The Stanley Parable, Panopticism, and Portal

When I first saw The Stanley Parable, I felt odd because the narration was occurring in real-time. Once I got over that, I immediately realized that the game had been set up for the player to act in a predetermined way. When the player arrives at the first set of doors, he is presented with a choice. The choice is less about going left or right, and more about deciding if he should listen to the narrator's voice or disobey. This choice reminded me of the decision in "Before the Law" but I believe that dead horse has been beaten quite enough.

The Stanley Parable is different from most games in two primary ways. Firstly, the interaction with the game is very limited. Almost every choice made by the player has a very large change in the outcome of the game. There are no NPCs to chat with, no items to gather, nothing to collect. There are only decisions to make. The second, and perhaps more important, distinction is that the player is put into a position from the very start of the game to be judged and watched by the narrator. While logic tells us that the narrator's lines have all been written long ago, the feeling that he has power over the player still exists.

This lack of interaction and constant feeling of being observed are two primary concepts of Foucault's Panopticism. Even though the player is alone, the game goes to great lengths to let you know that there are in fact many more people in the game and that they just happen to be absent today. It's fashioned in such a way that the player will feel like he is in the spotlight. In a way, this made it easier for me to ignore what the narrator wanted. Perhaps if there were many other people going about their everyday button-pressing, I wouldn't have felt so challenged to disobey the narrator.

The most interesting part of the game was the moment when the female voice interfered with the narrator's plan to crush the player in the trap. That moment revealed that there were many levels of power in the game world. The narrator arrogantly believed that he was in complete control of the situation. The female then assumed control in a similarly arrogant manner, then made a display of her power to the player as well. I found all sorts of symbolism and meaning in this single moment. Prominently, I thought that it was quite unlikely that this woman was in control of the situation any more than the narrator or player was. But whether or not she was in control was irrelevant to her cocksure attitude. The only thing that mattered was the fact that she thought she was in control, as did the narrator. I found the layers of power to be an intriguing addition to the game.

The way the player is constantly being shoe-horned into behaving a certain way or told to do specific things reminded me of Portal. The manner in which the narrator tries to make the player feel like he should follow instructions instead of thinking freely or exploring was very reminiscent to me of the way GLaDOS  toyed with the player's head and attempted to verbally force the player to behave in a certain way. The storyline to the first play-through of The Stanley Parable and that of Portal are very similar. In The Stanley Parable, to get the 'escape' ending, you must listen to the narrator. In Portal, you must ignore the promises of cake and threats of GLaDOS to eventually escape. So, while you must listen to one, and ignore the other, the similarity is in the fact that by doing this, you are playing the game 'how it feels like it should be played.'