The Stanley Parable Analysis

Humans have five senses. It’s a well known fact that kids learn early on, to identify seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting as the ways in which we observe the world, which segways nicely into our first science classes, walking outdoors carrying those neat little science notebooks, to write about butterflies that flutter on the edges of the soccer field. Some animals have better senses than us, some worse, but for the most part we count ourselves as pretty lucky to have the senses we have and to perceive the world the way we do. I find myself questioning what if we could see images our human eyes can’t? What if there’s something incredible we aren’t seeing, that other beings can? How confusing would that be? These questions consistently captivate me and, as a teenager, I naturally came to realize this in a video game.
In The Stanley Parable you wander around an office complex.
Essentially, there is a style to the graphics, and the player comes to accept it as reality for that world. What made me stop for a moment were a series of photographs on the office walls. These were real photos of real fauna, not in the style of the graphics. I paused to think, what if I walked into a building one day, and on the wall hung a picture infinitely more realistic than the reality around me? That would be weird. I realized the concept that we can’t see a whole intricate piece of our reality didn’t just appear in my mind from The Stanley Parable, but from earlier in my childhood. Superman, with his x-ray vision, could pick up signals a human eye couldn’t. Was it more confusing because of the overlay of sensory details? What if we could sense UV light, the way salmon, reindeer, and butterflies can? Most interestingly to me, could there be a way for humans to gain these
abilities? Superheroes have told me that people can gain these unique skills in science fiction only. Take Spiderman, and his “spidey-senses”, or Aquaman and his telepathy with fish, abilities we cannot yet achieve with science. These ideas captivate me because I enjoy taking every opportunity available, and it’s strange to think that all these animals around us have opportunities that humans can’t boast of. When I want to learn more, I turn to the internet, because I enjoy discovering these answers s on my own, taking learning into my own hands and looking at multiple resources. Then I realized I don’t need any more senses to see a part of life that eludes me, because there are an awful lot of experiences that I haven’t known. I don’t know what it’s like to be an adult, to live in poverty, to live outside New Hampshire, to make a scientific discovery, to save someone from a burning building, or to write a book. I only have my experiences to work from, which have so far lead me to a whole lot of empathy. I want to know and understand what it’s like to live a different life and have different experiences and a different lense on society, no science required. While I thought I’d always wanted to understand how Earth looks under an ultraviolet light, I realize what I really want to understand is how it looks from another perspective. I always go back to the pictures on the office wall in The Stanley Parable. They aren’t “more realistic” than the world of the game, they’re simply art in an alternate style, from my perspective more real than the game. For Van Gogh, the world he painted was more real to him than the world around him. Perspective is really what I’m after, and I never stop thinking about that.