who in the goddamn is stanley

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Pfft. Whatever. More like who in the hell is Stanley?

On the first playthrough of The Stanley Parable, I got the wife ending. This meant disobeying as much as possible without realizing the phone could be unplugged (because, in my defense, nothing else could really be interacted with). In this particular ending, the narrator hints at Stanley having someone who cared for him - a wife, hence the title “wife ending” being used online to reference it.

(A video of the playthrough of this particular ending can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raoTFX6UxlY )

The narrator creates the illusion of a life for Stanley, and a voice rings out from the other side of a door, only to be distorted, and a dummy be revealed, rather than a person. The narrator then really messes with Stanley’s head in a way not all of the other endings really do - and really, this is one of the more identity challenging of the endings, in my opinion.

The narrative, from then on, is very controlled by the narrator and only progresses if the player pushes buttons on the screen as Stanley, we are told, does at work. As buttons get pressed, the fake living room of sorts morphs into Stanley’s desk and office. The narration becomes particularly sinister.

“Look at him there, pushing buttons, doing exactly what he’s told to do,” the narrator narrates, as we push buttons in order to progress the story. “Now, he’s pushing a button. Now, he’s eating lunch. Now, he’s going home. Now, he’s coming back to work. One might even feel sorry for him, except that he’s chosen this life.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, like the idea of choice that Stanley, and the player, supposedly has made. For one thing, this is the path that happens when the player disobeys as much as possible until we literally have to learn that another mechanic exists in order to disobey any more. Are these ideas really congruous? I just tried to disobey as much as possible without just instantly killing Stanley, especially since I didn’t know if I could make it to the other platform or how the timing would be on that - and I didn’t even know where exactly the platform would end up anyway or if I might get stranded, and there are a lot of variables present in a first playthrough generally. And really, the players don’t know anything about Stanley’s personal life in the first place - if he has one at all. We just don’t know who Stanley is, and though I didn’t really believe the narrator at first, and didn’t think that the existence of a home life should matter to the story of Stanley, whatever it might be, players have the option to believe the narrator and assume that they are being fed actual information about Stanley from the only source of information that has at all that been encountered thus far in the game.

The wife ending continues. The narrator continues, “But in his mind, ah, in his mind he can go on fantastic adventures! From behind his desk, Stanley dreamed of wild expeditions into the unknown, fantastic discoveries of new lands! It was wonderful! And each day that he would return to work was a reminder that none of it would ever happen to him. And so he began to fantasize about his own job. First, he imagined that one day while at work, he stepped up from his desk to realize that all of his co-workers, his boss, everyone is the building… had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth. The thought excited him terribly.”

From there, the narrator spoiled a bunch of endings for me, but I didn’t even realize that they were spoilers - “an enormous room with monitors and mind controls”, “a yellow line that weaved in many directions”, “a game with a baby”. Like, sure. Maybe. I thought some of it might sound right, but not all of it. In fact, coming back to it now, I’m surprised how explicitly some of the endings were spelled out. So this was my first glance at Stanley as a character.

Another particularly interesting ending is the one where a lady on the street just stumbles on Stanley’s corpse after he just goes berserk in the “crazy ending”. We see Stanley as having… maybe a psychotic episode? That seems to be the case, hence the title of the ending. So we have two possible narratives of who Stanley is and where he is. We still don’t really know who he is, though, or what he actually does.

So who is Stanley?

Here’s my little philosophical spiel about it:

We cannot know Stanley because we don’t see him in relation to other people - and the narrator does not really count, I think, in this regard, as someone to define Stanley with or against, because he exists in a weird situational peculiarity where he has a personality and goals and exerts some control over the narrative, and can be affected by Stanley, but still isn’t a person that exists in a normal or easy to define power structure or relationship to Stanley. I don’t know how to categorize a disembodied voice in relation to friendship or a work dynamic or anything of the like. I don’t know how to categorize the narrator in the state of being or not being of a person or character aside from knowing he exists as a narrator. (And for that matter, we can totally have an interesting conversation on why exactly we place gender onto a completely disembodied narrator and the possible heuristic goings on for the narrator voice casting and gender theory, but that can go off on its own tangent and that’s not what I want to focus on for this post in particular).

Spiel over.

I think this broken concept of identity is also present in Bioshock, and this ambiguity of the self is something that, inherently, all games will have. I personally like to know everything about a piece of media before I even think about possibly consuming that piece of media, but usually players will go in relatively blind. That means learning, or not, about who you’re playing as.

So. Who is Stanley?