A number of years ago my son showed me this strange video game that was both mesmerizing and bizarre. It was called The Stanley Parable, and in it you play an office worker named Stanley whose computer screen mysteriously goes blank one day at work, and when he sets out to investigate, he discovers his whole building has been suddenly, inexplicably vacated. From this point on, Stanley explores the empty office building, led on from room to room by an omniscient narrator who suggests a course of action for every scenario Stanley encounters. The player may chose to act contrary to the narration of course, and this sets the story in an ostensibly new direction, forcing the narrator to find some way account for your choice and get the story back on to its original track.
The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek fun, with all sorts of references to popular video games from its era, like Portal and Minecraft, but there is no real action, combat, or puzzles to solve. At best it plays like an elaborate Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, with the narrator consistently expressing exasperation at the decisions you make, if and as you deviate from the story’s main path.
Calling it a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure though, is something of a misnomer, because on repeated play-throughs of The Stanley Parable, an astute player will begin to notice that the game is pushing you towards its desired outcome, regardless your choices. If you choose the left door when the narrator wants you to choose right, well, no matter, the game will find a way for the “right door outcome” to happen even so. This becomes part of the joke, but also, more importantly, the point of the parable.
Because The Stanley Parable is actually exploring a profound philosophical question, I think, one that all sorts of video games wrestle with in subtler, less self-conscious ways: what is the nature and extent of our free will when we are gaming?
The Stanely Parable presents the gamer with a façade of freedom, and works hard to convince them that every decision they make matters, because each one will help to determine an otherwise open-ended outcome. In the game, it seems really to matter if I choose the left or the right door; certainly it matters to the narrator, who grows increasingly annoyed if you ignore his directions. In truth, however, the endings of The Stanley Parable are of course limited, and ultimately the game’s programming will move you towards the same conclusion regardless what choice you make.
I encountered this same problem—that in video games we only seem to have free will—in a more sophisticated way while playing the game Skyrim. In the mythical kingdom of Skyrim an epic civil war is raging between the Tamrielic Empire and a faction of rebels known as the Stormcloaks. At one point early on in the story, the player is forced to decide which side he'll throw his hat in with. Will he join the Empire or become a Stormcloak?
I remember the first time I played through Skyrim, I agonized over this choice for weeks. I kept taking on pointless side-quests, trying to delay the fateful decision. In the end I sided with the Empire (because when I visited the capital city of the Stormcloaks I discovered the place was rampant with anti-Elven sentiment that I could not, in good conscience support—more on the morality of gaming in later posts). It sounds silly to say this decision gave me such grief, but it was, in fact, a painfully hard lot to cast.
I’ve played through Skyrim a number of times since, though, and what I’ve learned is that, ultimately, the game still unfolds in more or less the same way, regardless the choice you make. Stormcloak Rebel or Imperial Officer, you still get to become the Dragonborn, you still broker an uneasy peace between the two sides, you still defeat the evil dragon Alduin, and so on. Sure, you get to see different cut scenes if you're a Stormcloak, and perhaps you close off some side quests if you're an Imperial, but as far as the over-arching saga is concerned, fate runs ever as fate must (to quote Beowulf).
Some would argue that this is poor game design, if your choices don’t really affect the outcome of the game, but I think that’s one of the points of The Stanley Parable. Even games with a number of different endings still only have a specific number of different endings. Every video game is still, in the end, running a predetermined algorithm, and however many permutations and combinations there might be, still, they can't be infinite.
On a philosophical level, to begin playing a video game is to agree to limit your freedom in service to the game.
If I am on to something here, then I wonder if video-gaming might be a more verdant analogy for the Christian life than we might suspect. Indeed, an imaginative Christian could argue that the whole of reality, from God’s perspective, is not unlike the algorithm of a stunningly holy and beautifully divine game, where God will not micro-manage the individual decisions of individual players, but even so we can rest fully assured that the outcome he intended when he set the game in motion will be realized.
Some Christians, especially the Calvinists among us, would disagree. How could God truly be sovereign (they might ask) if human beings truly had free will? Others, the Open Theists among us, would disagree in the other direction. How could humans really have freedom unless God has left the future truly open ended?
In answer to both, the Christian Gamer might point to any number of video games where the player’s free will and the predetermined outcome of the game function together, not just harmoniously, but joyfully contributing one to another. Might this, in some way, be analogous to God’s Sovereignty? Could the video game offer us a way of imagining how we are free to make our choices in life, but however real those choices are, still they will not derail the Creator’s intention for the game?
If I am on to something here, there’s a flip-side to this argument that we will have to wrestle with eventually. Most gamers sense it intuitively, I think, that in order to enjoy the game, you have to submit in some way to its limitations. If Mario never fell when he stepped off the platform, and every Kuppa Troopa just brushed harmlessly by, what would be the point of playing? The joy of the game comes, in fact, from functioning within and exploring around the edges of the limitations it places on you.
In this, too, games may offer us a fascinating analogy for the Christian life. Becoming a disciple of Jesus is, after all, the ultimate submission of our wills to the most beautiful, joyful, and holy limitation of all. It’s to subject our very real, individual choices to the boundaries that the Way of Jesus imposes on us. And if video games are any indication, to do so does not suck the joy out of life, rather infuses it with greater delight, higher purpose, and more profound meaning than it could ever have if we were left to our own, perfectly free, devices.
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