The Frankly Terrible.

The Frankly Terrible.

Game Informer magazine, whilst ranking The Stanley Parable as the two-hundred-and-fourth best game of all time, promised that it “delved into philosophical questions about the nature of choice, and yet it was never pretentious […] the game was as funny as it was thought-provoking.”

Personally, I do not know what one expects of a magazine that omitted Spyro the Dragon from its list of three hundred games, secretly singing its own praises for remaining in publication (delivered to my home!!) for three hundred issues, (well into the Feminist Craze of two-thousands fourteen and fifteen, after which the hot stills of busty digital babes inexplicably diminished, if not vanished) and all in the same breath enthroned a SEQUEL to the Legend of Zelda (as though to spite Arin Hanson). Certainly I did not think that the Staff’s claims to non-pretension, or at least the proper assessment of it, were credible in light of these facts. But driven at once by a nostalgia for the corporate office setting, an insatiable intellectual curiosity, (including a fervent desire to understand what the average person considers pretentious) and the challenge that I internalized from the suggestion that my own ideas, especially for decision-based game design, were pretentious, I saved up what paltry allowance I could afford as a sleep-deprived, unemployed college student, and I downloaded the Parable with delight, anticipation, and some trepid reservations: a quiver of a sense that this would be a Camusian or Kafkaesque disappointment. It seemed that every person that I spoke with since my having caught wind of it had heard of it, and in my programming class it took only the mention of it on my part to invoke enthusiasm from the Gentle Giant that sits in front of me. Having played the demo, my appetite was whetted, even as my intellect was stimulated in retort. But the unease within my conscience did not abate when I had formalized my complaints in the form of an essay for my Game Design class. I felt ashamed for having assessed it so harshly without having played it through to its proper consummation, and immediately my training as an Academic Debater brought me into the imagined jury of my fellows. I had to attain ethos if my opinions were to be final. I felt an obligation to give this work of art a chance, fervently pursuing the hope that it resolves the problems that it addresses. Mind you: these problems are in no ways novel; the sense of existential despair is frankly a bit dated, and to treat any game that would try to sell it in so heavy-handed a manner as the demo suggested as though it were doing something groundbreaking is perhaps the most objective definition for “pretension” that I can find to apply to contemporary society. That horse is dead; MacIntyre long ago lay Beckett, Sartre, and Nietzsche to rest in After Virtue. Charlie Kaufmann glorified these themes believably and palpably in Synecdoche, New York, only to be met with mixed reviews and general confusion by his audience (present company excluded). Long before him there was Franz Kafka, whose name, as it turns out, appears nebulously on a white board in the Parable: “R.I.P. Franz”. Sartre wrote No Exit, a play that took minimalism to an extreme that only Waiting for Godot could top. So on and so forth, and did I mention “so it goes”? Kurt Vonnegut made his entire career out of tearing down false idols. So did Friedrich Nietzsche, about a century before him. And don’t even get me started on noise music.

So needless to say (hence I am saying it, for irony is my last refuge) when I expressed my hopes for the game upon having played the demo (after having spent hours trying to download it for free, prior to the arrival of my necessary funds) I told the Gentle Giant that I meant not to judge of it too harshly but rather to anticipate some sort of resolution. Once I had expressed my rather premature judgment that the Narrator sounded a bit Sarcastic, my interlocutor did not hesitate to tell me ardently that my judgment was not premature. I stopped him before he could spoil anything for me, and I was met with a silence the likes of which I could not read. I supposed that my visibly sensitive classmate was simply unaccustomed to that degree of ardour as I demonstrated in my pursuit of what Sartre calls a “privileged moment”.

There was nothing to spoil. The game played immediately to my sense of defiance, terminating me in ways that were so elaborate and schizophrenic that I prayed inwardly that these were just design flukes. When finally I took the proper course and did all that the wretched voice told me to do, I was heartbroken by the Beauty of the Outcome, knowing I did not deserve it. Then terror crept in as I began to wonder if this was all there was.

Of substance, yes. But as far as ridiculously overdone dead-ends go, I had only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

I played the Stanley Parable for two hours. During this time I was reprimanded by a condescending and Satanic voice, offered reprieve by a corny female counterpoint who only appeared once, even before I “won the game”, (and who was clearly some sort of parody of Tenenbaum) and reduced to a slave whose own liberation is apparently the result of conditioning and complacency rather than the strife and heartbreak that less privileged people know to be the true price of freedom.

I hated it. But what puzzles me is the seemingly unequivocal love that people have for it. If Games are Art, and they are to be ranked in the midst of literature, theatre, music, and the rest, then they must be able to compete. The medium, if it comprises any part of the message, should be necessary towards the expression of an idea that cannot be expressed as adequately in any other way. Since it is OUR Art Form, the bark of the Millennial Generation, it should convey us to islands unforeseen. Proving that you can retell No Exit and the Myth of Sisyphus in a series of reductionistic, brutalistic mini-games does not equate to novelty.

A radical Christian conservative I knew, despite his overarching madness, once pointed out that “there is nothing new under the Sun”, but that it may APPEAR new TO ME. I never agreed with him in the Absolute sense, which is after all the only sense that lunatics can allow themselves to deal in, lest they come down from the Moon. Yet in practice I find it relevant here. Gamers who crusade against Roger Ebert’s denouncements of their favourite Art Form give him plenty of faggots to burn (I mean sticks of wood, as a metaphor.) when they transparently call games “Art” not out of artistic fervor but rather out of intellectual laziness. They do not want to elevate Video Games to the Height of Hamlet. They just want to pretend that games are all ready there, attaining its actuality, for only then can they continue to play and consider themselves sufficiently cultured, never once having again to open a book.

What people consider “pretentious” is apparently any sort of genuine, contemporary philosophical inquiry. The term itself has become pretentious. Yet remember that I am not pretentious in using it, considering that I have a deviant conception of what it means that is at the same time rooted in tradition. The contemporary absurdist loves to be a mouse running into walls in pursuit of the cheese that is put in front of him each time. Why? Because he believes himself to have found Reality. People who recycle Absurdism and Post-modernism by creating anti-games manage somehow to create a work of art that pretends NOT to be art, yet at the same time it remains a work that pretends to BE art only when it is not. The former is illustrated by the fact that what could be an amazing and immersive office adventure is painted over with a voice whose every impulse seems to be to narcissistically deride it, except at those moments when the beauty of the surroundings can only be enjoyed fully by an infant without any sense of responsibility. The latter becomes apparent when a great deal of thought and design is reflected in simply pandering to a desk jockey’s clichéd fears of his Superior’s Luxurious Lifestyle. The game does this all in an overlying spirit of apathy and boredom. In this anything-goes world devoid of actual freedom, Hope is replaced by Realism. But this is pretentious because even to CLAIM to have found Reality, or at least a justifiable representation of it, once all criteria have been tossed out, is itself a Hopeful conceit. So it follows that gamers and designers who do not really CARE about the outcomes of their choices produce a game that has the immediate outcome of wasting my time and money, the only reward being that I know I kept an open mind and heart to it to that extent that it was bearable to a principled person. And if principle were pretension, what WOULDN’T be? The affirmation of one’s own pretensions is still a pretension by extension; it is like saying “I am lying.” The hypocrite does not become LESS of a hypocrite by admitting to his own hypocrisy; he becomes MORE of one by striving with futility to become less of one in the public eye. And it does not take a genius (I hope.) to figure this out INSTANTLY.

The Stanley Parable does not “delve into philosophical questions”. Office Space did that. Dilbert did that. The Simpsons did that. But this is frankly terrible. The Stanley Parable is like a game from the nineties minus the passion. It is like Camus without the human-hearted longing. It is Sartre without the glamour. And even if it could live up to any of those sources, some of which it cites by homage, it would come late, simply by being a Video Game in the New Millennium. It could do better.

The game does not raise questions about free will. I still FEEL myself to be a free and willing agent, despite the conditioning offered by a transparently bad Narrator. Perhaps when I first played the demo I felt a little shaky. But the game itself resolved that by its own failures at striving against my Will. By deconstructing itself it could only prove something about itself. The Spirit of a GREAT Game is never in its parts, and Man has known that reduction to absurdity is a fallacy since Plato at the latest. (Unless you mean to argue that I am Socrates because I wear a beard.) I do not QUESTION my Free Will any more so now than I did before. I CHOOSE NOT TO. I experience this Choice as being not only real (which never was a problem for Stanley) but consequential; not only Determinism but the passive-aggressive fatalism of the Parable are both prisons lost to me. So long as I FEEL free, and so long as I FEEL important, (or “Significant”, which literally means only that I am signified in some way, and that means that every time the Narrator calls me by name he signifies me.) then I can continue, even if it is only in the context of this experience, (and I need not choose even to go so far as to make “experience” my limitation, even if you do not believe me, Reader) to choose to believe in my own freedom and importance, and to act accordingly, without reference to any external criterion that would compel me to use my freedom to deny my freedom. That I refuse to simply “win” the game on the Narrator’s terms is not a testament to my doubts about the validity of my own choices, even when they produce favourable outcomes, but rather it is a testament to my REFUSAL to submit to a TRANSPARENT ruse. The game raises NO questions because even to think about it still FEELS LIKE A CHOICE, and that feeling, if it can be perpetuated by the act of what I call “choosing”, will all ways, inevitably, be the arbiter. But this does not make me its puppet. For in the absence of any evidence that I am not a PART of it but that it is simply a means by which to CONTROL me, I have every reason to trust it above any disembodied voice or uninformed order, even if it emanates from my own bad conscience, which quite clearly IS conditioned externally by abuse. So the game does not make me QUESTION this position. It does not ever provide EVIDENCE AGAINST it. It does not attack it; it simply baits me into attacking myself. But I am quick enough to know that I can CHOOSE to refuse, even if it denies that I have such a choice in the matter, by pretending to KNOW what I had intended to choose in some sort of cheap parlour trick that once upon a time self-responsible parents taught their children to disregard. If it were not for the FEELING OF BEING FREE, the game would raise the question of freedom’s own limitations. But a man who lives his life on his own terms, having found them not in arbitrary button-pressing but rather in alignment with a Higher Good, will not feel shaken by this willful waste of time; he will simply wait for a more persuasive attack upon his conviction, and until that comes his conviction will stand, and awareness of this fact ensures that his conviction is the closest thing to Absolute Knowledge that any man can fathom. It does not even matter that those zombies who have turned on Goodness imagine it to be some sort of manipulative dictator who supplies its adherents according to a Pavlovian rewards system. Clearly, the path of the righteous has all ways been more subtle than that. MacIntyre did not write his books just to get a KICK out of them; we know this because there are insights there that are more melancholy than stimulating; they simply RING TRUE. You can’t convince all beings of this Truth. But you CAN convince yourself. And you’d be right. Gamers deny this possibility, pretentiously, and out of fear and laziness. They project their own pretensions upon any one who claims to have Seen the Light or attained any sort of Transcendence whatsoever. But the joke is on them. For having seen the evils of the irresponsible insect who calls itself a Modern Man, or who must crusade against all alien wills just to assert its own, only to deny its existence, I know to learn from the mistakes of those deluded mice who run into walls for fun. One mustn’t imagine Sisyphus happy, nor must one extend this kindness to Stanley. One must simply leave the Office. The Stanley Parable mirrors the life of the Corporate Slave, but it does not liberate; it only begins to wiggle that tooth, and it does so in a manner that is so fiendishly tickling that the Slave is abated instead of aroused.

Dm.A.A.