Content warning: fictional suicide

For a long time I think my favourite video game was The Stanley Parable. It's one of the games that first got me thinking seriously about stories and narrative. I played it quite a bit when I was a kid

The Stanley Parable (stanleyparable.com)

I'll try not to spoil too much of it but I will be spoiling one ending, which if you've played the game before, you may or may not recognize as the ending with the light show and fire escape.

The Stanley Parable is kind of hard to explain as a game. It's a first person walking simulator where you explore an office building. A narrator tells the story as you explore. You can make decisions that follow the narrator's story, or you can resist it. The ways you interact with the narration shape the story into one of a whole bunch of different stories.

In one of those stories where you defy the narrator several times, he tells you that he's trying to show you something beautiful. If then you finally follow his instructions, he takes you to an otherwise dark room where you can look out over a beautiful, abstract display of lights. The narrator tells you that the two of you can stay there forever, together, happy.

Nothing else happens if you stay in the room. You can watch the light show on repeat forever. A door opens behind you through which you can exit. If you follow the hallway, you eventually get to a fire escape where the narrator begs you to go back. As you climb he gets increasingly desperate. From the top, you can jump off, plummeting to your death.

Only, the drop doesn't kill you. It injures you, and you move slower, but you can still move, choosing either to return to the light show or go up the fire escape again. Returning to the light show does nothing, but going up the fire escape agitates the narrator. If you jump off, the drop still won't kill you. You can do this another two times, at which point you basically have to crawl up the fire escape, and the narrator has totally lost faith. Finally, you plummet to your death, and the narrator asks "Is this what you really wanted?"

When I was a kid playing this for the first time, I felt pretty disturbed and wasn't sure what to make of it. When I played it again during the lockdown, I had a bit more perspective. I figured the "correct" choice was to stay in the light room forever. To stay was to live the good life. To choose to repeatedly throw yourself from the top of the fire escape was the capitalism, or industrialism, or whatever-ism driving you to hurt yourself for opaque reasons against your own interests.

After last semester I had some time off and I'd been meaning to play the sequel/expansion for a while. So, I revisited the light show ending. Now, looking back on it, choosing to stay and watch the light show forever feels kind of silly, because it's not that beautiful. There's so much more beauty in life that doesn't involve staring at an abstract, animated painting for all of eternity.

What's interesting, then, is that watching the light show isn't a meaningful "ending" to the game. Not playing the game is an "ending," in that the game will reward you with an achievement for not playing The Stanley Parable for five years. Doing nonsensical tasks for a very long time is an "ending," such as one ending where you have to press a button once every few seconds for five hours. But the game never "ends" or rewards you for staying at the light show. In as much as it's an ending, it's entirely intrinsic and outside of the game's mechanics.

The game does, however, end when you repeatedly throw yourself off the fire escape. This is the only path the game provides. This is canonically the world of the narrator's design, so it's a bit hypocritical of him to criticize you for behaving in the only way you're allowed.

This is probably a metaphor for something, idk

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