The Stanley Parable is a video game designed by Davey Wreden, that uses interactive storytelling. It was first released as a free modification for Half-Life 2 in 2011, but a stand-alone remake with more story elements was released in 2013.

The game starts off with a narrator introducing the main character, Stanley, an office employee. The narrator describes his mundane work life where, day in and day out, he is tasked to follow whatever instructions appear on his monitor. One day, however, Stanley sat at his desk for an hour, but not a single instruction had appeared, and no one else was in the office. With the starting objective of find out what’s going on, the player controls Stanley in a first-person perspective while the narrator gives indirect instructions through his narrations.

As the player, you can choose to follow everything the narrator says; you stick to the script and discover that the company had been mind-controlling the employees, after which, you put and end to it escape the facility.

However, as players, we have the natural tendency to go against the rules; to find out what would happen if you don’t do as the narrator says. This is where the interactive storytelling gets interesting. The game itself provides the player with many opportunities to go against the narrator, be it going the right door when he says to go left, or going down the stairs when he says to go up. But with every order you disobey, with every move you make, the game long foresaw, providing each scenario with it’s own script.

As the player’s disobedience prevails, the narrator gets increasingly annoyed, constantly mocking the player, and at one point in the game, gives up on the main game and boots up another one. The narrator’s reactions makes it feel as though he truly is reacting in real time to all your actions. Obviously, that is not the case. Certain dialogues are only activated upon entering specific areas of the map, meaning that the game was very well thought out in terms of predicting the player’s moves and thinking of a response fit for the situation. There is even a dialogue prepare for when the player purposely stays inside a janitor’s closet (without being told to) for too long. The narrator even gets mad when you interrupt his narration mid-way. He even says somewhat conspiratorial sounding things that can make you feel uncomfortable as you play the game.

So what is the point of having a game where the player doesn’t have to follow the main story line? Why go through all the trouble creating so many scripts for multiple alternate scenarios when they can just make it straight forward with no room for disobedience? It’s simply to give the players the freedom of choice. Or rather, an illusion of freedom of choice. The Stanley Parable aims to question what choices mean in video game, mocking how limited the choices really are. Sure, you can choose to disobey, but the fact that there there is a witty come back for everything you do, it proves that your move was predicted; the game designer knew the possibilities of disobedience and created paths disguised as new choices. To phrase it better, how much power does the player really have when everything has been predetermined?

Every decision the player is able to make was already preconceived by the designer; he knows every choice because he made them so. The story only serves as a decoy, leading the players to believe that they are the ones in control. There are various paths you can take, and these paths branch out to a total of 19 different endings. After reaching the end, the player is brought back to the start menu, where they are able to play the game again, making different decisions in an effort to explore other possible endings.

It is the games intuition and large range of choices that allows the players to have a unique interactive experience.