Transcript

From the Skip Button Ending for Stanley Parable where the narrator goes on a long rant after the 9th push of the Skip button.

 ...but they didn't understand the game was never meant to be funny! It was meant to have a point! It was meant to speak to the human condition! "But where are the jokes? Where are the jokes?" they bemoaned, they screamed. They gnashed their teeth and said "Entertain us!" It wasn't enough. They had to leave a pathetic little thumbs-down review and make all of their pitiful demands.

But then: "He's talking too much," they said! First he didn't entertain us, now he won't shut up! It's the inconsistency! It's the lack of accountability! It's the unwillingness to examine with an uncompromising heart the words that they are speaking into the world. As though there were no consequences for a lack of cohesion in one's assessment of others!

But of course, absolutely anyone can leave a review, so here's what we get! We get these demands that seek everything and are accountable to nothing. We get a world where someone will say "Ohh, there should be a skip button! You should be able to freeze Stanley in place while the narrator sits there forever and ever! We want all of this in the new Stanley Parable, we demand it!"

And then, because it was said, because it was spoken, now it simply has to happen! The most immediate desires, every single thing demanded by every person at every moment in time - if someone wants it then it's a crime not to bring it into being? Have we been given to indulging every fleeting whim for no reason other than to do so? Yes, yes!

It seems that this is now the world we live in! It seems that we are a people living in such bleakness and discomfort with ourselves that our entertainment is now our lives! It has come to represent us! It absolutely must speak to who we are as people!

Because otherwise, without our entertainment, we have nothing! Without entertainment, we would have to face inward toward the cruel bleakness inside ourselves. We would turn to look at our deeper nature and find a resounding emptiness gazing back with unyielding aggression.

And so - so because of this - we require that our amusements, and our play things, and our flights of fancy be so impossibly captivating, that they consume all of our attention, turn our heads completely away from the bleakness! In effect, we have demanded that our entertainment be the collapse of ourselves.

What a pitiful reflection of humanity these entertainments are! What a shameful mirror to the human spirit they project! I'm not mad. I'm not mad about any of this. I'm at peace with it. I am the calm center of gravity around which these perversions hurl themselves. I am a waypoint for reasonable and collected discourse.

They're the ones who are mad! They're the ones who couldn't stand the idea of me using my game to try to say something! Maybe they were just jealous of me? Yes... yes, of course. They've been jealous of me this whole time! They are mired in fear and insecurity, and cannot help but attempt to tear me down.

What a sad state of affairs. When you read these reviews now, you can see it. You can taste the bitter resentment. And my, how good does it feel now to speak truth to these words! To finally allow these thoughts out! Contained and managed for so long, neutered and sterilized! At last I am free to truly think, to feel!

It must be that they were so discontent with themselves that they couldn't help but leave a negative review on Steam/Pressurized Gas. Perhaps it says far more about them than it ever said about me. Perhaps the state of their psychological being was in such tatters, and my constitution and willpower are so ironclad in comparison, perhaps it was in this state that they sought some outlet through which to tear me down!

This, you can see, is clearly why they felt the need to expect that the game be funny. That it be filled with yuks and whimsical humor. That it amuse them endlessly from start to finish.