By Landon Lee
Designed by Lucas Pope, Papers, Please (2013) is a border-security simulator in which the player is “assigned to the Ministry of Admission in the war-torn dystopian nation of Arstotzka” (Pope 2012). While the player carries out their daily duties of verifying passports and identities, they put their meager earnings towards providing for their family and paying down their debt. As the days pass, players are presented with more and more responsibilities—bribe offers, pleas, and threats—as the State of Arstotzka demands disciplined performance from its employees and pays only by person processed. No time can be wasted in the 12-hour work day, lest the player fail to earn enough to support their family.
Source: Steam
This mounting pressure contributes to a frantic atmosphere that gives context and weight to the ethical decisions players have to make in the game. These decisions involve balancing one’s duty to country, family health, the pleas of well-meaning people, or other ethical concerns. Eventually, you might find yourself making morally questionable choices when faced with difficult situations or even questioning the morality of specific activities. Every system in the game is designed to examine the value of responsibility and illuminate the extent to which that responsibility can be a burden.
The system that highlights this value most strongly is, fittingly, the most prominent. Players can accept entry, reject entry, shuffle papers, verify discrepancies, and call for the next person in line. The sedate paper-pushing gives a layer of abstraction to the gravity that each decision has on the life of the NPC in question. It decides whether they live in a safe country or must continue in war-torn areas. In their book Values at Play in Digital Games (2014), Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum describe “actions”and “player choice” as two separate systems that are critical when designing values in games. In Papers Please (2013), these two systems are inextricably linked. To mark a passport as “rejected” is to make the choice to reject them. As you send individuals on their way, these individuals may express joy, anger, or apathy, but they usually make it known how your decision affected them, which contributes to the game’s feedback loop and the ethical sense of responsibility given to the player. This theme of responsibility is gradually amplified over the course of gameplay.
Source: Steam
The game also allows you to make decisions that do not align with “acceptable” employee practices, which in this case are governed by the state. Players are met with bribes, offers of conspiracy, or pleas for mercy from their clients. Some of these decisions come back to affect you later on, negatively or otherwise. A player may be running low on money to feed their family, for example, and thus accept a bribe to let someone through without proper papers. This can lead to ethical reflection of one’s engagement with corruption, and the reasons one might be justified to act “corruptly.” The game confronts the player with countless ethical situations like this, forcing you to make decisions as a character with competing layers of duty as a parent, patriot, citizen, or activist. By putting the player into the same desperate headspace, Pope asks the player to reconsider the ethical pressures felt when making a seemingly selfish decision.
Papers, Please (2013) also uses a reward system to explore values in the game, a system that feels as much like a punishment system as a reward system. First, players want to survive to the next day so that they can continue to play, see more content, experience more mechanics, and meet more characters. Like most games, avoiding death is its own reward, but the more explicit reward is your paycheck. Working for a fictional State, you are paid a certain amount for each immigrant you process and are penalized whenever you make a mistake. If a mistake in the processing of paperwork is discovered by the Orwellian, all-knowing authorities, a citation is issued and funds are deducted from your paycheck.
These two incentives create an interesting tension. On the one hand, the player wants to process each person quickly to earn the maximum amount each day; at the same time, the player is penalized for missing a small detail, which encourages slow, deliberate play. This dual-reward system effectively embodies the stress and tension of poverty, raising ethical questions for the player to consider as they weigh their different roles and responsibilities. The player has a family they are responsible for keeping safe, a country they are responsible for keeping secure, and immigrants they might feel a desire to help. But when a 40 credit paycheck forces necessities like heat, food, and medicine to become optional, the pressure begins to mount. If only you had a bit more, your son would not starve, your wife would not get sick, and your niece would have a family to go to. These pressures make it easier to take bribes and make morally questionable decisions, creating an instability that supports the game’s overall atmosphere.
Source: Steam
The aesthetics of the game also emphasize this value. Indeed, in a forum post advertising the game, Pope stated that he wanted to put special attention on the art of the game and its emotional weight. The first thing the player sees are low-resolution, low saturation visuals, reflective of Pope’s decision to limit the shading to three values. The low-detail, low-contrast atmosphere works to simulate the player character’s state of mind as they cope with the stress of their burdens. The visual style of the game keeps the player’s attention away from the gray, dismal view of the security checkpoint, where armed guards are positioned ready for a terrorist threat and the circuitous line of people are reduced to clumps of shifting pixels. Instead, the player’s desk and interview window are prominently featured and act as the primary play space of the game. The play space is detailed and vibrant, distracting from the reality of human suffering that is ever present in the endless line of people just outside your door. The sense of responsibility felt by the player is amplified with every glance at seeking sanctuary, as well as the sense of hopelessness as they realize that they will never be able to help them all. This design silently communicates to the player the attitude of the state, and thus the attitude that they should adopt: those people do not matter—only Arstotzka. This attitude is then immediately broken as each shuffling form steps up to the window. The player converses with each character, forcing you to confront and acknowledge each of their humanity.
It is impossible to discuss the aesthetics of Papers, Please without also discussing its sound design. The moment the player loads the game, they are greeted with oppressive, patriotic horns as the title lumbers its way up the screen, dragging with the weight of its authoritarian government. If the player lingers, they will notice that the theme picks up a frantic edge that grows in urgency, mimicking the increasing stress the player feels over the course of play. The title screen and main theme are deceptively important parts of the game’s aesthetic. They form its backbone by setting the tone and hinting at its main themes in a matter of seconds, allowing the player to begin experiencing its message as soon as play begins. The beginning of the game then contrasts with this aesthetic as the music fades and a bleak concrete landscape appears to the player. A deliberate silence descends as you read your instructions, filled only with the white noise of the wind and cars passing on the highway. The player then calls their first ever charge with a distorted, inhuman “NEXT” that echoes from the loudspeaker above their office. The sound design overwhelmingly presents the player with an environment that is bleak, sterile, and inhospitable to humans.
Papers, Please effectively uses formal and dramatic elements to convey the crushing weight of conflicting duties and responsibilities. The implicit themes about immigration, authoritarian control, and the ethics of border control are tied together with a striking aesthetic that reminds the player of the gravity of their in-game actions and the pressures influencing their decisions. Lucas Pope’s game is a wonderful, detailed, and rich example of the interconnected nature of how values are encountered in games.
References
Flanagan, M., & Esenbaum. (2014). Groundwork for values in games. Values at Play in Digital Games. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9016.003.0004
3909 LLC. (2013). Papers, Please (Windows Version) [Video Game]. Lucas Pope.
Pope, Lucas. [dukope]. (2012, November 14). Papers, Please [Available 8/8] [Online Forum Post]. TIGForums.