I was a bit hesitant when first playing The Stanley Parable – I normally enjoy fast-paced and attention-grabbing games, with quite intense graphics/mechanics. However, I found The Stanley Parable really fun to play, which made me question why.
On a graphical and spatial level, the game design is pretty good. I wouldn’t say it’s the nicest looking game, however, it fits in the general theme of ‘having a dull job’ in a seemingly ‘boring’ office. The mechanics are fluid, but again, it’s a walking simulator which takes place in an office, so it’s not ‘exciting’ per se.
However, there is obviously a lot more to this game than basic design. I think what makes this game so addictive is the aspect of choice (what is choice? – that’s a whole other topic which I, unfortunately, won’t go into in this post) and discovery. I can’t recall a game I’ve played where it is beneficial to explicitly disobey the orders or suggestions of the narrator, or where the narrator gets annoyed at you for making choices (in my experience if you disobey instructions, you normally get an alert or you fail). Yet, in The Stanley Parable, it is beneficial, if not very enjoyable, to disobey orders or narration when it comes to ‘winning’ the game. What this also points to is that humans enjoy disobeying orders – I’m not an expert in psychology, but I’m sure this is true to some extent.
Further, the idea of discovery is essentially what this game is all about. Especially in the Ultra Deluxe version, there are so many endings and so many secrets that the replay value of this game is huge. However, this also comes with regret. I’d seen the game a few times before, so I knew the basic story and how the game operated before I played the game itself. I felt like this diminished the excitement of discovery a bit, as I knew what options I had from the start. However, I could have also played the game without knowing its quirks and secrets, simply listening to the narrator, and finding the ‘true’ ending, which I think would have been even less exciting. Therefore, this leads me to the question; would you enjoy The Stanley Parable more if you had no previous knowledge of the game? In my case, the answer is definitely yes.
The question of “would you enjoy The Stanley Parable more if you had no previous knowledge of the game” is an interesting one. My gut response was “obviously, everything is better if it’s not spoiled for you,” but then I realized that’s not necessarily true for all works of media. Generally, (and assuming prerequisite or background knowledge doesn’t count as knowledge of the piece itself), going into things blind is always better—so long as the thing is actually good. A well-designed game should be able to tell players what they need to know to enjoy it.
If they game is not well-designed, external knowledge may contribute to its enjoyment. For example, it could benefit a player to know beforehand if a particular story path is horribly unsatisfying or if a certain character build breaks the game balance.
In general though, I still prefer playing games blind. It’s an experience you can only get once, after all.
I’m not sure I enjoyed playing The Stanley Parable. Conceptually, I enjoyed it—the interplay between videogame, narrative, and choice was interesting. There’s a degree of humor too in the self-referentiality and tongue-in-cheek tone that I enjoyed as well. I did not have any knowledge of the game prior, beyond the themes of metagames for last week, and I do think having knowledge would have negatively changed my enjoyment. Nevertheless, I ultimately found a lot of the repetition tedious, though I appreciate what the feeling of tedium adds to a critique of a neo-liberal corporate hellscape. On the inverse, after playing the game, I found a lot of enjoyment reading about the game and learning more about the other ends without actually experiencing them.
I agree with Tallon on the gut response of “obviously, everything is better if it’s not spoiled for you,” but I feel that for this game, it only changes how you approach the game. To elaborate, I feel that having previous knowledge of The Stanley Parable adds to the experience, especially since you know that you do not necessarily have to follow the narrator’s instructions. Obviously, for someone who does not have previous knowledge of the game, one could realize this after the first round of playing. However, it would save the player a whole lot of time to have said knowledge. Some could say that the time spent figuring out such a possibility is a part of the game, but I just don’t think so for games like The Stanley Parable. So, to answer “would you enjoy The Stanley Parable more if you had no previous knowledge of the game?”, I would say that neither would be more enjoyable and rather that it is just a difference in how the player approaches and explores the game.