True Meanings Behind These Confusing Video Game Endings

The Stanley Parable

You’re Stanley, a boring office worker who suddenly hears the voice of the narrator and decides to follow his commands. The big office you’re working for is discovered to be nothing more than an elaborate machination to enslave your co-workers and you subsequently find freedom. That’s if you listen to the narrator though.

The Stanley Parable actually is a lot like the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” – it’s about a character and his relationship with the “narrator”. Depending on how you interact with the narrator (doing or not doing what he tells you), different things happen and various endings emerge.

Each subsequent ending has different meanings. In one, Stanley doesn’t like the world created by the narrator and kills himself. In another, Stanley follows the narrator’s instructions and obtains “freedom”. And so it goes until you discover them all. Heaven for Stanley, for instance, is just one big room full of buttons because that’s what he was so good at it.

Stranger Than Fiction had several interesting messages to it – how one shouldn’t let their life idle away since they don’t know when it will end, the importance of fighting against fate, doing the right thing versus fate and so on – which are also mirrored in The Stanley Parable. Of course, it gets a bit more complicated at some points, like how the narrator doesn’t understand his own paradoxes and is taking Stanley’s help to solve them or how the narrator is taking revenge on Stanley for not following the “well written” plot. But you get what we mean.

It’s funny how the best possible explanation for The Stanley Parable is essentially The Stanley Parable. You derive your own moral from it depending on the kind of moral you want.