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More than a decade ago, game developer Davey Wreden experienced incredible success. In October 2013, he and his partner William Pugh released Stanley Parable HD, an improved and expanded version of a prototype Wreden had developed in college and made available for free two years earlier. Wreden and Pugh hoped to sell about fifty thousand copies of the new version over its lifetime. They achieved that figure on the first day. Wreden was twenty-five and had everything he had ever dreamed of: money, success, and recognition. Yet he fell into a deep depression.
The Stanley Parable is a game about a lonely man. The protagonist, an office worker named Stanley, looks up from his desk one day to find that his co-workers have disappeared. All he has left is a voice in his head, voiced by British actor Kevan Brighting, who comments on Stanley’s actions. However, Stanley is not obliged to follow the voice’s instructions. The game quickly becomes a contest of wills between the player and the narrator.
When I first played The Stanley Parable, one scene in particular struck me. It begins with Stanley walking down a dark hallway marked “ESCAPE.” He finds himself in a hydraulic press—and, according to the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek comments, doomed to certain death. Just before impact, a previously unheard female narrator (voiced by Leslie Staples) describes how the machine crushes Stanley, “shattering every bone in his body.” The machine doesn’t destroy him, however. Instead, he finds himself in a brightly lit museum. There’s a scale model of his office, with plaques explaining how each section has been designed to ensure the player is heading in the right direction. The game’s credits are displayed on the back wall. A new narrator notes that everything will soon be reset, and Stanley will be more alive than ever. “When every path you can take was created for you long before, death becomes meaningless, making life the same,” she says. Then he adds: “Now you realize that Stanley was dead from the moment he pressed the start button?”
I’ve been playing video games for thirty years, and I’ve never seen the medium so artfully deconstructed, or with such existential humor. I felt like the moviegoers of 1960 must have felt, emerging from dark theaters fresh from watching Breathless. Young game developers seemed to have freed themselves from the constraints of the past.
Since then, Wreden has released a second highly acclaimed game, Beginner’s Guide, and cemented his reputation as a designer who breaks traditional norms. None of his games require much more from the player than the ability to navigate a three-dimensional space; they are distinguished by a philosophical bent and a penchant for narrative tricks. (Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing in The New York Review of Books, invoked Nabokov when he called Beginner’s Guide “a kind of interactive Pale Fire.”) Wreden has become a cult figure among gamers, and his influence extends beyond his own field: Even the creator of the TV show Severance, another office drama that explores questions of free will as it oscillates between absurdity and horror, cited the Stanley Parable as an inspiration. (The game also made a brief cameo in an episode of House of Cards.)
Now 36, Wreden is slight and has brown hair. When we first spoke last year, he was wearing a dark gray T-shirt. He works from home in Vancouver, and the wall behind his desk is decorated with illustrations of characters from the Persona video game franchise, images from the manga Chainsaw Man, and photos of food. In the corner of the room, next to a bookcase, hangs a paper lantern he bought at a ramen shop on a trip to Osaka. He was putting the finishing touches on his third game, Wanderstop, which came out this month, and was reflecting on its predecessors—works he described as designed “to disrupt and unravel the tightly wound, traditional structure of what these games were supposed to do.”
As a teenager, Wreden was fascinated by stories with unexpected twists: Fight Club and The Usual Suspects, with their later revelations, as well as the works of Roald Dahl and Shirley Jackson. Growing up in Sacramento, California, as the eldest son of a pair of doctors, he was drawn to witty but silly humor; he was a big fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic, Flight of the Conchords, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Wreden was not a particularly happy child, but he believed from an early age that he could imagine his way to something better. His father once noted that as a teenager, he was difficult to communicate with because Wreden often forgot what other people said. “It wasn’t like a memory problem or ADHD,” Wreden recalled. “It was just anything that didn’t fit into my big plan to do as much as I could,
Sourse: newyorker.com
