The Stanley Parable Dev Showcase: Paradoxes
The Stanley Parable Helpful Development Showcase is our way of connecting you to the development of The Stanley Parable by giving you a small look at what's been going on behind the scenes. Each week we'll give you a tiny peek into what it takes to make a game like The Stanley Parable, the creative challenges we come up against in the course of development, and how to not judge yourself as a person for the quality of choices you've made in your own life. These are just a few of the topics we'll cover in this incredibly useful blog series.
Reader mail comes to us this week from Martin I. of Michigan:
I just played the Stanley parable and I have to tell you that the story in your game is a wreck. It makes no logical sense, contradicts itself, there’s no central consistency in even the loosest sense of the word. Seriously did you even look at what you were making?
Thanks Martin, it’s always a pleasure to hear responses like yours! Here at Galactic Café we take a lot of pride in creating storylines that resemble trainwrecks, totally devoid of value, impenetrable in every way, even bordering on spiteful toward the player.
This week: How to actively sabotage the quality of your game's story
Wrecking your own game isn't just good for your players, it's also tremendously rewarding! To demonstrate, I'm going to start with a video game whose narrative is extremely high quality, and work my way down toward filth.
Here's our example game.
It features two characters, on the left is Marsh and on the right is Chev.
To see the story, let's look at their characters' Attributes. In this case, Chev and Marsh's Attributes determine their relationship with one another.
This is a high quality story.
If your goal is to deeply impact your players, to inspire them with an emotional tale of the human condition, stop now. You won't get any better than this.
On the other hand, if you want a game that alienates and harasses your players, causing them to feel weak and unloved in a cold, brutal world, well then let's continue!
We're going to add another Attribute to Marsh to help confuse and contradict the story.
Great! See how already the narrative has stopped making total sense? That's the effect that we're looking for here.
But we're only just getting started, let's take it another step forward.
What??
your players should be asking at this point,
How can Marsh both love and not love Chev?? How can Chev love Marsh and not actually know her?!?
This is an appropriate response, it means that we're getting closer to infuriating the player with a huge pile of narrative nonsense. But someone stubborn enough could probably still make some sort of artsy bullshit sense out of this game, so let's push it even further.
Fantastic, I think you're getting the hang of it now! Keep going.
YES. I LOVE IT. MORE!
Hm. Okay, I think you stumbled a bit there, it's actually totally plausible that Marsh could be Swedish. In fact, if anything this detail probably causes the story to make MORE sense. Could you come up with something else?
Perfect! You can clearly see from the screenshot that Marsh has arms, this Attribute sends us further into Nonsenseville.
UIHIWREHT872781FHNFDUIAS9I98HAAJFJKE
...is probably what your players are thinking right now as they're playing your game. They came here for a normal, rational, coherent story! And instead they got a life lesson about not trusting me to give them something normal.
That, and the story of Genghis Kahn.
Could we take this even further and confuse the story even more? Of course we could, there is always more nonsense out there, always new piles of shit to heap onto your work, always a greater sense of sheer hatred you could be conveying to your players. Believe in your dreams.
But this is just a tutorial, meant to get you started in the right direction, to inspire you and your future work. So let's stop here and reflect on how far we've come. To actually step into the lives of Chev and Marsh.
Here is a screenshot of our game in action:
BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAMS.
please make this room an easter egg XD and make them talk about their relationship.
Please do that, it would be fantastic. You should also do that for the room full of forklifts.
This tutorial is BS, this story still makes perfect sense!
What you should have done is gone further, for example some of the colours present in the game are actually real colours.
Of course, I feel the real intention of this post is to inspire the next generation of game developers to make their work even shittier than I could even have imagined.
As an armless Swedish woman with conflicting feelings towards my lover from the Mongolian past, I find this tutorial offensive.
What are you going to do? Throttle them with your metaphysical lack of arms?
What boggles my mind is how you can even type without arms.
Don’t worry davey, nothing will come of this because… she’s.. heh..heh.. no wait… she’s ‘armless. Hehheh.
your mastery of feet typing scares me a little…
Great job! I haven’t even finished the first letter of this blog post and I’m already feeling an all-consuming rage for the universe itself. I can’t wait to see what comes after “R” so that I can see ever more clearly how to communicate this feeling to players in the most roundabout and condescending way imaginable.
I love this stuff. Please do more!
Looking forward to the HD re-make.
You didn’t even build the cubemaps. Or is that part of the confusion?
Please, let me point out a few things about that story and how it makes perfectly sense:
So first of Chev was in fact Genghis Khan in his first life. Afterwards he reincarnated into Chev, who live before the events of our/the game take place. From a fortune teller he heard about Marsh, a beautiful woman who hasn’t been born yet, but he immediatley fell in love with her, even though he didn’t know her a bit. Unfortunatley later on he lost his arms in a tragic car accident and soon after died.
Now comes the actual twist: He then reincarnates into Marsh (who might have lived in Sweden, if it wouldn’t have been for some meddling producers/programmers), the woman he fell in love with in his past life. He/She still knows that he/she once fell in love with herself/himself, but now realizes that he/she can’t love Marsh anymore since she’s now himself/herself…
And since Marsh is Chev who lost his arms she hadn’t had any arms left for her reincarnation and got another pair of arms from somebhody else, but unfortunatley something went wrong during the reincarnation process and the arms didn’t really went into her possesion, leading to the conclusion that they are still controlled by the former owner Sir Garbinghead Pnoy II.
She may have a pair arms attached to her new body, but they actually don’t belong to her.
And now during the game she has the task of dealing with all the problems (caused by Sir Pnoy II.’s arms), while she suffers from severe mental breakdowns (from her former life as the war lord Genghis Khan) that send her into an imaginary world in which following the cooking instructions of instant pudding always leads to the emerging of a bagel, being a donut, that’s actually the british crown.
I think I now may claim the Internetz as my price.
Perhaps Sir Garbinghead is Swedish, therefore part of the character model is, indeed, just as Swedish as Pnoy, but Marsh as a character isn’t, despite providing some bloodflow.
I have a terrible interpretation of Marsh and Chev. The worst part is that it makes sense. If anyone wants to hear it, let me know…
I’d like to hear it. ^^
(If it’s good I may consider to share the Internetz I won with you.)
Marsh is in love with Chev… or at least that is what she thinks. She is really just attached to Chev but doesn’t really love him. Chev doesn’t know Marsh, but loves her… He knows about her because he sees her in his dreams… Then we find out Marsh is Chev… My interpretation of this is that all of this is happening inside Marsh’s head, who is currently at a Mental Asylum. She has been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder. Chev only exists in the past because he is a past personality of her. Marsh also has no arms, but through her eyes, she appears to have arms. She must have blocked out the loss of her arms, and is currently suffering from phantom limb syndrome. Chev is now revealed to be Gengis Khan… Or at least he (that personality) thinks he is Gengis Khan. I believe this may mean that Marsh’s father was mentally ill, and thought he was Gengis Khan…
[...] may recall that in last week's installment of the Stanley Parable Helpful Development Showcase, I explored narrative paradoxes and how to use them to make your game objectively [...]
Doesn’t take much to entertain players these days. Or does it?
As a Swedish person, I personally don´t feel very plausible. I think this post is racist, as it depicts us swedes as plausable human beings instead of figures of imagination. Now, if you excuse me I will fly to Narnia on my ectremely wealthy elephant.
EXCALIBUR!