"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." This is the official description of the game The Stanley Parable, taken directly from its page on the Steam store. Much like the game, the description of the game is quite confusing and is hard to make sense of what it means. The few things I knew for sure when starting the game were that I was controlling an office worker named of Stanley, no one else was in the office building, and a narrator was telling me what to do. The game began in Stanley's office and the narrator encouraged me to go figure out why no one else was at the office. The first ending I came across was the freedom ending. The freedom ending took place when I followed every order of the narrator, which resulted in getting Stanley to freedom outside of the office building; and then the game restarted. After the first ending, after the second ending, after the third ending, the game still continued to take me right back to the beginning in Stanley’s office. At this point I realized that The Stanley Parable was no ordinary video game.

The way The Stanley Parable story is constructed differs greatly from every other video game I have ever played. In other video games, I begin with a good amount of knowledge about the character I am playing as, and for the most part, know what the main goal of the game is. As I make my way through these games and as I progress, so do the stories, putting me closer to the goal or the conclusion of the games. I started playing The Stanley Parable believing in the notion that as I progressed through the game, the story would further develop and my main goal would become more apparent. I was wrong. As I continued to play The Stanley Parable, the main goal I initially set out to accomplish became less and less apparent as I found different endings, all leading me right back to Stanley’s office where I first began. Once I got through enough endings, I realized that The Stanley Parable could not be beaten the same way other types of video games are beaten. I began to question what I was even doing in the game as I set out again and again to find other endings, all putting me right back where I was before. Here is a flow chart of all of the different endings in the game and how to get to them.

            

With all of this in mind, it was clear that to find the true conclusion of The Stanley Parable, I had to look for it in new places. Once this enthusiasm was sparked within me, the real purpose and the real beauty of The Stanley Parable game began to emerge. The game is a satire of not only the life of an office worker, but also a satire of other video games. The Stanley Parable pokes fun at other games that basically hold your hand as you make your way through the game. The Stanley Parable helped me realize that my role in video games are actually predetermined and all of the different things I choose to do in the games really have no substantial effect on their outcomes. These choices we make in video games are supposed to provide us with verisimilitude, which helps create the sense that what we are doing in these game worlds are real. Zachary Waggoner from Arizona State University states in his dissertation, “video game technologies offer users interactive and immersive experiences that convey verisimilitude more with each passing year.” Much like what James Paul Gee talks about in his book Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul, video games provide us players with an alternative world in which we can feel like the hero, even if we do not necessarily feel like the hero in our real lives. As video games become bigger and better with technology, the verisimilitude in video games becomes even greater. This may be true to a certain degree, but if The Stanley Parable suggests that my actions in the game world have no real affect on the outcome, then why would I feel any sort of joy or accomplishment from these games? This paradox is what I call the illusion of choice.
             One ending in particular that promoted this illusion of choice and freewill was the confusion ending. The confusion ending occurred when I defied the narrator’s directions and wound up in the monitor room. The narrator restarted the game because I was not supposed to see the monitor room just yet, so he restarted me in an attempt to retry the story in a way that made sense. When I tried to go through the game again, the narrator got all discombobulated because he seemed to have forgotten the way the story should go. He told me to look around the office to try and “find the story.” After mindlessly walking for some time, the narrator restarted the game once again. The next time around the narrator still could not find the story, and made me restart yet again. The next time I started, a yellow line called The Stanley Parable Adventure Line had appeared on the ground to guide me. The narrator said, “The Line knows where the story is.” As I followed this Line, the narrator said something that essentially summed up the purpose of The Stanley Parable game. Listen closely to what he says at the 25s mark.

The Adventure Line eventually took me right back to the monitor room and once again the narrator restarted the game. After the next restart, The Adventure Line was still on the ground, but this time the narrator suggested I followed a different path that the Line did not follow and that he and I should “make up our own story.” Listen to what the narrator says at 0:36s, he basically is mocking me, telling me to use my imagination to make up this new story, even though by this point I have realized that my imagination plays no role in altering the storyline of the game.

 I eventually made it to this room where the schedule of the confusion ending was, further implementing the fact I had no control over the events that took place in the game, making my choices even less significant to the story.

           “Is the story of no destination still a story?” Yes, indeed the story of no destination is still a story. The Stanley Parable is not meant to be played with a single destination in mind, it is meant to be played recognizing that the journey is really the destination. The destination is all of the things I have seen and learned throughout playing the game. Think of the game as a mirror, whoever is playing the game is who gives the game its meaning, and the meaning is different for everyone. No two people are the same and no two people go through the game in exactly the same manner. The Stanley Parable provides its players with the authentic profession of decision-making and choice, choice not within the confines of the game’s story, but within the confines of the player’s. The game serves as a catalyst for recognizing this. The decisions I made in the game did not alter the scripted course of the game, however these choices did alter my own personal course outside the game. For example, when discussing the game with other people who have played it, we all would agree that the endings are the same no matter who is playing, but the order in which we experience the endings is what gives our choices meaning. If I were to play the game and only get through maybe two or three different endings, my perception of the game’s meaning might be drastically different from someone who got through all of the game’s endings. If I got through only a few of the endings, I might believe that the game has no true ending and only a variety of different endings, and then making the choice to stop playing the game out of boredom or discouragement. But the people who made it through all of the endings might have a different take on the game’s meaning, realizing that his or her choices do in fact matter, not for the sake of Stanley, but for his or her own authentic sake. This person might stop playing the game because they feel like they accomplished everything that they could, realizing that the only true choices that matter are the choices to start and stop the game.
           To truly beat The Stanley Parable, I had to realize that there was no real conclusion to the story. The feeling of accomplishment that I typically get from beating video games was not the same feeling of accomplishment that I got from beating The Stanley Parable. The accomplishment that I got from beating The Stanley Parable was meant to be felt outside of the game, in real life, meaning that the only way to truly beat the game was to turn it off and leave my computer. Since I learned that my freewill and choice in the game were merely illusions, I had to go out and experience the joy of freewill and choice in real life, my first choice being turning off the game.

However, this freewill and choice we experience in everyday life is not entirely free. The pre-determined nature of video games can be paralleled to the philosophical theory of determinism. According to determinism, “the libertarian free will does not exist and all human actions and choices are the results of neural and physiological processes beyond the person’s control. As a consequence, no human action or choice is free.” (Fajardo-Chica, and Torres 519) With this view in mind, do I really experience any more freewill in my life than I do in video games? While this theory is seemingly far-fetched, I am mindful of the fact that determinism could perhaps be an accurate view.

If the entire world actually were just some determinate system, society would therefore be predetermined too. The neural and physiological processes that are supposedly beyond my control are directly affected by my respective society. If I were a puppet, and my social forces would be my puppet masters. My personal identity is shaped by my social class, by my race, by my ethnicity, by my gender, etc. These are attributes I was born with and subsequently, I live my life around them. These factors determined where I was born, where I was raised, what schools I went to, and what my beliefs would be.

Just like real life, video games provide me with unchangeable factors within the game that influence all aspects of my in-game actions. I base my decisions in the game on the knowledge that has been given to me, because that is all I know. If I knew everything, my decisions would be entirely different knowing the outcome or result of all the decisions I could possibly make. Only at this point of infinite knowledge would my choices be completely free. Since no one person can be omniscient, the choices I make are a result of what I do know. For example, when I began The Stanley Parable, all I knew was that I was trying to find out why no one else was at the office, and a narrator was telling me what to do. My instinct was to follow the direction of the narrator because he seemed to posses more knowledge about the situation than I did. As I learned that the narrator’s direction did not lead me to a conclusion, I began to listen to him less and less. If I knew when I initially started the game that the narrator would be of little benefit to me, my decision to follow him would have been different. While even in the beginning I was free to follow or not to follow the narrator, the knowledge I had at the time is what caused me follow his direction. It would have been an irrational decision for me not to follow the narrator because my initial focus was to progress through the game. If someone had told me prior to playing The Stanley Parable that I should not follow the narrator’s guidance to beat the game, I likely would have made the decision to ignore the narrator from the beginning.

Playing The Stanley Parable allowed me to reexamine my idea of freewill both inside and outside of video games. My newfound perspective is this: for something to be truly free it cannot be under the control of something else, and it cannot be determined beyond its own nature. Therefore, no decision or choice in this world is free; they are all determined by something else. Even when I made that decision to turn off The Stanley Parable video game to experience the satisfaction of making a real-life decision, that decision, although satisfying, was not free.