Davey Wreden is a game designer, and creator of The Stanley Parable (2009) , an experimental Half Life 2 source mod that made waves among niche circles, and charged discussions and explorations on the structure of non-linear first person narratives.
Right now, Davey and friends are slaving away at The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, a graphical and structural revising of The Stanley Parable . I talked to Davey about the Remix, specifically his thoughts on his creative processes and on the ideas expressed in his games, as well as the ideas of games in general. His answers were.. insightful. Let’s get into it.
Who are you?
My name is Davey, I’m 23 years of age, I’m a resident of wherever I happen to be living at the time (which at the moment is not in any one place). I graduated from USC with a degree in film, then realised that everyone else in film school cared about film way more than I did. Fortunately, a month after graduating, stanley parable became a hit and I decided to go into making games! Convenient! I’m currently working on The Stanley Parable: HD Remix , which is on Greenlight despite there being no actual details about the game on the greenlight page, so I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out. Also I eat really slowly and I think way too much. Trying to do something about that second one.
How long have you been making games?
Stanley Parable was my first game and that started in 2009, so 2012 minus 2009 makes…………..um………
Can you give a brief overview on what The Stanley Parable is?
Ah, this is the part where I say something really vague and cryptic! TSP is an experiment in video game storytelling that attempts to mess with your expectations about what you think the story will be. Plus, it’s a British-BBC-Narrator-responsiv
Let’s talk about The Stanley Parable series, if I can call it that. Why make an HD Remix?
The “raison d’etre” for the HDR has changed over time. At first it was basically just a graphical upgrade to appease the people who thought the original looked terrible. Then I started brainstorming a few new bits and pieces and realised there were a few new sections I’d like to add or bits from the original I wanted to tweak. Then after about 8 month of this I realised I had been thinking small. The remake should not be a tweak on the original, it should be a new perspective on the original. All of the original content is here in some form, but it’s been perverted and distorted to get you to rethink how you saw that content in the first game. I don’t want to replace the original game, I want to show how the changes in the life of its creator changes how he thinks about the same piece of work.
By and large the changes in the remake reflect how I’ve grown in the last few years. The ways that I’ve had to confront personal shit has manifested in new tensions between Stanley and the Narrator. Also the game is a lot funnier, which I think is because I’m just happier in general than I was back then. I see the game in a new way every month, it continues to show me what it’s trying to be, and I’m sure that will continue until and after its release. The reason I feel the remake is working is because I’m constantly learning from it, it’s evolving and growing, and I’m having fun making it. I’m hoping that those experiences are conveyed to the player, that they feel like they’re learning and growing along with me.
You mostly worked on the Stanley Parable by yourself, if I’m correct. How has the design process been different, working with a larger group of people, specifically Galactic Café?
>It’s as though I’m working in two completely different mediums. I started to get really depressed working on the original, which I think was because I was making it entirely on my own. I didn’t share the game with anyone pre-release; I had no outlet to test what was working. Now that I’ve surrounded myself with a number of people who are not just good at what they do but also good people, most if not all of that tension has lifted. I’m extremely extroverted, so just chatting with William (the lead mapper) every day brings the energy rushing back into my blood. I can actually share my ideas on a more regular basis with someone who understands the game and has the perspective to know what’s working and what isn’t. It makes me feel more confident about getting difficult tasks done, but also just makes me feel happy to be doing what I’m doing, which in turn leads to me being far more creative and coming up with more ideas. I know this sounds like it should have been obvious years ago (extroverted people need to work with others to be happy?????) but it feels groundbreaking and has completely changed my process.
What themes and ideas do you think are most representative of what The Stanley Parable is, and what do you want to do with those ideas in HD Remix? Will the game approach them from a new perspective? Are there new ideas and themes you want to portray? Or are we seeing the same things we’ve seen before?
To me this is the single biggest point the game makes: none of the meaning can be spoken. By putting it into words, by trying to explain and rationalise and reduce those themes and perspectives we stifle them, we split the animal’s belly open in order to see what makes it run and in doing so we kill it. The harder the Narrator tries to explain the story the harder he falls. The real story is between the lines, it’s about the change we go through as we transition from one place to another, it’s the invisible connection that ultimately makes sense out of what appears paradoxical. So this question makes me a bit hesitant, because the direct answer is that yes, there are many many new ideas in play, new circumstances, new themes. But that answer feels disingenuous to me because these details are not the story. The story is how the player has to confront himself/herself in the course of playing, how the player’s imagination inserts information to try to make sense of it, to comprehend the incomprehensible.
On one level this is happening in the game itself, but it’s also happening in the transition from the original game to the remake. If the remake challenges the perspective that you developed from playing the original, that’s part of the experience. This could also be because you’ve changed since playing the original and you see this kind of game in a new way. Or because you play the endings in a different order from someone else and thus get a different experience. Or if you thought you understood the story and then a new ending subverts that interpretation. It’s the invisible connections between these details, the way you grow and change when forced into new positions, that is the real experience of The Stanley Parable. That has always been and will always be the core of the game. The rest of it, the details, well if I explained them for you it would kill them.
I want to talk about endings for a second. The Stanley Parable had several completely different endings, each sort of memorable in their own way. What makes a good ending, in your eyes?
The biggest thing I wanted to do in the original was have each ending mess with your expectations around gameplay or story in some way. I didn’t know how that would look so I simply took every convention of how narrative and gameplay usually intersect and tried to mess with it, sending it down paths it didn’t belong. I tried to give players something to hold onto and relate to, while at the same time throwing them off balance and confusing them. I’m happy when an ending has a good balance of these two elements. Each does it in a different way, I don’t want there to be any one format for how this balance manifests itself, I want players to be surprised by each new ending. Also it’s important that they all talk to one another, that they contradict one another, that each adds a small new piece to the story. I like when an ending takes on a new meaning after you’ve played another part of the game, so that the full experience is greater than the sum of its parts.
