The Stanley Parable: Dystopia and the Implied Player (DiGRA 2015 Diversity of Play)

At this year’s DiGRA, I had the pleasure of giving a talk about „The Stanley Parable: Dystopia and the Implied Player”. To give you a brief summary: The talk mainly aimed at uncovering dystopia’s implied warning within the game itself. Every dystopia is inherently didactic, in that it tries to warn us of a potential nightmarish future that may lie just around the corner, or has already arrived (with us being unaware of the precariousness of the situation). For this purpose, I took a closer look at The Stanley Parable’s implied player, that is, the game’s dynamic structure. Just like Stanley, the empirical player is trapped within a confining system of rules from which he or she desperately tries to escape, but without avail. It is now up to you (the empirical player) to ask yourself one critical question: is your life (the life in the empirical present) similar to Stanley’s? In other words, have you already become Stanley?

For more information, please check the PDF attached below.

“The Stanley Parable: Dystopia and the Implied Player.” DiGRA 2015, Leuphana University Lüneburg, 14 – 17. 05. 2015.

89_Farca_ The Stanley Parable – Dystopia and the Implied Player

Links:

The Stanley Parable

DiGRA 2015 Diversity of Play

Leuphana University Lüneburg

 

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