I was inspired in class to create my own experiment and asked a few of my friends to play SP and only to play one end. Only one of them was familiar with the game, but the others don’t ever play video games or know much about them at all.
I was interested in the notion that people who knew the game would still try to follow the rules to try to be “unique”, figuring that everyone else would disobey the narrator.
My findings:
Player 1: He has played the game before and began following all the rules up until the stair case choice where he went down instead of up. He achieved the looped dream/suicide ending
Player 2: She has never touched a video game in her life. I told her nothing about the game and just explained how to move around. She explored a lot and ultimately followed the narrator to the freedom ending. She thought she would lose if she disobeyed.
Player 3: She has also never played video games. She followed the narrator all the way to the end but pressed “ON” instead of “OFF”. She was very freaked out as the narrator toyed with Stanley and initiated its nuclear self-destruction.
I had a few other people play (who do not play video games or haven’t heard of this one) and most followed the narrator to the end shockingly. I presumed that they would mess around but most told me they were afraid to lose. Their only association with gaming is with winning and losing. As UChicago students, of course, they wanted to win.
The game itself is built like an experiment, easily replicated. We will always end up back in Stanley’s office to start over and have the choice to get the same outcome or venture off. There is some strange reverse psychology going on in your own head while playing this game. I was always thinking about what other people would do and trying to do the opposite. A new concept that wasn’t discussed in class was winning and losing in SP. Google defines a parable as “a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels.” So, can you really win a story? The only way to “win” that I can see is to learn the moral lesson it offers. So, to win the SP game is to learn its purpose or at least one of them.
As a less-frequent game player than most people in this class, I totally resonate with the decisions made by players 2 and 3- I have a really hard time feeling like I’m going to “disappoint” characters, even when I know that they’re ultimately just code, so I’m really susceptible to in-game pressures like the Stanley Parable narrator. I especially experience this in games where there are dialogue options, in that I almost always choose the least confrontational option even when I know there are more “favorable” confrontational options. I wonder if playing enough video games can inoculate a person to this form of pressure at all? Like, the more one plays games, the more comfortable they get with feeling like game characters aren’t real people? Maybe people can improve in their ability to draw the line between non-virtual and virtual space by playing more video games.
This is an exciting experiment. It feels like a win/lose condition and competition are inherent to gameplay, which sometimes limits free exploration in games, especially games that try to tell some stories. However, I feel like for games that tell branching stories, such as Stanley Parable or visual novel games, the win/lose condition turns from the simple good ending/bad ending into beating all the endings / not.
I think I would’ve had the same play experience had I been one of your friends. Since, I don’t have much experience with games like SP I personally would’ve followed instructions as well. I agree that the main conception people have about games is that there’s always a win state and refusing to follow its instructions cause them to lose. It’s interesting how SP takes advantage of that belief by having both a “right” path to follow and numerous other options for those who want to defy the game’s rules. After learning about SP’s multiple endings, I think it slightly shifted how I look at other games. When playing other games I wondered how I could go against the game’s wishes? And are there things that I can learn from not following directions? Even though most times going against game rules ends up in my losing, it’s still fun to see what I can learn about he game’s mechanics that I otherwise wouldn’t have found out.