Exploring the limits of authorial intent in video games through The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide
We are going to do something a bit different this time. Instead of the usual esoteric buzzwords or references to various pieces of obscure media, we are going to keep this laser focused on two specific video games—as a case study. Namely, The Stanley Parable (available here or here for the deluxe remaster) and The Beginner’s Guide (available here). Or you can get both as a bundle here. Go off and play both to whatever extent satisfies you, and then come back here. It should not take you more than three or four hours to play both even if you play them with a scenic mindset, and this post is about actually playing those games, so please go do it. If you’re too poor to buy them, I am sure that there are many novel workarounds available in particular circles of the internet. Or just beg me on Steam.
Video games are art—apparently. When we traced our way through to a reasonably functional definition of art in the previous post on this blog, we reached one that does not discriminate on the basis of medium, and so we must accept that video games can be art. And in conversations about the artistic value of video games, so-called “walking simulators” are invariably held up as either representatives of the artistic merit of video games, or just as often as pretentious demonstrations of the failure of the artistic mindset as currently applied to the medium. The Stanley Parable is one of the most common examples to elicit discussion in such cases.
The Stanley Parable… well, you should already know what it is if you did as you were told and played the game before reading further: But, for those with either clinical forgetfulness or disobedience, The Stanley Parable is a 2013 first person “walking simulator” video game that places the player in control of the titular Stanley, who exists in an existential conflict with the narrator of the story and must traverse various video game tropes in order to reach many different possible endings. The core loop of the game involves a series of (mostly) binary choices where the player must either obey or disobey the narrator, and thereby negotiate their relationship with the metafiction of the game. It is a reasonably simple concept and does not involve any complex gameplay that tests the strategic thinking or reflexes of the player; they must simply walk around, look around, and make decisions.
The Beginner’s Guide is a 2015 first person “walking simulator” project by The Stanley Parable co-writer Davey Wreden—as well as some overlapping technical staff. Similar to The Stanley Parable, The Beginner’s Guide involves walking around and completing simple tasks at the direction of a narrator. However, in the first major departure from its predecessor, we game removes of any pretence of fictionality in its presentation to the player. The player’s character is left as a simply unnamed avatar of the player’s will, and the narrator claims to be the writer Davey Wreden himself. In other words, it presents itself as a direct conversation between player and developer rather than relying on proxy characters like The Stanley Parable.
Of course, any readers who obeyed my initial instructions would already know most of that. The point of this post is rather to discuss what this genre means for the construction of meaning in art by way of a case study of these two titles. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined a phrase which has come to occupy a monumental space in media criticism: “the medium is the message.” This theory simply posits that the scale of the meaning introduced by the form of a medium outweighs the meaning communicated in the content of that medium. To quote McLuhan, “indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.”
So, how does this apply to video games? According to McLuhan’s theory, the character of the medium of video games—that is, its audio-visual nature, its computerised peripheral interfaces, its interactivity—should carry more weight than the content of video games themselves. It is not merely that the medium is more important in an abstract, theoretical sense, but that the scale of the impact of mediums is greater than the scale of the impact that their content can carry. Yet, the distance between medium and content is precisely why the discussion of video games as an artform so often leaves me feeling so cold: While the medium of video games has allowed new frontiers of meaning to open far beyond the scale of the artistic content itself, as per McLuhan’s theory, it is seldom the case that the works that carry the banner for “video games as art” present content that matches the scale of the meaning afforded by their medium. This all might be a little abstract, so let us return to The Stanley Parable.
The Stanley Parable and meaning
The Stanley Parable delivers an experience that subverts the usual logic of video games in some crucial ways. As many have already said long before this post was written, the false conflict between player and narrator that the game establishes serves as a kind of critique of the illusion of choice that is so prominent as a concept in video game design: While the player may at many opportunities disobey the instructions of the narrator, these acts of disobedience merely lead to more gameplay outcomes that are part of the intended meaning of the narrative. In other words, disobedience is not so much rebellion against the systems of the game, it is a core mechanic of The Stanley Parable’s “gameplay.”
With this in mind, what does The Stanley Parable “mean”—or at least, how does it construct meaning? Like all narrative media, it is possible to interpret meaning as the straightforward output of ideas communicated by the author in the direct text of the work. Basically, The Stanley Parable is about whatever it says it is about. Of course, this definition is immensely vulnerable to the challenges of subjectivity, as no one can definitively declare what a text “says” without any disagreement. As a result, this mode of analysis relies on the discussion and analysis of the themes of a work in order to provide a concrete foundation on which to base any interpretations. Themes being the lessons and morals that the audience can directly lift from the content of the work. Under this framework, it is fairly simple to understand what The Stanley Parable is about: it is about the inherent contradiction of trying to offer an illusion of agency to a player participating in a story that was decided ahead of time by the developers. It is about the various oddities in the conventions of video game narratives when interrogated by the self-aware actions of both Stanley and the narrator. This is all so obvious because The Stanley Parable, rather bluntly, says what it is about on various occasions through its narration.
Some astute readers may note that this model of meaning leaves very little room for the meaning of the medium that McLuhan theorised, and that is precisely why we cannot accept the limits of this perspective if we wish to have a full discussion of the experience of walking simulators. If meaning arises from interpreting the messages and lessons placed within the content of the text, the gameplay of The Stanley Parable can only communicate meaning insomuch as the gameplay relates these messages and lessons to the audience. This overly didactic perspective immediately falls apart in the context of McLuhan’s theories, where there is a meaning separate from whatever the author places within the content, due to the very frame of the medium itself. In other words, regardless of whether the content of The Stanley Parable intends to communicate a direct, metaphorical meaning through its core gameplay of “choices,” it communicates emergent meaning due to how it situates the player in the context of the idea of a “video game” as a medium.
For example, what is the meaning of Pac-Man? The backstory Tohru Iwatani intended for the events depicted in the game is deceptively irrelevant for understanding the meaning that is actually constructed in the game of Pac-Man itself. Instead, the meaning of Pac-Man is a dynamic, emergent property of the systems and assets of the game interacting within the frame of its medium. We understand the antagonism between the titular Pac-Man and the multi-coloured ghosts due to the audio-visual design of the characters, and the feedback those audio-visual systems give to the player when particular mechanical interactions lead to a “game over” screen. This is why, despite their lack of human context, even a machine learning algorithm can grasp the essential meaning that “Pac-Man should avoid the ghosts”—because doing otherwise makes the player have to insert more money into the machine, which the algorithm is taught to be a generally undesirable outcome.
The same still holds true in much more complex games. Even in the sprawling, functionally infinite world of Minecraft, the essential relationship between the player and enemies such as Creepers is a property that emerges dynamically out of the mechanical consequences of losing gear and materials due to one exploding at an inopportune time. The added social dynamic of multiplayer only serves as a further example of the meaning that emerges out of the frame of a medium. The players naturally construct their own narratives about one another’s behaviour in relation to the mechanics and consequences of the game, and whatever meaning this leaves behind. In other words, due to its unique structure, Minecraft does not truly have lessons to be imparted on behalf of its creator, but nonetheless has various, seemingly infinite, narratives that are experienced due to the interactions between players within its large and complex sandbox. For a practical demonstration of this concept, please see this video demonstrating YouTuber Dan Olsen’s recreation of the tropes of the Transatlantic Slave Trade within the emergent systems of Minecraft.
Readers should not misunderstand; this is not a specific property of video games with a high degree of procedural or unpredictable content. Rather, it is the very medium of video games and their prerequisite interactivity that creates this property of meaning being constructed by the behaviour of the player. Dating sims, even with their sole gameplay interaction of making dialogue choices to raise or lower relationship points and flags with possible companions, are still undergoing this process of creating meaning through the interaction of their video game systems. The linear and scripted quest content of roleplaying games such as The Witcher 3 still creates meaning within the player’s interactions. For example, the priority that the player places on certain objectives over others creates the illusion of characterisation, as does the abilities that the player prefers to use to complete these objectives, since these all shape the player’s perception of the character they are controlling and how this interacts with the designed, static content that the developers have written and created themselves. This is all to say that video games do not merely existent in a dichotomy between having or lacking a “story,” they have emergent story properties whose meaning is shaped by being in the frame of a video game.
Returning to The Stanley Parable, what meaning is constructed by its gameplay? Well, in this case, precisely the same meaning communicated by its text as is. While The Stanley Parable does incorporate player interaction with its mechanical systems—walking and decision making—into its narrative and its themes, it does so in an extremely direct, binary way. Cohesion between the narrative of a piece of media and the technology shaping it at the level of medium is not an inherently undesirable thing. In fact, it is if anything a sign of an artwork built with a high degree of expertise. But that is exactly why these walking simulators are such an interesting case study of the challenges of any simple view of meaning in art. Because, even with all of the expertise on display in The Stanley Parable, it still fails to make full use of its medium to construct additional meaning and communicate that meaning to the player: Because of the fundamentally simple and binary interactions available in The Stanley Parable, it lives down to the meaning directly constructed by its author, rather than growing into the meaning possible in art that is more organically constructed as an interactive video game first.
Thematic ambiguity vs emergent meaning in The Beginner’s Guide
These paradoxes and ironies at the heart of the so-called artistic walking simulators are representative of exactly why I have, perhaps controversially, called video games a fundamentally immature medium. Not immature in the sense of being for immature people, but instead in the sense of being simply too recent to consistently present art that is as cohesive and sophisticated as is the case in novels or film. A video game that simply presents a film-like narrative without using its medium is, at least in a certain sense, strictly inferior to a film that presents that same film-like narrative as a film. This is because of the dissonance between medium and content present in the former. These challenges become even more clear in the second game of our case study, which is arguably both better written and yet even more dissonant precisely because of its recognition of the weaknesses of The Stanley Parable.
The Beginner’s Guide, unlike The Stanley Parable, presents a thematically ambiguous story. While The Stanley Parable makes the limits of interpretive freedom explicit in its reduction of video game logic to binary choices, The Beginner’s Guide removes almost all interaction from the player. Instead, the player is taken on a linear tour of several short, abstract video games that are said have been developed by a mysterious creator known only as “Coda.” The player’s primary challenge is actually their interaction with the narrator, writer Davey Wreden, and his personal interpretation of the meaning of Coda’s games. These interpretations are forced on the player through monologues and through interventions in Coda’s “intended” gameplay. Davey, for example, allows the player to skip sections through ad hoc shortcuts, or even whole levels altogether if they desire.
Through the dissonance between the narrator’s personal interpretations of the themes of the games and the range of possible experiences of the player, the challenges of authorial intent and how meaning is constructed are made the explicit text of The Beginner’s Guide—and this makes it an even more direct demonstration of the paradoxes of walking simulators as an artform. The Beginner’s Guide addresses the shortcomings of the writing of The Stanley Parable by including a more complex and dynamic concept of meaning in its content, but ironically does so while becoming even further removed from any meaning that can be constructed from its medium. In other words, even as it escapes from the limitations of the model of meaning as simply a product of lessons and morals being included by the author, little of its meaning is truly constructed by the interactivity of video games as a medium. The player may come to any number of interpretations about the narrator Davey, the mysterious creator Coda, and the games they are playing, but all of these interpretations manifest in and from identical gameplay interactions and identical audio-visual experiences. As a result, even if we grant that both games are story-focused games featuring writing of comparable sophistication, The Stanley Parable distinguishes itself from The Beginner’s Guide through its use of the medium of video games itself.
To surmise the basic points of this post, ever since walking simulators became a popular subgenre of the so-called artistic video game, they have been an interesting source of the ironic limits of analysing video games as an artform. This is precisely because they manage to create artistic intrigue without demonstrating the larger capacity of video games to achieve artistic meaning. This is because art does not create meaning purely through the expression of the author’s ideas, but through the interaction of the various aspects of the full text as an example of its medium. For video games, this means that art does not just include the intended meaning placed by its creators, but also the unintended and ambiguous implications of its writing, and interactions between both of these and the mechanics and systems it employs in its gameplay, the audio-visual assets that go into its creation, the social dynamics that shape engaging with it, and many other features. By leaving a gameplay-shaped hole in their design, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide make it nakedly obvious how much meaning is ordinarily found in that hole.
