to interpretation by the reader, the “second author”¹⁰. Games make the role of the player, this “second author,” still more prominent. Game narrative can be called a kind of procedural narrative: it must rely on the player’s active interaction with the game to be completed; a game realizes its own expression only in the process of being played; and even within a single playthrough, the narrative text itself will often change with the player’s operations². Games themselves, meanwhile, have developed from Pong and Pac-Man, which had almost no narrative, into games with rich, complex stories such as Mass Effect and The Last of Us. There are games like The Painscreek Killings, which use games’ distinctive interactivity to tell a nonlinear story through the environment, and even games like Dear Esther, which rely purely on the environment to build atmosphere, with no narrative at all¹¹; there are games like White Album 2 and Detroit: Become Human, whose main selling point is that the player’s choices change the plot; and there are open-sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series, which make freedom their calling card. But we should note that in environmental storytelling, not every object can be interacted with, and The Painscreek Killings constrains the order of the player’s exploration to some degree by locking doors whose keys must be found; in a galgame, the player can choose only among the options the game supplies; and open-sandbox games are not completely free either—they too have places that cannot be explored and objects that cannot be interacted with. Today’s game developers seem to be promising players ever greater freedom, but to complete the narrative and the designer’s self-expression, necessary limits are indispensable. Anyone who believes a game can be free of all limits—leaving aside whether that is even achievable in programming terms—has certainly misunderstood the genre of games¹, or rather, misunderstood every artistic genre¹, and even reality itself¹².

We can see that the Narrator is the key that gives The Stanley Parable its play experience and its meaning; without the tension between the Narrator and the protagonist, the game would become utterly bland¹³. Everything the Narrator does is aimed at moving the player toward the ending he recognizes as the game’s own—the “Deception” Ending—and the further the player strays from this track, the more agitated the Narrator becomes and the more he intervenes in the game, using verbal sarcasm and even directly altering the game’s possible options to push the player toward completing the game’s narrative. In the first restart of the Confusion Ending, when we come once more to the hall that originally ought to have only two doors, six doors appear; if we walk through one at random and explore at will, the Narrator first keeps silent, then suddenly speaks up, declaring this “the worst adventure I’ve ever been on,” with no story at all. After the second restart, the hall has no doors whatsoever, and the Narrator simply takes the player to a spot and declares the player the “winner” (with irony, of course). In the former case, the player has gained a degree of freedom beyond the designer’s control, but the designer cannot furnish it with a corresponding narrative and expression, and the playing turns dull; in the latter case, stripping the player of all initiative (no doors to choose from) makes the game simply unable to continue¹⁴. And the “victory” declared right after following the Narrator down a single path leaves the player bored, because this victory was won “without any real challenge.” This can be seen as the game’s own acid satire of the majority of players who think only of winning—who follow the game’s own guidance step by step to victory while lacking any thought about the game itself—and as an exposure of the meaninglessness of victory in games¹⁵. The leaderboard that appears later in the Games Ending is likewise a satire of how today’s games rank players by score so that they will play the same game over and over. Another point worth noting is that the Narrator, though he possesses a certain power to control the game, is by no means omniscient or omnipotent. There are parts of the game he does not know well (in the Confusion Ending, the Narrator’s mistake lets the player enter the boss’s secret surveillance room ahead of time), just as designers leave errors and omissions when designing games; he can be startled by some of the player’s operations on the game (in the Choice Ending—the Not Stanley Ending—when the player unplugs the phone, the Narrator is astonished), just as in reality players always come up with ways of playing that game designers could never have imagined; in the Choice Ending, after the player makes a choice the Narrator never expected, the game breaks out in glitched textures and the like while the Narrator complains that the player has ruined the game, just as in reality designers may complain and rage when players fail to honor their intentions⁹; and although he dearly wishes the player would return to his appointed route, and holds a certain power to change the game, still—whether from the constraints of the big Other or by deliberately granting the player a measure of freedom (in the “Heaven” Ending, the player can leap to Stanley’s death while the Narrator begs him to stay, even though the Narrator could close a door and make it impossible; in the Confusion Ending, the Narrator pleads against restarting the game, yet in the end it restarts anyway)—so it also goes in real game design.

The Female Narrator who appears can be seen as another concept standing above the male Narrator (representing the game designer) and Stanley (representing the player), while remaining closely bound to the game itself as object: the big Other. According to Lacan’s theory, no communication between individuals is direct; it must pass through the intervention of the big Other¹⁶. The communication between game designer and player, accomplished through the object that is the game, naturally cannot escape the big Other’s intervention either, which enters into the game’s expression in the form of ideology, social discipline, and the like. The big Other alters what the game designer originally wanted to say, just as the Narrator never once wonders why the hall that originally had only two doors now has six, and now has none at all. Red Alert 2, for example, was designed with many elements mocking the Soviet Union, yet quite a few players fond of the Soviet Union found that fondness further strengthened by the game; the designers of Frostpunk intended players to feel the value of the individual, yet many players saw in it the power of discipline or faith and the importance of the collective. And in the “Meat Patty” Ending, the Female Narrator takes us on a tour of a museum displaying the process of the game’s making, hinting that the big Other’s intervention was already present in production. What the Female Narrator says there—that however the male Narrator mocks Stanley, however hard he labors to carry the game’s course to completion, no matter what, the player need only lightly click “start” and everything is as before—seems full of the game makers’ self-mockery about their own work, and of complaint against players who bring no thought and no respect to games. And after we leave the museum, the Female Narrator implores us to quit the game, because we “can still save these two.” Here the big Other’s intervention leads the game to propose canceling itself in order to realize the expression of the game itself. This looks like a contradiction, but it is not: halting the game, if it can achieve expression, is naturally one of the game’s endings too. And the game has an achievement on Steam called “Go outside,” which players can earn by not playing the game for five years—exactly this.

The game itself realizes its expression in the process of the player’s playing, but that process of expression is at every moment shot through with the tension between game designer and player: the player always hopes for more freedom and stronger intervention in and command of the game, while the game designer must always design obstacles and limits to complete the artistic expression they hope for¹⁷. If either of the two is missing, no complete play experience can form. And above these two, the big Other deeply shapes their interaction. It is precisely this tension that makes the player’s experience of the game.

III. False Freedom: Power Relations in Games

The first crucial choice we meet in the game is the two doors: go left, or go right. A series of further choices follows, and as we have said, the key to The Stanley Parable—or rather, to all games—is choice¹⁸.

In The Stanley Parable, the player can jump out of one of the office windows and land in an all-white map. The Narrator then says: “At first Stanley assumed he had broken the map, until he heard this narration and realized it was a part of the game’s design all along.” Here the game shows us the falseness of the choices we make in games: every choice we can make has been designed in advance; we have only the freedom to choose among the options the game provides, and that is not real freedom. In Grand Theft Auto, the NPCs we can interact with and the places we can enter are all designed beforehand—you cannot discuss today’s weather with just any NPC or ask one for directions, because the designers wrote no such dialogue. In a galgame, the dialogue options offered are likewise designed in advance; sometimes, caught between two extreme options, the player has no chance to maneuver with clever words of their own even if they try. In Street Fighter, every character’s moves are designed in advance; the player cannot control a character’s body at will the way they control their own. No careful examination is needed to see that freedom in games is false: the options available in a game were all designed by its designers beforehand, and we have only the freedom to choose this one or that one. In the Explosion Ending of The Stanley Parable, the player tries in vain to stop the bomb from detonating, while the Narrator mocks the player: the game never designed any such mechanism, so the player is completely powerless before it. When the player jumps out of the office window, the Narrator sneers at the player for imagining they had discovered a bug in the game and thereby broken the game’s limits—here the falseness of the game’s various freedoms of choice is pointed out as directly as can be. And when the game reaches an ending (the Choice Ending excepted), it restarts automatically, the loading page showing “the end is never the end,” and immediately we are back at the game’s beginning. A single run to an ending is not long, often only ten or fifteen minutes, and a player who has reached one ending will usually try to reach the others, until every ending has been tried. Nor do people playing galgames often finish one route and never look at the other storylines—and The Stanley Parable goes so far as to encourage its readers to try all the endings⁵. However we choose, the result is that we will see all of the game’s endings, which further strips choosing in the game of its meaning. The experience of the whole game is rather like the novel If on a winter’s night a traveler—a novel about novels, in which the novels inside keep breaking off abruptly and beginning again, telling a story that is the same and yet not the same¹⁵. This produces a situation in which we think we are making choices, while in fact both the process (every option was designed in advance by the designer) and the outcome (we will usually try every possible storyline) tell us that such choice is false, all of it arranged in advance by the author.

As for the second point, which touches on the game’s capacity to restart endlessly and time’s capacity to be reset at will, it too carries very rich implications, but theme and space oblige us to set it aside here¹⁹²⁰. As for the former point, we cannot help asking: do we really have so many choices in the real world? It is not hard to see that our choices in the real world are constrained as well. What we can talk about with a stranger on the street is extremely limited; in a fighting match, not every move is permitted by the rules; and when we fill in our university preferences after the gaokao, we find that, under considerations of every kind, the choices we can actually write down are very limited too. In fact, taking our cue from real life and starting from Foucault’s standpoint, we can regard the game as a power structure: the relation between game and player is in fact a relation of power²¹. In Foucault’s view, a power relation is a relation between two individuals, carrying neither praise nor blame—and it is precisely within power relations that the subject comes to be formed²². (Below we will also treat the game’s protagonist as a subject²³.) When players open a game, they accept this power relation, know which things in the game are permitted and encouraged, and act according to the rules the game has set—just as we do in the real world. The act of playing brings us into relation with the game as object, and then, through subjectivation, produces the subject that is the player. Our reflection on the freedom of choice in games is precisely our reflection on the freedom of choice in reality. In fact, whether in games or in real life, the freedom we attend to today is very often a merely formal freedom of choice, whereas substantive freedom is not only the freedom to choose but should also include the freedom to disrupt the very conditions that delimit the choice²⁴. In games, the power relation that imposes limits is a necessity of artistic expression¹—and in real life? It is worth mentioning that the circular surveillance room in the boss’s office, which appears in several of the game’s endings, carries a distinct flavor of Foucault’s panopticon (though here the watching runs one way)²⁵. Played from end to end, the game even leaves the feeling of a dystopian work¹²⁶—if, that is, we take the omnipresent Narrator and the game’s entire mechanism as external power, and take Stanley’s process of exploration as an adventure of recovering his own position as subject (it is worth noting that on this reading, some of the Narrator’s seemingly impotent moments become all the more thought-provoking²⁷).

IV. Meaningless Exploration: Absurdism

The Stanley Parable sets its narrative in an office, and this, it must be said, is a very clever choice. The first time I played this game, though it was a summer afternoon, I still felt a trace of chill. The game itself has no horror elements to speak of, yet it manages to transmit an unease and tension. But this uneasy feeling differs from that of Firewatch, set in the open wild; from that of The Painscreek Killings, set in an abandoned town; and from that of a game like Five Nights at Freddy’s, which leads precisely with horror. Why should being in a scene from our daily life make us so uneasy?

This subtle unease begins to reach the player from the very start: all of Stanley’s colleagues have disappeared, which at a stroke throws us into an unfamiliar situation inside a familiar environment. In the vast office only Stanley is left, searching everywhere for the reason, but from beginning to end the game never reveals that reason to us. Like the protagonists in Kafka’s novels, arrested without knowing why or transformed into a beetle, we will never know why things are so—this is the classic device of absurdism: a character suddenly unable to comprehend the world around him. At the same time, the office, as a field thoroughly stamped with modernity, is the place best suited to showing modernity’s alienation of the human being²⁶, like the court in The Trial and the castle in The Castle. The game does not even try to hide this: from the graffiti on the washroom wall in the boss’s office, the whiteboard in the meeting room, and the text of the slides, it is not hard to read its discontent with modern capitalism’s oppression and exploitation of the human being. Of Stanley as a character, all we know is his job—we know nothing of his family, hobbies, or personality—which makes his alienation stand out all the more. And Stanley’s story matches Camus’s description of the arrival of a person’s existentialist moment²⁸: “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.” At first, Stanley blindly follows the instructions on his computer screen and taps at his keyboard—which is also the daily routine of the modern office worker, completing work before a computer day after day. Then, at a certain moment, Stanley is suddenly “thrown into a desert, searching for meaning in a place without meaning.” This unease comes precisely from the panic deep in our hearts at the absurd and empty essence of real life.

Absurdist works use this device to force us to think about “what is happening right now,” and from there about the meaning and essence of existence; The Stanley Parable likewise uses this method to make us think about “what should I do now,” and from there about the meaning and essence of choice (within the game). And in fact, the design of the game’s branches also embodies this. The game has many branches, but for most of them the causal relation between branch and choice is far from clear; we can hardly understand why one particular branch of choice corresponds to this particular ending—just like so many of the choices in our real lives. More interesting still is the Broom Closet Ending: Stanley can hide inside a broom closet along the way. In this game, most of the office’s doors cannot be opened, yet the broom closet door, of all things, can—and the game gives the door no special marking of any kind to tell the player so. Many of the game’s choices are designed so that you can find no meaning in them, or no relation between them and any outcome. But it is exactly this design that further strengthens the game’s sense of the absurd and the Narrator’s black humor.

After most endings are completed, the game automatically loads back to its beginning, the loading screen carrying the words “the end is never the end”—just like the endlessly repeating, never-concluding action of Beckett’s absurdist play Endgame²⁹. And the relation between Stanley and the Narrator—each side making the other’s existence possible—is likewise just like the mutually dependent characters found in most absurdist drama²⁹.

V. Who Is Stanley? How the Player “Enters” the Game

We mentioned earlier the tension between game designer and player, but there are many ways for a player to “enter” a game. There are games like Street Fighter and The Last of Us, in which the player controls a character, and games like Civilization and Cities: Skylines, which need no character for the player to control. But in either mode, the game’s world always requires the player to be “present”: we must in some way perceive the environment or the events within the game world³⁰. So when playing, is the player completely immersed, experiencing the game’s events entirely as if in the flesh—or playing from a distanced perspective, in a spectatorial way without identification³⁰? If it were complete immersion, then every player who reached the white-phosphorus massacre of civilians in Spec Ops: The Line would presumably need a long stretch of psychological counseling afterward. It is easy to understand that we do not need to adopt the self-identity of a soldier to play Rainbow Six; playing a galgame, we may be there only to see the CGs, or only to grind through the branching routes, without ever thinking from inside the protagonist. But in The Last of Us, Joel’s choice in the final ending plainly requires the player to have a rather high degree of identification and empathy to understand and accept; and in Five Nights at Freddy’s, one precondition of our being frightened at all is naturally that we have to some degree projected ourselves into the situation the game creates. Thus different players, in different games and at different stages, occupy different positions between these two states, just as readers or audiences “enter” novels, films, and the other artistic genres. But how does the interactivity that belongs to games alone affect the player’s experience of the game as a work?

At the very end of the Apartment Ending, the Narrator suddenly realizes that Stanley has been controlled all along by the player beyond the screen. At this moment the perspective begins to shift from first person to third and we lose control of Stanley; we can now see Stanley standing before the two doors where we made our first choice. The Narrator now urges Stanley to make a choice of his own, but Stanley naturally cannot make any choice at all; at this point the game ends and the game’s credits begin to roll—this is also held to be the game’s “true ending” (yet after the credits finish rolling, the same loading page appears and the game restarts once more, which rather obliges us to keep the scare quotes). Here the game points out clearly that the player and the game’s protagonist are not one subject, but two independent subjects linked together in a certain way—and this link can be canceled at any time. At the same time, however, the two subjects make each other what they are: a game protagonist without a player controlling him can accomplish nothing at all; and once we lose the link to the protagonist who is our vehicle for entering the game, our identity as players ceases to exist as well.

For first-person-perspective games like CS:GO, and even online text role-play (known in Chinese fandom as yu C, or “language cosplay”), it is not hard to understand how we project ourselves into the game: like a real person, we look with our own two eyes and can react accordingly. But what about characters controlled in the third person, or even entirely independent characters, such as those of Ace Attorney or Grand Theft Auto? We can control these characters, yet they clearly each have backstories and personalities and so on that are not ours to decide—so how do we establish a link with them? Here we can turn for help to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage to understand this process³¹.

Lacan’s mirror-stage theory runs as follows. We generally come to know ourselves by way of the outside world, above all in infancy: when we see ourselves in a mirror for the first time, through the fact that the self in the mirror responds by following our own movements, we realize that this is a mirror image of ourselves. But this image is not our real self; it is an ideal self—a complete, coordinated image, different from the fragmented, uncoordinated body we experience as our own. Yet this misrecognition of mirror identification makes us wish to draw near the self in that mirror—a more “mature,” more “powerful” self—to make our inner self merge into the mirror-self’s world, even though this is forever impossible. But it is precisely through this mirror cognition that we are able, as individuals, to establish our connection with the real world³². Lacan’s mirror-stage theory has been applied to film criticism, the cinema screen being like a mirror—and is the computer screen not one as well? We can control the characters in a game, but we can never become the characters in a game; we must establish our connection with the game’s world through its characters, and the game’s characters possess what we do not: capacities that operate within the game’s world. So although the characters in games seem to have backstories, personalities, and the rest beyond our control, this does not prevent us from forming an identification with them—taking them, while we play, as our second bodies, and thereby “entering” the game; while outside of play, in fan works or other derivative series, we can regard them as independent characters with thoughts and personalities of their own.

Such identification is naturally the aim of many games, whether for commercial or for artistic purposes. But not every game leads player and protagonist to identification; some games instead manufacture a sense of estrangement in order to achieve their own distinctive expression. Spec Ops: The Line is such a game: its protagonist’s view of the game world is often shot through with hallucination and delusion, and on this level the game forces the player to become aware of the gap between the two subjects—oneself as player and the game’s protagonist—as well as the rift between the game’s protagonist and the game world he inhabits²³. What the player directly interacts with and builds a relation to is not the game’s protagonist but the game itself as object; the link between player and protagonist is realized through the object that is the game (from a particular angle, we can even regard the game as a subject²³). It is just that in some games the object serves precisely the function of a “mirror,” while in others it does not, so that what forms is a hybrid identification belonging neither wholly to the player nor wholly to the game character⁶. Another exquisitely designed moment comes when white phosphorus is raining down on civilians: as the protagonist operates the drone launching the shells, the game’s screen is the drone-operator’s screen, and that screen reflects the protagonist’s face—but the computer screen reflects the player’s face at the same time. In this sense, the game is disclosing the link between player and game protagonist²³.

Žižek once commented on video games in these terms³³: “Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It’s, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it’s just a game? It’s reality. It’s more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I’m a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the naive reading. I want to appear stronger, more active, because in real life, I’m a weak person. But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself, and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I’m not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it’s only a game, it’s only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self.” I do not wish to pass judgment here on this assertion of Žižek’s. But given the complex relations between game characters and players that we discussed above, the premise hidden in his analysis—that the player forms a complete identification with the game’s protagonist—is not so “self-evident” as he takes it to be; it demands more careful analysis and discussion³¹²¹³⁴. At first glance, for instance, it is we who control the characters in the game, using them to realize our desires in the virtual world or the real one; but when we spend time, energy, and money to “raise” and “level up” the characters in a game, it seems instead that it is not we who use the game’s characters to realize our own desires, but the game’s characters who in turn control us to realize their desires within the game³⁵.

A few words of digression. At the same time as our games increasingly take on social features, we should also see that social life is itself, in a certain sense, becoming more and more gamified—as can be seen, leaving aside certain accounts run for profit, from the many ways people fashion their images on social media. When we post to Moments or Weibo, we are usually shaping a self somewhat distinct from the one in real life, another self we would like to become. Follows, likes, and reposts are like the feedback mechanisms in a game, ceaselessly stimulating the players of social media. And now that digital capitalism grows more prevalent by the day, there is the concept of the so-called “virtual body” to describe our second body in cyberspace³⁶³⁷. People often call on us to “keep the virtual and the real apart,” yet our reality precisely contains these virtual things; these virtual things in turn construct our reality, and if we lost what is virtual, we would lose reality at the same time³³.

VI. A Real Person: How to Become a Good Player

If we follow the Narrator’s instructions all the way from beginning to end, we will, at the game’s close, shut off the controls in the boss’s office and walk out of the office building into freedom. But then we realize that the “freedom” we have obtained is precisely the result of unfree choices. Having simply obeyed the Narrator’s guidance throughout, the freedom we obtain can only be false, because from beginning to end we never made a single genuinely free choice; what we did differs in nothing from what Stanley did in his office—following the instructions issued from a screen, yet feeling an inexplicable happiness. So this is not the game’s real ending, nor can it be called a “victory” in the usual sense. And the game’s more “commonly recognized” “true ending” must, on the contrary, be reached by defying the Narrator. Yet in the Confusion Ending, the game in turn satirizes the meaninglessness of victory in games. As for the game’s achievements on Steam—there is one earned by not playing the game for five years, one by playing during a specific span of time, one by clicking on a certain door five times (when you do this in the game, the Narrator will even mock you), one by restarting the game—the only reason you would ever do these things is that the achievement system asks you to, which satirizes in turn the meaningless and absurd nature of game achievements³⁸. And as we mentioned earlier, in the “Meat Patty” Ending, closing the game itself becomes part of the game. If we regard games as a means of artistic expression, then there is only one way truly to win a game: to grasp from within it what it is trying to express. As one short review under The Stanley Parable’s Douban entry puts it: “While I was playing this game my computer ran out of battery and shut down—I took that as one of the game’s endings too.” Winning and losing are merely one means of a game’s self-expression. September 12th: A Toy World, for instance, is a game in which victory can never be won: the player is to strike terrorists, but civilian deaths breed new terrorists, and the designers have arranged, by design, that the player striking terrorists cannot avoid harming civilians. So the game can end only with the battlefield in shattered ruins and every person turned terrorist—this game designed to be lost uses the very form of losing to carry out its self-expression, aimed, obviously, at a particular political event². And in certain competitive games, out of love for a particular character, players will still choose that character even when the character’s attributes put them at a disadvantage against the rest (the protagonist Ryu in the current version of Street Fighter V, for instance); clearly what such players are weighing is no longer merely the game’s winning and losing.

The plot of Spec Ops: The Line can in a certain sense be called a game version of Apocalypse Now. At the game’s end, the protagonist, having lost all his comrades, fights his way into the destination he set out for at the beginning, and another character in the game demands of the protagonist: killing so many soldiers, sacrificing so many comrades, slaughtering so many civilians—all of it was merely so the protagonist could play the hero; had he halted the plan to advance at the very start, none of it would have happened. These words are spoken not only to the game’s protagonist but also to the player beyond the fourth wall, just as the lesson of Apocalypse Now is addressed not only to its characters but to its audience too. Here the game, like The Stanley Parable, hopes the player will complete the game’s self-expression by way of not playing. A similar tension exists in GTA IV²¹. The protagonist Niko repeatedly voices, within the game, his hope that in coming to America he might begin a new life; the game, of course, requires the player to keep Niko at his unlawful trade in order to advance the plot. Here the player faces a choice: let Niko commit crimes so as to push the story forward; or never touch the main storyline at all, simply drifting about Liberty City, forgetting the protagonist’s entire past, turning over a new leaf as a law-abiding good citizen; or even close the game outright and end the relationship with its protagonist. And yet becoming aware of this tension does not necessarily mean we must choose the latter two. In fact, once we are aware of this tension, the first choice instead adds a further layer of meaning to GTA IV: the protagonist expresses his wish to begin his life anew, yet driven by a force not under his own control (in our lives, it can be the external world; for a person of religious faith, the god they believe in; and for Niko, the player beyond the screen—in the same way, the “Mind Control Facility” that controls Stanley’s thoughts in The Stanley Parable, being part of the game, may also stand for the game itself as a whole: the game itself is the “device” that controls Stanley’s mind), he cannot but walk down this road. Of course, weighing the three choices together, we see that all of them are permitted by GTA IV, all can realize the game’s self-expression, and no ranking among them necessarily holds; but because the additional dimension of real-world morality is present among them, the choice admits of yet another reading—like the trolley problem, whether to run over the five or to change tracks and kill the one, each course with its own justifying argument. What we should hope is that no matter what choice we make, we can never take our own choice to be absolutely right; we must at every moment remind ourselves of everything sacrificed for that choice—and however we choose, we must see that these choices correspond to the game’s different expressions. Having said all this, I cannot help imagining: if, in The Stanley Parable, alongside the Narrator’s voice we were also to give Stanley lines of his own, and a corresponding (outwardly shown) subjectivity, how much more interesting the relations among the game’s subjects would become than they are now (and, equally, how much more it would leave players at a loss).

We said earlier that closing the game is also part of the game’s expression—but once the game is closed, does the game stop expressing? The “Go outside” achievement of The Stanley Parable on Steam, which requires the player not to play the game for five years, hints that even when we are not playing, the game is still carrying on its self-expression. One clear example comes from a game’s player communities²¹. Most games give rise to player groups of varying sizes, and these groups may on the one hand act back upon the game (mod-making, say, or the negotiations in competitive play over factors in the game that affect balance), and on the other hand produce subcultures that circulate independently of the game (all manner of memes and vocabulary, say). Seen from this angle, once you have played a game for even a little while, you are its player for the rest of your life, because closing the game does not mean your relation with it is thereby canceled. Indeed the ever more common practice of “beating a game by video”—becoming what Chinese players call a yun player, someone who only watches playthroughs—is showing us the complexity of the player as an identity.

How, then, can we be competent players of games? The answer The Stanley Parable gives is, most likely, do not give up thinking¹⁸. Never be led by the nose by the game’s design itself (the “Deception” Ending); the point is not to win victories inside the game (the Confusion Ending), nor to gain in the game’s narcissistic narrative a momentary escape from the real world³⁸³⁴ (the Apartment Ending), but to read out of the game what its designer wants to express—and even, transcending the very limits of the game’s program, to read out what exceeds the designer’s intent³⁹. Even if the designer has not deliberately tried to express anything in a game, we can still read out some information from the perspective of the big Other. Just as one can read the tension between nostalgia and modernity out of a toaster⁴⁰, just as Žižek can read the philosophy of everyday life out of every mass-produced Hollywood flop, an insightful game player should likewise read out of a game implications that exceed the game itself. We do not play in pursuit of the illusory numbers and false victories inside games, but to realize in the game the self-expression of all three: the game’s 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 press keys again and again to keep a baby from perishing in a fire and a puppy from being eaten by piranhas, for four hours on end. Obviously, apart from a very few players, hardly anyone will attempt this ending; but if we really do play the full four hours as the Narrator says, the game whites out, and then there appears a black stone monolith, resembling the black slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey, beside which stand words of appreciation from the game’s designer for the player. At first glance this looks like the game’s encouragement and affirmation of the player’s persistence, but on reflection it seems a kind of satire—a satire of the self-congratulation of the designers and players of so-called “art” games that treat the player as an unthinking blind follower of the game’s guidance while forcibly endowing the game with so-called “artistic” elements. From another angle, though, if a player really does draw a reading of their own from four hours of dreary key-pressing—say, the monotonous repetitiveness and essentially void nature of daily life and work, or the blurred boundary between games and work¹ (one particularly interesting point: the computer is at once the most common modern tool of productivity and the most popular gaming platform; and in the Apartment Ending, the game asks the player to press keys to accomplish the various affairs of real life), or a new thought about the game itself (what is the meaning of my pressing keys so unthinkingly over and over; how do other games differ from this one; if a program were made to press the keys automatically for four hours, would that affect its expression)⁶¹, or a reflection on the meaning of spending great amounts of time and energy pursuing victory in games, or even a mockery of this game and its own players—just as we have (over-)read so much out of this utterly boring button-pressing game, so the makers and players of The Stanley Parable are merely flattering themselves as well⁴¹—then, once we have drawn such thoughts from it, can we still maintain that this is a meaningless game? Even now, many game players, while hoping games will be recognized as an art form, at the same time oppose conducting game criticism the way we criticize novels and films, regarding it as meaningless over-interpretation. Is that not a self-contradiction⁴⁰? This final little game is really like the game Desert Bus and the film Empire: the meaning of the act of playing exceeds the meaning of the game itself, and the meaning of interpreting it exceeds in turn the meaning of the act of playing—and all of this keeps reminding us of what it is to be a competent player.

References

25. 蓝江，电子游戏世代的存在哲学[G/OL]. 《信睿周报》2019(20190912)[2019-09-12] https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail\_forward\_4407441