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Writer's pictureLorenzo Orders

The Stanley Parable: Taking Aim at The Simple Decision

While playing The Stanley Parable, I felt as if I had the game’s mechanics perfectly understood. When a choice is presented, the possibility tree diverges, and I have to choose which path to explore now and make a note of the other path to explore later. For most of the game, I played through each ending with the desire to do whatever I needed to see the ending for itself, and none of the endings were necessarily “bad” to the point where I would be mad if I accidentally re-entered their decision paths. Except for one particular ending.

The ending where Stanley repeatedly jumps off the stairs to his death was where I truly felt like a terrible person. After the it played out, I feared for how the game would punish me for insulting the narrator. Here, I am fitting into Sicart’s definition of an ethical choice where neither outcome is desirable. The game presents me with two choices: To leave the game running forever to let Stanley and the narrator have their peace, or to kill oneself so that the player can continue exploring the different decision paths.

Part of what made me feel awful was how I decided to put my own exploration of a video game over the feelings of someone I had begun to treat as an actual person. The game tried to push me in a certain direction to continue exploring its different storylines, but it only succeeded in forcing me to stop playing for a while. The wicked problem (Sicart) here is that I have no clue as to what the storyline may bring, and I have to trust that the game will prevent me from dying. The game taunts me with the promise of further adventures in this storyline via the stairwell room, or gurunteed monotony in the stars room. Instead, I watched as Stanley repeatedly jumps off the stairs and ultimately dies. The narrator interjects before the second jump by saying, “Are you literally willing to kill yourself to keep me from being happy?” The narrator thus transforms my personal fear of the implications of my actions into a true, explicit, and damning take on my repeated jumps.

This is one of the only points in the game where I can point to the narrator as a person with feelings, and not just an omnipotent entity. This decision has radically changed from being about trying to discover an ending to scarring a human being. Therefore, I have just engaged in an action that hurts a human being, and to complete the ending, I need to repeatedly jump and force a bystander to watch me. A bystander who wishes the best for me, and who is taking my actions personally. A no-win situation where the only winning move is not to play.

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Jimmy Christensen
Oct 30, 2019

Similar to RS, I could not care about the narrator's feelings at this point in the game. I had the narrator kill Stanley only because Stanley tried to take control of the Mind Control Facility. Furthermore, he seemed to only like Stanley when Stanley did what he wanted. It felt like a servant and master relationship, and as the player, I did not wish to fulfill that servant role completely. Many endings made the narrator upset, such as the broom closet ending (truly the best ending). After exploring the broom closet too much, the narrator blocks off the door, locking Stanley out of the broom closet. Thus, if he was willing to take away Stanley's affection towards the broom c…

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RS
Oct 28, 2019

Although I see your point about how jumping off the platform multiple times to kill Stanley made the narrator mad, while I was playing the game I did not care about the narrator's feelings at this point. I don't know when in playing the game you encountered the ending in which the narrator kills Stanley because he clicks the on button in the mind control facility. However, since I had already encountered that ending by the time I tried to get to the "kill Stanley" ending, I knew that the narrator had this same petty sense of Stanley's life that he threatened me of having in the "kill Stanley ending." One of the most interesting things about this game was…

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