namman siggins

So the creator of The Stanley Parable has a new game out

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If anyone figures out how to get into the cell in the chapter 7 when the narration is disabled, please tell me. I want to try playing that one as intended.

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Would anyone else be interested in having a weekly discussion where we analyze one chapter of the game each week (in order)?

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Would anyone else be interested in having a weekly discussion where we analyze one chapter of the game each week (in order)?

Well, I think that sounds pretty cool.

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Should we do the weekly chapter in this thread or a separate one? I'd be willing to administer it (but if someone else wants to do it that's fine too).

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One aspect of this game that I haven't seen much discussion on is Davey's desire to "fix" Coda. A friend of mine once had a suicidal episode, though thankfully their family was able to help them in time. Ever since then I've felt conflicted about how and when it becomes a person's "responsibility" to intervene in the lives of those they care about. Is it always selfish and if so, when is that selfishness excusable? We can say pretty clearly that Davey was overzealous and grasping at straws, but can you trust a deeply depressed person to accurately assess whether they need help?

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One aspect of this game that I haven't seen much discussion on is Davey's desire to "fix" Coda. A friend of mine once had a suicidal episode, though thankfully their family was able to help them in time. Ever since then I've felt conflicted about how and when it becomes a person's "responsibility" to intervene in the lives of those they care about. Is it always selfish and if so, when is that selfishness excusable? We can say pretty clearly that Davey was overzealous and grasping at straws, but can you trust a deeply depressed person to accurately assess whether they need help?

The Gamers With Jobs podcast had a spoiler episode on the The Beginner's Guide and they talk about this idea a bit.

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New Errant Signal on The Beginner's Guide

Although here it is obviously done very intentionally, it's interesting to me how often things written about TBG mimic the form of TBG. It's like it sets of meta chain reactions in games writers' brains

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That Errant Signal video reminded me of a problem I had with TBG, which I shall now voice. I've tried to keep things detail-light enough to stay out of spoiler tags.

 

The whole "You are playing as yourself: a human who installed this game on your computer and is now playing it" bit made the narrative very confused for me. As the game goes it becomes increasingly implausible that the narrator would have created and released this game for your character to play. At the end, he starts talking to you in a way that made me feel like he's supposed to be in the room with you, watching over your shoulder and talking with you as you play. It left me wondering what was supposed to be happening in the fiction of the game. Did anyone else run into that problem?

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I think I was aware of it but didn't let it bother me. It's getting to the point where writers are getting awfully clever about setting little logical traps to destroy the brain of anyone who tries to deduce what's really really happening within a meta-narrative. Eventually you just kind of have to take it as it is. The MST3K mantra is useful here.

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I read the narrative as an allegory where Wreden was personifying the part of his creative-process that he has no control over. So when the voice became desperate at the end, I took it as an expression of his frustration and confusion paired with narrative contradictions intended to break the illusion that they are two separate people in hopes that the audience would apply everything we've learned to the paradigm that this has all been an attempt to wrangle the genius/muse. In other words, I saw the falling apart of the logic as an intentional literary-device.

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I played the game and then a few weeks later watched my girlfriend play it. She's a fan of The Stanley Parable so she was interested. I took a passive role, just enjoying watching her interact with a game and noticing the differences between how we approach them. Anyway, at the end her words were "Fuck Davey. I hate him." 

 

We keep trying to figure out the meaning and what the narrative is, and she played it more straight, as if this was real, as if coda was real. The game tells us not to look deep into the game (or games in general) and to not project or make assumptions about the creator and their message. I thought it was interesting how approaching it in a different way creates a completely different experience. But maybe that's obvious and I live under a rock. 

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