How to Examine Your Decisions Through Gaming

The Stanley Parable is clearly a game about decisions, but what are those decisions truly connected to? Many of the decisions made in the game seem to be entirely separate from morality, which is often the center of choice-making in games. Your choices lead to new areas, endings, or dialogue, but the characters end up virtually unaffected by them. Stanley may go insane, commit suicide, or reach freedom, but the end result is always that he comes to in his office. The only other character in the game is the narrator, who is also always reset to the same position, mindset, and dialogue by the game’s resetting (expect the “confusion” ending, but that also resets after several more attempts). This is what truly makes the Stanley Parable unique. The decisions aren’t there to instill a moral dilemma, make meaningful choices, or force the player to question their morality, they are in the game to question the very concept of making decisions, to try and separate decisions from morality.

Papers Please is, in contrast, a game in which every decision is a moral choice. Do you heat your home or feed your family? Do you let in the wife of the man who just entered although she doesn’t have an entry ticket? Do you pass faulty information to the rebels, turn them in, or assist them? The two simple interfaces for player interaction: the accept-deny stamp and the money distribution mechanic both instill or poke at a moral compass. Without the weight behind these decisions, the game would become exactly what it twists so well into entertainment: a passport-stamping simulator. The moral choices the player is forced to confront with every stamp at a rushed pace cause them to wonder if they would actually have prevented the abusive pimp from entering in real life or not.

These two games portray choice is such powerfully contrasting ways, yet both make the player question their choices. The Stanley Parable made me wonder why I was playing, why I chose the way I did, and what those choices actually meant to both the game and to me. Whereas Papers Please made think about how I justified my choices, who my choices were affecting, and what “good” choices were. Papers Please expertly modifies the standard ethical gameplay strategy by adding strict time limits and multiple layers of Skinnerian feedback. At the same time, the Stanley Parable effectively strips the morality and weight from your decisions in a way I have never seen in games or literature, bringing the bareness of choice to the forefront of your mind. Both games are exceptional examples of choice-based thinking and game design for starkly different reasons.