Exploring Antenarrative in ‘The Stanley Parable’
I began my first playthrough of The Stanley Parable by not following directions. The game’s narrator guides you along through the opening gambit of the level until you are met with two doors. Each door stands open before you. The narrator anticipates that you will continue following directions and enter the door on the left. But when given an opportunity not to comply with the linear directions, I disobeyed the narrator and entered the right door. That small decision felt like (pardon the pun) the right thing to do.
Narratives often take place in linear sequence. This linear sequence forms the tropes and archetypes we know and love. Stories usually take shape in three main parts: beginning, middle, and end. Or, thought another way, stories begin, things happen, and the plot resolves. But nearly infinite potential for other stories exists, and many stories deliberately subvert the traditional, linear narrative.
One such narrative subversion is antenarrative, which is an obscure term that refers to many narrative processes going on at once. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be focusing in on a branch called rhizomeatic assemblage antenarrative, which is an obnoxious term for a storytelling process that isn’t causal or linear in structure, but rather combinatorial. Think of The Stanley Parable, a game that defies linearity. Sure, the game has a “true” ending in the same way as many multifaceted narratives. One can certainly play it linearly. But no two players who play The Stanley Parable have identical playthroughs – and that fact is crucial to understanding antenarrative.
I hesitate to wedge such a clunky and academic term into the conversation about such a fun and often silly game, especially considering the confusion surrounding the term “antenarrative.” I am not talking about the most common forms of antenarrative – usually referring to pre-bet narratives – even though The Stanley Parable begins with all of the relevant conditions in place for that sort of discussion. What is more interesting to me is how the multiple stories that can be told in the game interact, how they contribute layers of meaning to the overall game, and finally what the player’s subjective experience is like while playing through for the first time.
The Stanley Parable begins by introducing employee 427, known as Stanley, who we find working peacefully in his office. It’s easy to read a horrible pointlessness into Stanley’s job, which consists of taking orders from a screen and pushing buttons on a keyboard. The narration acknowledges that most people would find this kind of work to be “soul rending,” but explains that Stanley actually quite likes his job – in the same almost unbelievable way that Spongebob enjoys his job as a fry cook.
One day Stanley finds himself completely isolated in this massive office suite. No one has sent him orders, no one is there to ask for assistance, and so Stanley stands up from his desk and walks out into the seemingly abandoned office building. It’s almost as eerily abandoned as when Rick Grimes wakes up in a hospital, where it looks like people have just outright disappeared all at once, leaving all their possessions behind. And here’s where the antenarrative begins.
From the game’s introduction, the player is given a certain degree of freedom with how they can proceed. I was lucky enough to play this game with a group of Twitch chat who, as soon as I beat the game, were familiar enough with the game to encourage me to seek alternative and secret endings. To the unsuspecting player, however, it’s not at all obvious that this game contains such multitudes and alternative storylines. The sheer amount of possible endings in this game boggles the mind. With nineteen ways to explore and conclude the otherwise non-linear story, The Stanley Parable is in some sense a story that is always being told differently, always for the first time.
When thinking about The Stanley Parable as a cohesive whole, incorporating all the nuances and dissonances that accompany each storyline and its concordant ending, the game is kind of a whole bunch of things at once. There isn’t a definitive experience to be had in this game, and that’s one of the things that makes it beautiful and enshrines it as a classic. When referring to how this game tells its story (or stories, more accurately), the term antenarrative seems the most appropriate for a number of reasons. Here are three:
(1) the story in the game is not causal, but combinatorial – each story within the Stanley Parable contributes to a graduated sense of meaning(s),
(2) antenarrative borrows from the idea of qualia, the notion that there is something fundamental about what it’s “like” to be you, or in this case, what it’s “like” to be Stanley – and this is different for everybody, and
(3) while forming, the narrative maintains a definitive sense of ambiguity, locking down multiple undetermined but linear potentials – and these stories all sort of “interact” from the player’s point of view.
Whether you simply listen to the narrator all the way to the game’s end, you jump out of your office window to your death on the pavement below, or simply end up annoying the narrator in a broom closet, The Stanley Parable has a seemingly endless potential for how each narrative can be assembled. It’s impossible to objectively determine this, but I would argue that the more the player gets to know the game and the more they explore, the more profound their experience. The screens in the mind control facility, for instance, might appear more sinister when experienced at first than when experienced later. The baby game would likely be even more bizarre if experienced earlier than later in subsequent playthroughs. And that’s right at the heart of what antenarrative does.
Each story in the Stanley Parable has a unique voice, whether heard by the player or not, and it’s not easy to know where to start putting the multifaceted puzzle pieces together. Antenarrative helps me better grapple with the problem of thinking about how to talk about the game. When people recommended the game to me, they would always say something along the lines of “Oh my God, you have to play it.” But I never had someone try to explain what the game was, or why they liked it, or why I was someone who should play it. I surmise that this game is so difficult to talk about because you kind of have to talk about the whole game at once.
The Stanley Parable is a beautiful, complicated mess – one that you’d never want to clean up. I think of this game as a sort of Jackson Pollock painting, where stories are dripped onto the canvas by the player, rather than the other way around. It matters that the player is in control of Stanley. It matters that you have so much influence and autonomy, even against the façade of narrator control. When thinking about the antenarrative in Stanley, my mind shakes up like a snowglobe, and I watch all the little pieces float about, settling one by one, story by story, until my thoughts themselves can rest.
