The Stanley Parable

Wow, the demo.

pretty cute.

Not a long thread, hey? Just played several hours of this at the weekend, was completely blown away. Need to sort out my Steam account and get it myself, as I think I was on the verge of finding a fairly hidden thing when it crashed on us. (Also I completely failed to obey - even when I told myself that was going to be my playthrough strategy I crumbled and revolted towards the end.)

i loved watching Youtube videos of this, i just never play games on PC.

If you picked up the game recently but didn't play the demo first, get that too (it should still be available I think). It's not just a slice of the game, its a completely separate little companion piece.

Anyone else played the Beginner's Guide yet? Much less of a game, in fact pretty much entirely a story, but I just finished it and it's a fucking great piece. Got quite emotional at points. Obviously I am a sucker for both story-driven games and metafiction so am very much the target audience, but I'm interested in what other people think.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-10-01-the-beginners-guide-review

i did! and i really liked it, too. i posted about it a while back here: whatchu playing now

i don't think it was well-received on ILX, at least. tbh i'm kind of surprised i liked it so much because i'm NOT a sucker for story-driven games in general. like that game 80 Days, which everyone loved - i could barely get through a single playthrough. but Beginner's Guide was super-meta. a game about games (like Stanley Parable, which i went back and played for the first time after learning about Beginner's Guide. i love both these games).

maybe i enjoy his games more than most other story-driven games oartly because they're 3D and i can walk around and explore the world while listening to it, rather than clicking through menus or reading paragraph after paragraph of text? it's not just a matter of staying occupied, either - there are certain moments in his games that are visually driven and couldn't really exist as just text. like in Beginner's Guide when you float up into the air and that fractal maze comes into shape. there's something indescribably emotional about that.

i am not good at describing why i like things, sorry. but i'm with you on beginner's guide. i thought it was amazing and couldn't stop talking about it for days

it also probably helped that i'm overly trusting at times, so i just accepted the story of the Beginner's Guide, at least up until near the end. it didn't even occur to me that it might be fiction. so yeah, guess i'm a dummy but at least it meant that the story felt real and meaningful to me while i was playing it

maybe i enjoy his games more than most other story-driven games oartly because they're 3D and i can walk around and explore the world while listening to it, rather than clicking through menus or reading paragraph after paragraph of text?

Well, I play a lot of interactive fiction/text adventures, so I don't mind text, but one thing that makes a difference for me is this sense of "exploring the world". So I am happy with a text adventure that is on rails, it only has one outcome, you just have to get there - I am happy with that if it has a well-implemented world that I can play with while I get there. Which is why I don't like twine games: I can live without real choice, I can live without the ludic element, but I can't stand interaction being solely reduced to a click. I need to look around. I need to at least try to poke things.

I think part of why the Beginner's Guide worked so well for me is b/c I am in a, not an uncynical place, but... I guess in a fragile state of mind at the moment? So the emotional aspect very much resonated with me, and the attempt at navigating both another's mind and your own, and whether there can be reciprocity (regardless of whether they are aspects of the same person, it's about attempting to achieve connection in a highly disconnected state and the futility of such).

it didn't even occur to me that it might be fiction

One of the commenters in the other thread said something about knowing that Coda wasn't real spoiled it for them, and you say this, but... at no point in playing did I ever think Coda was real and this was a real, biographical story. I can see why some people might have but that just seemed a given to me (in the same way I didn't assume the voice-over artist in Stanley Parable was actually the developer). I never thought Coda was real, but it didn't make the story any less real to me. Metafiction doesn't mean it's not fiction. You still have to buy into the world. I still believe in Anton Vowl and the story that erupts from his absence in A Void, even though I know it's a beautifully-executed example of a lipogram. I believe in him but at no point do I believe he existed. Fiction is potentiality. The Beginner's Guide is a possible world where this story happened, and David Lewis assures me that all possible worlds are in fact real.

I am definitely blethering now, I just wrote a whole lot more but deleted it. Will stop. I liked this.

i know the feeling - i think at least half of what i write for ILX ends up getting deleted. fwiw your post references several really interesting things that i'll be looking into while sitting in airports all afternoon and evening, so thanks!