How one game caused me to lose 10Kg, quit my job, break up with my girlfriend and move to South Korea

This is your life, Stanley.

I was a young guy who seemingly had it good. Some success in the acting industry, a beautiful girlfriend who allowed me to play videogames and watch all my favourite TV shows, all supported by my fairly easy day job. Things were going good, plaaiiiin sailing. Enough money to be comfortable and enough stimulation to keep me busy.

Then one cold January afternoon, during the Christmas Sale on Steam, a digital distribution platform for PC games, I purchased ‘The Stanley Parable’ for £5.99. I often buy games in the Steam sales that I never play, mainly because they are so ridiculously cheap. Fallout: New Vegas for £3.49? I want to play that some day, so if I buy it now I will save money in the future! Success! I have yet to play Fallout: New Vegas.

And the same was true of The Stanley Parable. I left it on my digital shelf for months, knowing that one day I would have a few hours to blast through it. You see I knew it was fairly short in length, just 3 or 4 hours, and I knew that it had a narrative that was best suited to one unbroken play session. Beyond that? Not a clue, certainly not how my life would be changed forever.

Let’s begin, Stanley

Most articles and reviews on The Stanley Parable launch into some lengthy and boring explanation about the exact mechanics of the game, and how it came about, and generally fall in love with the word count. So to avoid all that, here is what The Stanley Parable is really about:

You play Stanley, he works in an office and every day does the same thing, he’s a button pusher. It’s a hilarious, terrifying and in-depth look into the Western man’s obsession with order and the routine. It’s a game about choice, about the path not taken and the life not lived.

The entire game is brilliantly narrated by one guy, who at first describes your every action, then asks you nicely to stay on track and eventually ends up taunting you and trying to “help” you in equal measure.

But don’t just take my word for it, watch this trailer.

The Red pill, or the Blue Pill

It’s hard to find the right balance between getting you excited, so you’ll leave this article and go and play it, and revealing too much. But basically Stanley gets up from his desk, then depending on where you go and what you do, you get an ending.

And these endings are profound, there's one particular ending, where you realise you are Stanley, your life doesn't just draw parallels with the fact that you are both pushing buttons on a computer, but that you both have the same mundane life, only fleetingly interrupted by something out of the ordinary.

Below is one of the endings. Spoilers of course, if however you do not own a gaming pc and will likely never play the game, it’s worth a watch.

One of the endings, The Stanley Parable at it’s devastating best.

Press ‘Q’ to question nothing

The real killer was ‘The Stanley Parable Adventure Line’, something the narrator puts in place so you don't wonder off track.

See, the thing is, you think you have freedom, that you are exploring a world in the way that it was not meant to be explored. You are Stanley and you are defying the narrator.

Except you‘re not. This entire world was made by design. You can only do what the developer allows — within the construct of the game. All that dialogue by the narrator and everything you “break” was carefully planned.

Then I started to look at my life: I woke up, I went to work, I ate, I went home, went on a computer game, I slept, I repeated. I worked 6 days a week, sometimes 8 days in a row.

And for what? A constant consumption of media, of food, of stuff? Suddenly I was having an existential crisis.

I had my own adventure line, just without the adventure.

Nothing more than this

I realised that I had become nothing more than a battery, a worker ant. That my existence, in return for a (not so) equitable share of the profits, was to eat, work and sleep myself into an unfeeling stupor, questioning nothing. Exactly the opposite of why I chose the career of an actor.

Suddenly, I couldn’t play videogames anymore, something I had been doing since my third birthday when my Nanna bought me my Atari 2600. That escapism, that “freedom” which I was “not afforded” in real life, suddenly felt so empty. It all felt so constructed.

My relationship came to a natural conclusion, one which we had come close to a few times in the weeks leading up. Then I lost a lot of hours in my job through no fault of my own, I also hadn't acted in 9 months despite being the leading man in a festival winning short film both here in the UK and in the US.

Then just by chance, I spoke to my friends out in South Korea who were teaching English. I've taught kids before and really enjoyed it, and I've always been a good communicator. They said come out and teach, and I think slightly to their surprise, I accepted.

I’m trying to help you Stanley!

There were of course many contributing factors that lead me down this path, some of which I have mentioned in this article, but The Stanley Parable was the first time I questioned my cosy little existence.

So I'm going outside this world of my own creation, I'm going to another part of the globe, and who knows after that, maybe I’ll become an Astronaut and carry on this trend of breaking out of the world around me.

I'm not saying that travelling the world and teaching English is the answer to this conundrum of modern life. It just feels like a more productive thing to do than be nothing but a consumer, pushing buttons in return for entertainment tokens.

Conflict Resolution

I think what I'm ultimately trying to say is it’s about creating your own adventure line, one not guided or prescribed by other people. I’m not preaching and saying that Netflix is the devil or that Videogames are a form of slavery, I'm just saying we are given this path we think we should follow: You’re 16 now, decide what you want to do and stick to it for the rest of your life. Consume media and food in equal measure in return for 4 weeks of doing what you want a year.

No. There is another way.

Where does your adventure line go?