Miriam Scuderi is a student assistant researcher at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität of Mainz where they are obtaining a Master of Arts degree in American Studies. Their research focus is all over the place, ranging from media studies to queer theory and landing on digital humanities. You can find them on BlueSky.
“You will follow a story, you will not follow a story. You will have a choice, you will have no choice. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. This world was not made for you to understand.”
—Promotional tag-line for The Stanley Parable
When playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (2022), the re-release of The Stanley Parable (2013), (from now on referred to as Ultra Deluxe) for the first time, the game asks the player whether or not they played the original game before. If the player replies with yes, the new content is immediately available. A new door with a shaky ‘New Content’ line written on top awaits the player in one of the familiar office corridors. When traversed, the player is introduced, slowly, to all the additional gameplay mechanics the game offers. The game has all the trappings of a re-release: the ability to jump (within the bounds of a comically small ‘Jump Circle’), collectible statuettes of Stanley, new achievements, and an entirely new area the player can navigate: the Memory Zone. This area is also filled with video game paratexts, including the reviews that the original game received throughout the years since its release in 2013.
In the context of digital games, paratexts can be understood both in the original conception of the term by Gerard Genette as adjacent texts (such as prefaces, author’s notes, illustrations, etc.) that function as a “threshold… that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (261) and as the expanded, and game-specific, definition given by Mia Consalvo, in which paratexts also include “game reviews and fan discussions that shape how we understand what a particular video game might be like and how best to play it” (177). Ultra Deluxe includes paratexts created by the developers as well as game reviews, and seemingly shapes its revamped gameplay around the criticisms leveled at the game.
Paratexts are not just conversations surrounding games but become part of the text of the game itself. The inclusion of reviews of the game in its diegetic world places the game in direct conversation with these paratexts and places the player in a position of privilege to consider the relationship between text and paratexts. This paper will discuss this relationship and how the introduction of gaming paratexts alters the gameplay of Ultra Deluxe by incorporating allegedly missing features (the aforementioned jump button, for example) to highlight ontological questions regarding the nature of video games and re-releases. By analyzing this intertextual exercise, this paper notes how the audience ultimately influences the design of the game and how creators can incorporate, through poaching, the discourse surrounding their games within the game world itself.
The game can be analyzed as a text (Fernández-Vara 6) whose poetic form is exemplified by formal elements such as gameplay mechanics and corollary interactive elements, such as the HUD, the saving process, etc. (122). Ultra Deluxe’s poetic form does not simply include additional gameplay content that expands on The Stanley Parable, but additional texts, taken from the web and conveyed visually for the player to read. This can be interpreted as an act of authorial communication that places the new text in discourse with the audience both as a response to criticism and as a reflection on the intervening years since the game’s original debut.
As Fernández-Vara points out, paratexts might influence the player to “read the text a certain way” (7). The paratexts invite a reading predicated on ontological questions about the nature of games: when the promotional paratext for The Stanley Parable declares that the player “will have a choice, [they] will have no choice,” it highlights the limited degree of agency and freedom players can expect from the game, calling into question the nature of agency in games in general. For example, in order to escape the office building – the goal of the game – the player must oblige the Narrator’s commands, limiting their freedom to explore the virtual environment. This limitation to player’s freedom is further explored in the game during one of the endings: if the player wants Stanley (their avatar) to escape the office building and find out the secrets hidden by his boss, then they should follow the Narrator’s commands to reach the exit unscathed. But following the Narrator diminishes the player’s agency. What choice is there to make except not to play? This is further highlighted in the achievement ‘Super Go Outside’, obtained by not playing the game for ten years. In this respect, as mentioned in another one of the game’s paratexts, the wiki page ‘The End is Never …’ which was “the famous tag-line for [the game] … first used in a previous image on Steam Greenlight”, the game’s paratexts have always pointed players to ontological questions over games. Depending on the paratext, the question might relate to agency and freedom or, as is the case with the tagline, the recursive nature of play. As noted by the writers of the wiki article, the tag-line “implies that The Stanley Parable has no point where the game actually ends, as it has infinite playthroughs with no actual goal”. Most games are often considered to be goal-oriented (Juul), but The Stanley Parable deliberately challenges and trivializes that notion by positioning its only discernible goal (escaping the office building) in direct opposition with the narrative elements that encourage exploration. What the player can and cannot do, how they engage with the text, and the meaning of the narrative elements are all included in the paratexts, making The Stanley Parable and Ultra Deluxe texts that are deeply engaged in ontological questions about the nature of video games, from player agency to interactivity and constitutive gameplay elements. As game designer Gareth Damian Martin puts it: “[The Stanley Parable] exposes the restrictive scaffolding of interactive narratives”. The game does so with every element at its disposal, from the paratexts to the text, and from the gameplay to the narrative.
In Ultra Deluxe, this approach to paratexts is most evident in the section called ‘Memory Zone’. The Narrator, disheartened by the lackluster new content, creates a new area for Stanley to explore. Through a vent, the player is directed to a new wooden building containing the crowning achievement of The Stanley Parable: A glowing review by game critic James Stephanie Sterling in which she/they states that the original game “strives and then succeeds to be every game ever created”. The Narrator, reading sections of the review to Stanley, states, “Did you hear that, Stanley? Every game ever created! That’s how grand and all-encompassing the original Stanley Parable was!” This review, originally published on November 23rd, 2013 for Destructoid, is printed in full and framed, hanging like a painting in the middle of a room that contains digital paraphernalia of The Stanley Parable. The narrator also reads another review to the player, this time from GameSpot. The Narrator’s dialogue underscores not only nostalgic reflections over the past and the greatness of the original game, but also the impossibility of that nostalgia, specifically regarding the impossibility of recapturing what was great and innovative about it. Through the ‘Memory Zone’ and the incorporation of positive reviews, Ultra Deluxe critiques the concept of sequels in games, new releases within the same franchise, and the nostalgia one might feel for the experience of playing a game for the first time. If nostalgia, as argued by Ekaterina Kalinina, is something “one does” (12), playing and replaying the same game retreads the same virtual steps into a different temporality in which the player ventures into the unknown of a new game. By including these reviews as a response to underwhelming new content and new mechanics, Ultra Deluxe seemingly argues for the futility of additional content in recapturing the spark of nostalgia, both for players attempting to replay the game and for game developers alike. While there is a monetary incentive in re-releasing games, the experience of releasing a game for the first time is too temporally locked in the past. Sarcastically, the Narrator asks the player, “Remember back in October of 2013 when the game originally launched? Back then, video games… meant something! Oh, the waste.” After commenting on Sterling’s review, the Narrator adds,“And now [The Stanley Parable is] nothing!… It’s just a husk now… with an hour of new elevator content.” Considering the Narrator’s remarks, it would appear that the text of the game itself is doing nostalgia, visually and textually, to invite its audience to participate not only in the nostalgic feeling but also in the consideration that re-releases do not recapture an experience associated with a specific place and time (a playthrough) but can instead create new meaning. The ironic tone of the section highlights the discourse that the texts are engaged in: the primary text of Ultra Deluxe comments on and incorporates within itself the secondary text of Sterling’s review, directing players’ attention to this very linkage and repositioning the primary text as the main object of scrutiny and discourse. The nostalgia present in this section directs the player to reflect on their own experiences with the game and to position themselves within the discourse that surrounds the game.
But discourse over games is not always entirely positive. So it is fitting, then, that after the praises and the nostalgic musings, the Narrator ‘discovers’ another room in the same area, one that contains negative feedback. Locked in containers labeled “Pressurized Gas” – a reference to the online store Steam – seemingly countless negative reviews await the player and the Narrator.
Using the same visual format of user generated Steam reviews, Ultra Deluxe presents those reviews as a forgotten part of the discourse that the Narrator would rather not engage with. Only three reviews are showcased as points of contention between players and specifically the Narrator. The third review is of particular interest here as it mentions the need for “a skip button” to cut off the Narrator’s long speeches. This, the Narrator takes to heart and comments, “Well – well, yes. Yes, I think I can do that.” After this dialogue line, the Narrator presents Stanley – and the player – with the possibility to skip the narration or chunks of the game by pressing a yellow forward button. The subsequent sequence breaks time in the diegesis by allowing the player to press forward until the environment around Stanley deteriorates, as if centuries, even millennia have been skipped. What is interesting in this section is the inclusion of this skip functionality. The paratext of the review is incorporated within the text of the game and is linked to the decision to expand the mechanics of the game. Paratexts, then, are used to bolster and enlarge the primary text in an act not dissimilar to Henry Jenkins’ textual poaching, but it subverts the concept by identifying the poacher with the original creator. Jenkins notes how media fans repurpose certain signs from their preferred texts to create new meanings, poaching the textual signs to constitute new texts. The text of Ultra Deluxe is similarly poached from the larger discourse surrounding The Stanley Parable by picking reviews that illustrate either the greatness of the original game or its perceived flaws. In this way, the text of the game incorporates its paratexts and builds upon them to expand its gameplay and generate new meaning from the same premise. The new game is expanded to incorporate both the original text, with its questions over agency and choices, the new text, and the paratexts to expand the narrative possibilities of The Stanley Parable. Paratexts included in the text of Ultra Deluxe highlight the nature of the game as a remake. This is not simply a self-referential joke; it is a commentary on the nature of sequels in the video game industry, which thrives on producing sequels and remakes. Paratexts in the games are incorporated both as criticism and as entry points into the nature of the games, providing the audience with new material through which they can generate meaning. By rendering the paratexts part of the text, they become part of the authorial vision for the game, injecting into the narrative a reclamation of the position of the object as instrumental for the dialogue between fans and critics alike.
Through this intertextual exercise, the text of Ultra Deluxe inserts itself within the constellation of the online discourse generated from the first game. Reviews, as part of fandom discourse, spring from the same environment that prompts players to give one’s opinions on a given piece of media. As such, the “social process through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other readers” (Jenkins 45-46) is now interjected by the addition of Ultra Deluxe and its textual acknowledgment of such discourse and social process. Within this discourse, the new game, just like the first game, invites players once again to ponder new questions related to video games, expanding its scope to serialization, additional content, and the video game ecosystem that involves players not just as audience but as active members of that ecosystem. In this manner, the game invites players to interpret the new material and to ask whether or not The Stanley Parable truly needed an interactive jump mechanic or a skip button. In addition, this intertextual exercise reveals the malleability of the text in the era of online gaming, downloadable content, and updates. The text is no longer a fixed entity, but something mutable, incorporated within the broader online discourse and in communication with its own paratexts instead of existing alongside them. What both the nostalgic tones of the ‘Memory Zone’ and the poaching of paratexts make apparent is that a digital text is mutable and potentially expandable. In the specific example of Ultra Deluxe, this is done to expand the project of ontological inquiry started by The Stanley Parable to include questions over the necessity of sequels, additional mechanics, and even the ecosystems of games and audience.
Works Cited
Consalvo, Mia. “When Paratexts Become Texts: De-Centering the Game-as-Text.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 177–183., https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648. Accessed 17th Dec. 2022.
Genette, Gerard, and Marie Maclean. “Introduction to the Paratext.” New Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 1991, p. 261., https://doi.org/10.2307/469037. Accessed 18th Dec. 2022.
Fernández-Vara, Clara. Introduction to Game Analysis. Routledge, 2015.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.
Juul, Jesper. “Without a Goal On Open and Expressive Games.” Jesper Juul, 2007, www.jesperjuul.net/text/withoutagoal/. Accessed 23th Feb. 2023.
Kalinina, Ekaterina. “What do we talk about when we talk about media and nostalgia.” Medien & zeit no. 4, 2016, pp. 6-15.
Martin, Gareth Damian. “How Video Games Discovered Their Humanity.” Frieze, 16 Dec.2019, www.frieze.com/article/how-video-games-discovered-their-humanity. Accessed 13th Feb. 2023.
Sterling, James Stephanie. “Review: The Stanley Parable.” Destructoid, 23rd Nov. 2013, https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/review-the-stanley-parable/. Accessed 18th Dec. 2022.
The Stanley Parable. Windows PC version. Galactic Cafe. 2013.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Windows PC version. Crows Crows Crows, Galactic Cafe. 2022.
“The Stanley Parable Wiki.” Fandom, https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/The_End_Is_Never… Accessed 20th Feb. 2023.