The game of narrative authority: Subversive wandering and unreliable narration in The Stanley Parable

Abstract

This article explores how players’ attempts at subversive wandering in The Stanley Parable (2013) render the game’s narration unreliable and thus reveal its comments on the nature of ‘agency’ in video games. Unreliability brings the act of narration itself to the fore and exposes its mechanisms of manipulation. Players of The Stanley Parable may seek to contradict the voice-over narration subversively. They must find out, however, that, even though the narrator’s authorial omniscience and power are an illusion, they cannot break away from the predetermined path the game lays out. The narrator and the player are constantly fighting over who gets to tell the story and who therefore wins the game of narrative authority. Subversive wandering, as will be theorized in this article, exposes the impossibility of true player agency in the game’s set structure and comments on how player movement and interaction construct parts of a game’s narrative.