“This is not a very good garbage-picking-up game.”

An Update in which I play Half-Life 2 in 30-minute increments. 

I thought it would be fun to log playing the seminal game “Half-Life 2.”  I have never played it, have only a passing familiarity with it through my experience playing the portal games, and have no idea what kind of a game it is. I’m only going to look things up if I get hopelessly stuck, and because I’m playing it on the PlayStation 3, I can’t stream it or take screen captures. So I’ll use AI to generate the supporting artwork for this walkthrough. Oh, and one last thing: I’m playing it on my lunch break, so I only get 30-minute increments, and I get interrupted regularly. 

Update 1

The game starts with a tutorial on how to use the square button. To be fair, it’s probably with doing some kind of mention that you’re going to be mashing on the square for this game since, by this point in the PlayStation existence, even Square-Enix has given up the non-standard locations for the default action button. 

But that aside, we’re treated to some weird agenda and content (“something, something wrong man at the right time”), given a reference to an “insertion point,’ and then forced to walk around in a train car where we literally can’t do anything.

This frustration continued as I stepped out of the train car and was immediately prevented from going anywhere other than where the map wanted me to. Open world, this is not. 

I found a revolving gate puzzling, but I somehow managed to push my first person through the spinning gate and continued walking along an empty hallway, searching for anything to click on. 

A guard, who turned out to be someone who knew me, presented me with non-interesting background information. I learned my name is Gordon. Then I moved some boxes around and fell out a window. I guess I should have paid more attention. 

Standing in a tall three-story courtyard, I tried to figure out what I needed to do next. There were some bricks I could kick around (but not pick up, as near as I could tell), and there was a half-open door, but I could not shove through it. 

I am 20 minutes into this game, and I'm flummoxed by the puzzle of the bricks and the somewhat open door. Turns out, unlike the rotating gate, you have to click on the door to get the loading screen to go. Ahh, Playstation. You got me! 

Eventually, I got to a part of the game where a guard yelled at me to pick up some garbage. Then the game yelled at me to throw things I picked up using a button. So I threw the can. And I missed the garbage. So the guard who yelled at me beat me up. So I went and picked up the can and threw it at the guard. He chased me but stopped after I got too far away. And that’s how I learned how to throw a can.  This started me on a five-minute course of picking up all sorts of garbage and throwing it at the guard. I don't know how to tell what garbage is pickupable and what is not. 

In real life, a freshman girl in the room asked me if there would be any guns in the game. I said I didn’t know. She went back to clicking on her phone. 

At this point, I realized this game was a terrible garbage-picking-up simulator and decided to try to advance the plot. I wandered through halls and corridors until I realized that other doors might be openable. Some of them were not. Some of them were. Not sure how I’m ever going to tell the difference. Eventually, I found enough clickable doors to wander the street. Proud of my stellar door-clicking skills, I crouched by a fountain and saved my game. 

End of the first 30 minutes of gameplay. 

The Parable is Me: Reflections on "The Stanley Parable"

I played a game called "The Stanley Parable" last night. It was pretty amazing. The graphics were nothing special, (although they were fine) but the game – the game was like playing an episode of the Twilight Zone.

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You play the part of Stanley, a boring office worker with a boring job that he loves. And suddenly one day, Stanley looks up from his computer as he realizes that his work cue is not filling. And lo—all his coworkers are gone. And so he roams around the office building looking for clues.

But here's the twist. Stanley's story is being narrated by a third person as he goes along. "Stanley walked along and wondered where all his coworkers are," says the narrator. And eventually, Stanley end up in a hallway where you have to make a choice. Do you go through the left door or the right door?

"Stanley goes through the left door," the narrator says.

Do you?

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That's it. That's the whole game. You either obey or disobey the narrator, and the interactions get deeper, weirder, and more meta. There are many endings. There are many surprises. There are strange little delights. In the version I played, you end up exploring a museum dedicated to how the game was made. It's won many awards.

This nihilistic, mind-bending take on the first person explorer genre was exactly the right fit for my mood at this time, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. The game has won a lot of awards, so it's probably not just me.

But, for the most part, The Stanley Parable is a great experience that anyone with a touch of dark humor and ironic playfulness will enjoy. It is also that rare jewel of a game that is genuinely comedic. Intentionally. On purpose.

It’s the kind of an experience that can only be delivered by the language and convention of computer games. I don't even think this game would really work on a console. A novelization would not work.It would make a terrible movie. But because it's a game, where the player has agency and interacts with the fiction around them, the meta storytelling works. As a result, creators Galactic Café have made an artful expression that could not have been made in any other medium.

I think this debate has been over for a long time, but playing "The Stanley Parable" is one of the rare times I've experienced a game that is undeniably art.

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