The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play

Clickbait title: Watch These Hot Games Intentionally Misbehave

The cough hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's worse now. I had to stop and hack a good, rumbling cough for a solid few seconds every other line. I wouldn't be surprised if it shows in the performance. The other thing, and this is petty I know, is that I'm dreading the inevitable wave of single commenters pointing out that my shirt is missing a button. They'll probably mostly assume that I missed a button, maybe make a crack about how I forgot how to dress myself, but, no, the shirt is just missing a button. I actually meant to take the spare from the fringe and repair the shirt before filming, but between the cough and the three hours of sleep it pretty much slipped my mind until recording was already done. Anyway, The Stanley Parable and Dark Souls are both really good games with very different approaches to narrative, you should check them out.

Written and performed by Dan Olson

[franklinturtleton]

When you pick up poop in Duke Nukem Forever and Duke shouts "WHY AM I DOING THIS!?"

[mikeymegamega]

No matter what we type, as long as comments are enabled, we are still playing along to his intended narrative.

[Ameliacats]

At first I thought the title of this video was "The Stanley Parable is the Dark Souls of Intended Play"

[stevenm]

My favorite moment in a game is when it tells me " don't turn off while auto-saving" and I do!

[misterdoctor]

To see true "unintended play" one need only check in with the speed-running community.

[arenkai]

Players: Hehehehe ! I'm disobeying the game, I'm so smart !

Game devs: Sure you are **patpat**

[Tuckerscreator]

Okay, to be actually serious, the Broom Closet of Stanley Parable is interesting because it's designed to lure the player into taking part in it, even though the player thinks they're disobeying. The player sees a labeled door open, drawing their attention by the sudden movement. The narrator starts commenting on it, and the player is encouraged to remain so they can hear more lines of said narrator's increasing frustration. Even the lack of anything interactive inside the broom closet is turned into a plus, since the narrator keeps insisting there's nothing noteworthy inside, so the player becomes determined to find something and clicks on everything they can see systematically. So in a way, lack of content itself becomes content. A neat trick of reverse psychology.

[saarimarshad]

"why is it the genocide route in undertale"
gold

[elsie]

"DID YOU GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING?? THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVORITE xD"

[michaelw]

Disco Elysium is packed full of these moments to the point where doing what you’re told not to do, or not doing what you’re told to do is a key part of the experience. It helps that there are certain skills that you can focus on that lead to hilariously unreliable narratives, like the one that makes you an expert on illicit substances that more or less turns you into an addict or an alcoholic.

[casbyness]

The earliest (and in my opinion, best) example of this was in Dino Crisis, way back in 1999 before I knew to look up walkthroughs on the internet. I was totally blown away by what the game set up.

During the dramatic finale you are presented the choice of either allowing a wounded team mate to chase down an escaped bad guy (he succeeds, but then dies) or knocking the team mate out so you and a second team mate can carry him to safety, allowing the bad guy to escape.

However, after choosing to start down the path of the latter option, the game still leaves the route to the bad guy open. So I randomly thought "hey, what if MY CHARACTER goes after the bad guy, instead of me escaping with the other two heroes?!"

To my total shock, the developers had actually left that option open, and I was treated to a surprise "best ending" by both catching the escaped villain AND not letting my overzealous friend die. :D

There was no prompting of the player to take this third option, the final choice of the game appeared to be a binary tradeoff, but secretly wasnt. Despite all the great efforts of Bioware and other AAA games, that final choice in the original Dino Crisis still sticks out as the first memorable moment in a game when I genuinely felt free to make my own choices.

[SoranMBane]

Well, there is also that moment early in Undertale where Toriel tells you to wait in that room while she leaves to make you a pie. But if you actually do try to wait like she said, the Annoying Dog (who is Toby Fox's author avatar) will just keep delaying her forever until you proceed. In the end, he even steals her cell phone to keep her from calling you, and only gives it back once you leave the room to actually PLAY HIS DAMN GAME ALREADY. So, the game tells you to do one thing (wait in the room), but it clearly intends for you to do the opposite. It's also a pretty funny and self-aware bit of blatant railroading on the developer's part (since, again, it's literally a representation of Toby Fox that's forcing you to proceed, and he's doing it by being REALLY ANNOYING).

[elizabethagudelo]

you breeze through am IMO very interesting point halfway, when you say that dark souls tells you there's certain NPCs you should not kill because they're your allies or, and I quote "at the very least not your enemy", something caught my attention about the way you said it, the tone of your voice and the emphasis you put in "at the very least", and got me to think how often games expect you to not care about anybody that's not explicitly your friend, like there's a couple games like undertale and spec ops that explore the implications of how willing we are to just attack anything the game tells us to, how easy it is to convince ourselves that what we're doing is the righteous thing to do, with no evidence or nuance, because that's what the protagonist do I guess, how we don't ask ourselves "why is the enemy, well, my enemy" or question the fact that shoot first ask questions later is the default interaction with the world in so many games; but both games make it quite explicitly about the idea of enemies, spec ops frames the faction you're fighting as nothing more than the same kind of dubious middle eastern people so many games before asked you to shoot right up till the white phosphorus, which is when the game starts to unravel, and undertale frames your encounters in a very deliberately cliche turn based rpg battle screen, expecting that the audience's game literacy will imply to them that what you see before you is just another mob to slay.

But I've never seen a game explore the implications of how explicitly worthless neutral, everyday people are, never really seen anybody question why it is that characters that are not explicitly on the character's side, even if they're not marked as enemies either, are fair play, how they're faceless setdressing at best and cannon fodder at the worst, why is it that in games, you're not expected to show mercy, compassion or empathy to anybody that does not aid you or support you first, even if they're not doing anything to harm you either, why is it that only the life and death of your friends and allies matter? does life has no value if they're not serving your interests? isn't that kind of fucked up on it's implications? just think that's interesting is all

[Karanagi]

A friend of mine was playing Skyrim some years ago.

He figured that instead of killing all the bandits in a dungeon, it was much faster to just run through the place, grabbing anything of remote value along the way. If the bandits objected in some fashion, he would simply smack them with a shield. By the time they had recovered, my friend would be 3 treasure chests further into the dungeon. I don't think that was intended play. The AI seemed very inept in it's response.

But I doubt the developers would be upset. After all, my friend had a lot of fun playing Skyrim this way.

[alpacalorde]

In half-life 2 when the gaurd knocked a can off of a garbage can and tells you to pick it up and throw it away, essentially its supposed to be a tutorial on throwing things and world establishment showing that the guards and police force of this city treat its citizens in a demeaning manner. But if you pick up the can and instead throw it *at the guard* then he runs forward and smacks you with his Baton which might at first make it look like that's not what the game wanted you to do but instead build the world a little bit more.

[DennisJoyceEsper]

I stopped playing SUPERHOT when the game made me promise to stop playing. True story.

[timetuner]

Where does it fit into this that I haven't opened Undertale since Sans asked me to stop in the middle of the boss fight?

[Noelle]

One of my favorite recent examples is Nier: Automata, which has 26 "endings, " but 21 of those endings are ultimately just more elaborate game-overs.

[Satherian]

Reminds me of DMing in D&D - some players try to mess around and throw everything off. However, if they were truly throwing off the game, then they would just be kicked out.

So, my players might think they're messing with me, but really, they are playing the game as intended.

[Michael-Hammerschmidt]

hen he was talking about intended behavior being all that which the game permits and includes in its content, I was waiting for him to reference when, in the Stanley Parable, you jump out the window thinking you've found an exploit and have escaped the map, until the narrator starts talking; or how, if you turn on cheats in the developers console on steam you are teleported to "The Serious Room".