Davey Wreden | |
---|---|
Born | September 29, 1988 |
Alma mater | University of Southern California |
Occupation(s) | Game designer, developer |
Known for |
|
Relatives | Douglas Wreden (brother) |
Davey Wreden is a game designer and developer, best known for his work on The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide .
Wreden attended the University of Southern California, graduating in 2011 with a degree in critical studies. [1]
Wreden created The Stanley Parable in 2011, as a modification for Valve Corporation's game Half-Life 2 . The mod itself received attention for its approach to storytelling and use of the video game medium. [2] [3]
In 2013, he remade and expanded it into a standalone title with co-developer William Pugh. [4] [5] The Stanley Parable received critical acclaim for its thought-provoking themes and innovative use of popular gameplay mechanics. [6] The game explores the nature of player agency and challenges traditional game design conventions. [6]
Wreden experienced depression after the success of The Stanley Parable, which included various media outlets' game of the year awards. [7] [8] [9] He described responding to emails, both negative and positive. "In answering all that fan mail, Wreden says that he lost sight of the meaning in his answers, he lost sight of why he made The Stanley Parable in the first place." [7] Wreden also drew a comic to help describe his feelings. [7] [8]
Dan Erickson, creator of the TV show Severance , said he partly took inspiration from The Stanley Parable. [10]
Jasper Juul finds ironic similarities between Wreden's experience and his following game, The Beginner's Guide. [9]
In 2015, Wreden released The Beginner's Guide , a narrative-driven game that delves into the personal and creative struggles of a fictional game developer. Through a series of introspective and emotionally charged levels, the game raises questions about authorship, interpretation, and the relationship between creators and players. [11] [12] The Beginner's Guide was noted for its introspective storytelling and its ability to blur the line between reality and fiction. [13] [12]
Davey Wreden, acting as narrator of The Beginner's Guide, became a character in the game as well. [14] Frank G. Bosman and Archibald L.H.M. van Wieringen write that the game's narrative ends up being largely about the Davey Wreden character, also describing the complex intertextual relationship between the character's narrative and other elements of the story. [14]
Alayna Cole and Dakoda Barker describe Wreden's approach to the narrative of the game; they suggest that the introduction, where he describes himself as the creator of The Stanley Parable and gives out his real email address, is meant to establish authenticity. [11] They suggest this approach blurs the line between reality and fiction in a post-structuralist way. [11]
Braxton Soderman believes the character Coda is also a stand-in for Wreden the game designer. [15]
Wreden has also released free-to-play games on itch.io. This included a 2017 collaboration titled Absolutely: A True Crime Story, described by Kotaku as a "nihilistic parody". [16] [17] [18]
In 2021, Wreden founded the game studio Ivy Road along with Karla Zimonja and C418, with additional support from Annapurna Interactive. [19] The studio intends to release their first game, Wanderstop , in 2024. [20]
From February 2021 to June 2022, Wreden and Cara Ellison hosted The Inspirational Quarterly, a podcast dedicated to reading, reviewing, and discussing Keith R. A. DeCandido's 2006 novel StarCraft: Ghost: Nova. [21]
Wreden has been influenced by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author David Foster Wallace, and the games of Brendon Chung—including Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving . [22]
Soderman finds a change in themes between the lightheartedness of The Stanley Parable and the depression and alienation of The Beginner's Guide. [15]
Discussing authorship and player agency in game design, Ivan Girina writes, "Davey Wreden's authorial discourse is often evoked as the focal point around which the meaning of not only Stanley but also his other creations, such as The Beginner's Guide ... is organised." [23]
Wreden was born on September 29, 1988. [24] He has previously resided in Austin, Texas but is currently located in Vancouver, BC. [25] He has been developing games since 2009, around the same time Wreden started to work on The Stanley Parable. [26] He originally went to school to study film, but realized it was not what he wanted for his particular work and focused his attention on the gaming world instead, stating that "wasn't so interesting to me, but there's still so much space for games to grow." [27] Wreden is the brother of Douglas Wreden, popular streamer and online content creator. [28]
Shadow the Hedgehog is a character who appears in Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. He was created by Takashi Iizuka and Shiro Maekawa and first appeared in Sonic Adventure 2 (2001). Within Sonic's fictional universe, Shadow is an anthropomorphic black hedgehog created by Professor Gerald Robotnik, the grandfather of the series' antagonist Doctor Eggman. After witnessing the death of his best friend Maria Robotnik, Shadow initially seeks revenge, but later vows to keep his promise to her that he would protect the world from danger. An antihero, Shadow has good intentions but will do whatever it takes to accomplish his goals, putting him at odds with Sonic the Hedgehog.
Kenneth M. Levine is an American video game developer. He is the creative director and co-founder of Ghost Story Games. He led the creation of the BioShock series and is also known for his work on Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2.
Kotaku is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier.
Jonathan Blow is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016). Blow was born in California, United States, and became interested in game programming while at middle school. He studied for computer science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out to start a game company. After the company closed following the dot-com crash, Blow worked as a game-development contractor. He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly technical column for Game Developer magazine.
Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
Navi is a fictional fairy who acts as series protagonist Link's navigator throughout the 1998 Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. She was voiced by Kaori Mizuhashi. Navi performs a variety of functions within the game, including being a companion and guide to Link, providing the player with advice and being a focal point for the game's Z-lock targeting combat system. Other characters in The Legend of Zelda series have served in similar roles, including Tatl, Midna, and Fi. When designing the reticle for the game, designer Yoshiaki Koizumi made a ball of light with wings, naming it "Fairy Navigation System" before naming it Navi. She has been widely criticised by players and critics for her repetitive interruptions in gameplay, particularly with the prompt "Hey! Listen!", though some have argued that she was a valuable companion in the game.
Every Day the Same Dream is a short, 2D art game by Paolo Pedercini. The player is put in the role of a man whose monotonous life is about to change. Developed for the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, the game has been described as "a beautiful game with a very bleak outlook." Pedercini says it is "a short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor." It has been compared to Passage by Jason Rohrer and Don't Look Back by Terry Cavanagh in that it is "an interesting, potentially fascinating experience." The game is offered as freeware under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.5.
Hotline Miami is a 2012 top-down shooter game developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital. The player assuming the role of an unnamed silent protagonist—dubbed "Jacket" by fans—while committing numerous massacres against the local Russian mafia at the behest of anonymous messages he had received. In each level of the game, the player is tasked with defeating every single enemy through any means possible, ranging from simple firearms and melee weapons, to more specific methods such as knocking enemies out with doors and executing enemies brutally. Before beginning each level, the player can choose from a variety of different masks, which offer unique abilities. The game is set in Miami in 1989, and primarily tells its story through cryptic dream cutscenes where mysterious masked figures berate Jacket for his actions and foreshadow upcoming events.
The Stanley Parable is a 2013 story-based video game designed and written by developers Davey Wreden and William Pugh. The game carries themes such as choice in video games, the relationship between a game creator and player, and predestination/fate.
Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418, is a German musician, producer and sound engineer. He is best known as the former composer and sound designer for the sandbox video game Minecraft. He is a co-founder of independent video game developer Ivy Road with Davey Wreden and Karla Zimonja.
The Beginner's Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden's follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is an adventure video game developed by Crows Crows Crows, a studio created by William Pugh, best known for his work on another video game, The Stanley Parable. The game was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on December 4, 2015 as a free offering. The game sets up expectations of participating in a narrative-driven story about a heist, but players instead find themselves helping out an unseen narrator before they can participate in the story.
William Pugh is a British game designer best known for his work on The Stanley Parable, and for founding the game development studio Crows Crows Crows.
Squanch Games is an American video game development studio based in Burbank, California. The company was founded by Justin Roiland in August 2016. The studio is most known for developing Accounting (2016), Trover Saves the Universe (2019) and High on Life (2022). The company has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Burbank, California.
Hades is a 2020 roguelike action role-playing game developed and published by Supergiant Games. It was released for macOS, Nintendo Switch, and Windows following an early access release in December 2018. It was later released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in August 2021, and was released for iOS in March 2024 through Netflix Games.
The Backrooms are a fictional location originating from a 2019 4chan thread. One of the best known examples of the liminal space aesthetic, the Backrooms are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality.
Douglas Scott Wreden, better known by his online pseudonym DougDoug, is an American YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and former Hearthstone caster and producer. He makes gaming videos that revolve around him doing various gaming challenges, often involving the use of artificial intelligence, modifications to games, or giving his Twitch chat heavy control of the game or stream. In 2023, he won the "League of Their Own" award at The Streamer Awards.
The Narrator is a fictional narrator who first appeared in the 2013 video game The Stanley Parable. The game follows The Narrator attempting to narrate and guide the player character, Stanley, to the end of the story of Stanley's missing co-workers. However, the player can deviate from what The Narrator wants them to do, which will cause the story to diverge greatly from its original plot in ways The Narrator tries to dissuade the player from taking.
Wanderstop is an upcoming video game developed by Ivy Road and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is written and directed by Davey Wreden, composed by C418, and created with Karla Zimonja. The game is scheduled for release in 2024 for PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Windows on Steam.
Ivy Road is an independent video game development company started and led by Davey Wreden, Karla Zimonja and C418 in partnership with Annapurna Interactive. The company will release their first game, Wanderstop, in 2024.