The Stanley Parable
Davey Wredon's The Stanley Parable floored critics and players alike when it came out in 2011, originally as a mod for Half-Life 2. The game wryly explores the determinism subtly at play in just about every video game, exposing how that determinism is usually masked by some appearance of free will. You play as the nondescript and eponymous Stanley, an office drone who finds, one day, that his officemates have disappeared. He goes in search of them, but that mystery is merely a catalyst for the real conflict in the game: the relationship between Stanley and the narrator. Brilliantly voiced by Kevan Brighting, the narrator describes what Stanley "does" before the player actually makes Stanley *do* it; for example, at the first major branch moment, you stand in front of two open doors while the narrator says, "Stanley went through the door on the left." If you choose to do so, the story continues quite logically. If you choose to rebel, the narrator reacts. The continued sequence of branching choices leads to 19 potential game endings, some hilarious, some miserable, after each of which the game restarts with you in your office once more, able to play through again and make different choices.
No matter what you choose, however, it becomes increasingly clear that your decisions (and Stanley's possible lives) are predetermined, if only by the nature of the game. Each story arc you experience is only available because the developer created it. It's not like you're in a huge, open-world sandbox with hundreds of hours of possible content. You're in a branching-narrative piece of interactive fiction in which you will always, unless you quit the game entirely, wind up back where you started. The narrator mocks your narrative impotence mercilessly at times, giving you glimpses of something that seems like freedom only to have things snap back into place while he tells you you'll always be an office drone with no spine, pressing buttons because you lack the curiosity and the courage to do anything else.
The player's goal thus tends to be to break the game and in some way break out of the deterministic loop. Although, I (shamefully) didn't. The first time I played, I got what's called (sarcastically) The Freedom Ending, which means I followed the narrator's instructions to the letter. I "won" but, by following all the rules, missed most of the content. I feel this doesn't say great things about my obedience to authority. But the game really doesn't let you break it in any meaningful way; all the narrator's snarky comments are obviously prerecorded, nothing you can do is ever truly "unexpected," the game is literally made to taunt you to break it, then pat you patronizingly on the head because you can't. It's totally fantastic.
I once waited 20 minutes before pressing anything because the narrator had taunted me with a quip about how controlled I was, how I couldn't stop myself from doing what he told me. I waited to see if anything might happen were I not to do as he asked, and of course nothing occurred. Eventually, out of boredom, I pressed it so the story would continue. Which, I feel, leads us back to the undeniable truth that, if you want to live in a non-deterministic universe, you must be willing to be bored sometimes. Constant stimulation is paid for by giving yourself over to another person or entity's control, enjoying the story they designed for you to experience. A game that lets you be bored (like, ahem, No Man's Sky) is much less deterministic.
