<<In October, 2013, the video-game designer Davey Wreden and a collaborator, William Pugh, released the Stanley Parable HD, a polished and expanded version of a prototype that Wreden had developed in college. Wreden and Pugh hoped that they might sell 50,000 or so copies of the new version in the course of its lifetime. They sold that many on the first day.
Wreden followed the Stanley Parable with a second critically acclaimed title, the Beginner's Guide, and cemented his reputation as a designer who defies convention. But his search for new forms never yielded a sense of personal uplift or fulfillment. It took him years, he said, to see that he had built a kind of mental prison. After the release of the Beginner's Guide, in 2015, he found that he could no longer write at all.
In January, 2016, Wreden began drawing for upward of five hours nearly every day. He would produce hundreds of pictures in the course of a six-month span, all of them variations on a simple scene: a pastoral clearing with a quaint-looking tea shop surrounded by trees, rocks, and brooks, which became the seeds of his new project, Wanderstop.
The game, which was recently released, belongs to a burgeoning genre of nonviolent titles devoted to relationships, crafting, exploration, and routine-to building, rather than destroying. In a 2015 lecture, Wreden declared that a fearful state of mind" within the mainstream video-game industry had led to "an art form in which by far the most ubiquitous form of expression is that of firing a gun." We have, he went on, "a culture where violence is understood and implied to be the central means of problem-solving." Wanderstop is a kind of rebuttal, prizing dialogue and contemplation over heroic acts.
Read a profile of the influential game designer, whose career has gone from the absurd to the practical>>
https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/GEARS3
🆂🆃🅽 
"The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe" | Xbox
