Cause No Trouble: The Experience of
“Serious Fun” in Papers, Please
Oscar Moralde
UCLA Cinema and Media Studies
102 East Melnitz Hall
Box 951622
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1622, USA
+1 (213) 453-9986
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The indie puzzle “dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) has
been critically acclaimed for its mix of compelling gameplay mechanics and satirical
depictions of bureaucracy run amok. Using a phenomenological approach that focuses on
the embodied and subjective experience of play, this paper performs a close examination
of the game in order to address the question of how fun and entertaining gameplay might
coexist with the representation of serious social themes. This examination identifies and
describes key elements of the game’s formal aesthetics (the layout of the interface, ingame representations of the controls, and the management of player attention) which help
cultivate a bureaucratic and even dehumanizing player mindset, which is then held up by
the game for reflection. This analysis also highlights the avenues of inquiry available to
the phenomenological approach and to examining the experience of the game as it is
played.
Keywords
Phenomenology, aesthetics, space, embodiment, interface, subjectivity, social realism
INTRODUCTION
Bundles of paperwork, people standing in line, and lists of government regulations are
not things one would necessarily associate with fun gameplay, yet they are the trappings
of the award-winning Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013), a puzzle game and selfdescribed “dystopian document thriller” in which you play a border inspector in the
fictional 1980s Eastern Bloc country of Arstotzka, with the power to allow or deny
people entry into your “glorious” nation. Designed by independent developer and former
Naughty Dog programmer Lucas Pope, the game has sold hundreds of thousands of
copies and won the “Innovation Award” at the 2014 Game Developers Conference. The
core gameplay consists of examining people’s passports, work permits, and other
paperwork for discrepancies or failure to follow government-issued rules. Let the right
people into the country, and you receive wages to pay your rent and feed your family; let
the wrong people in, and the consequences include fines taken from your salary, or
worse.
The game offers choices in its story mode that point to an exploration of issues such as
privacy invasion, immigration policy, and the banality of evil. In one example, the player
must decide whether to allow an immigrant with bad papers through with her husband,
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which would result in a financial penalty; or the player can follow the letter of the law by
denying her entry and abandoning her to arrest or worse in her home country. The way
that both gameplay and narrative elements convey a sense of heartless bureaucracy and
the precarious qualities of life under a repressive regime might put Papers, Please in
good company with other seriously-themed games, such as news-based terrorismcommentary September 12th (Newsgaming 2001) and historical data forgery simulator
Opera Omnia (Increpare 2009). Indeed, one reviewer has argued that “you couldn’t really
describe Papers, Please, as fun… it’s not a game you’ll fire up for a 10-minute
distraction” (Whitehead 2013).
However, the gameplay contains qualities that are indeed compelling and even
entertaining; another review has described the mechanics as “an intrinsically satisfying
process” (Walker 2013). In the other games I just mentioned, after one playthrough and
after the message or theme is understood by the player, there is no particular reason to
return to them for the experience of their gameplay. In essence the games are vehicles for
their themes. On the other hand, with Papers, Please the gameplay is not solely a
rhetorical delivery mechanism and there is even an “endless” mode to keep playing for
better scores after the story-based campaign is complete.
What might we make of the conjunction between serious social themes and addictive, fun
gameplay mechanics? How can we reconcile having a good time playing a game and
recognizing its thoughtful subject matter? Here I examine Papers, Please and attempt to
answer those questions using an approach that focuses on the embodied experience of
play and the forms generating that experience. That is, I share the stance elaborated by
games scholar Henrik Smed Nielsen that video games are embodied experiences, and not
just through the most obvious examples of Wii and Kinect motion-controlled games –
games act upon sensory perception, evoke feeling, and make space for intentional action,
and the locus for all of that is the body (Nielsen 2012, 15). So in Papers, Please I am not
focused solely on the representations of its narrative or the rules that govern play, though
those are certainly important determiners; I look at the actual embodied experience of
“what it’s like” to be in the moment playing the game. I am looking at the aesthetics of
the game, an area which Graeme Kirkpatrick has argued deserves further exploration:
The tensions in the hand are shifting and if we recorded the movements of fingers
and thumbs against the plastic buttons we would find a series of crystalline
representations of game action, which articulated to their corresponding events
on the screen would constitute the game’s “effect-shapes.” In a sense, the
important forces that drive the action of the on-screen game fiction are present in
the tension between fingers, thumbs and plastic controller (2011, 92).
I specifically consider the forms of these “effect-shapes” through the use of
phenomenological methods of inquiry, and through recognizing that the embodied
relationship between player and game is an intersubjective one. The conduit for that
relationship is the player’s intentionality: how he or she acts upon the game, and viceversa. The method that flows from examining an intersubjective relationship such as this,
according to media and philosophy scholar Vivian Sobchack, is the correlation of the
subjective act of audiovisual perception with the objective structures expressed by the
form of the work (2011, 193).
To help clarify this concept, take the example of jumping and falling in a game. Even in a
medium as seemingly passive as the cinema (or a video game cut scene), seeing a
-- 2 --
depiction of someone falling from a height is an embodied experience for the viewer. To
make that depiction meaningful to our own experience requires an awareness of our own
embodied selves, of being bodies in space, and the activation of sense-memory or senseimagination to internalize gravity acting upon our own bodies in a similar manner. That
experience is not merely thought, but also felt.
Falling in the middle of gameplay takes on an additional dimension because the character
falls despite or against the player’s input; there is a discrepancy between game action and
player action. This discrepancy is key to how the player perceives the experience of
“falling” in the game. The horizon of the player’s experience here is the correlation
between the depictions made available to the senses and the intentions channeled through
and across the interface. Through this correlation, falling in both a realistic actionadventure such as Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics 2013) and an abstract 2D platformer
such as Super Meat Boy (Team Meat 2010) might produce similar experiences of thrills
and danger.
Bringing this method to bear on Papers, Please means discerning and describing the
effect-shapes that are formed during the act of playing the game. They constitute a world
of experience that has room to produce both fun gameplay and the recognition of a
relevant social reality. Both these aspects converge in how it “feels” to play Papers,
Please. Here I examine three salient aspects of the game experience: the booth, the stamp,
and the queue. If the concept of the game’s “feel” at this point appears to be somewhat
imprecise and subjective, I hope that the phenomenological reductions I perform below
reveal their own kind of rigor, and yet I would also argue that the realm of the subjective
and personal is itself worthy of being part of what we talk about when we talk about
games.
Figure 1: The main gameplay screen of Papers, Please,
divided into three areas: the booth (left), the inspection
desk with stamps (right), and the queue (top).
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THE BOOTH
Players spend most of their time in Papers, Please on the main gameplay screen (Figure
1). Except for some expository cut scenes and transitional screens between levels where
the player manages his or her money, most of the game is on a screen depicting the main
Inspector character’s workplace, a checkpoint on the border between the nations of
Arstotzka and Kolechia. Like a cubist painting or multi-windowed desktop, the screen is
divided into three sections, each a separate vantage point that nevertheless together
converge on the player character’s subjective perception. In the lower left is a first-person
view of the inspection booth where travelers step up, present their documents, and answer
questions. To the right is a close-up view of the inspection desk, where the player can
examine documents in more detail. At the top of the screen is a bird’s-eye view of the
border, showing the checkpoint and the queue forming outside. Although this last section
appears at first to be merely ambience, it plays a complex role in relation to the flow of
gameplay, which I will address later.
However for now note the ways that this segmentation structures the experience of
gameplay and encourages the player’s attention and intention to flow along certain lines.
Though the fixed, static viewpoints and the dreary lo-fi aesthetic help evoke the feel of
the 1980s Iron Curtain setting (along with being within the grasp of an indie developer’s
time and budget), these factors also pose a certain relationship between the player, the
game space, and the characters that inhabit it. The philosopher of technology Don Ihde
has described the categories of relationship between human subjects, technological
artefacts, and the world; one of those categories is a hermeneutic relation, in that
technology allows a person to “read” the world, such as a thermometer which is read to
find out the temperature (Ihde 1990, 107). Hermeneutic relations are ones in which some
aspect of the world is condensed and processed into information for the human subject;
the layout of the interface of Papers, Please constitutes such a relationship. The screen
provides one way of looking at the world, and it is important to remember that this
relationship expands particular facets of subjective perception while narrowing or closing
off others.
Specifically, we can more closely examine the actions that I as the player perform during
one segment of gameplay and the way that this screen structures those actions. I click on
the on the loudspeaker in the top queue section, which brings another traveler into the
lower left booth. The traveler stands there and presents two documents: a passport and an
entry permit. A dialogue between my character and the traveler automatically starts, with
dialogue bubbles telling me that this man will be in transit through the country for two
weeks. I click and hold to drag the documents from the left-hand booth to the right-hand
inspection desk; as they cross the threshold the objects magnify in size so I can read the
information in more detail. I look at the information on the entry permit, and it matches
what he said. I look at the date on the entry permit, then look at the clock and calendar in
the booth; the document is expired. Clicking on a button to enter “Inspection Mode”, I
click on each of the dates, and my character announces that the document is expired. The
traveler replies that he could not come until today, which is not a valid excuse. Clicking
on another button on the interface makes a set of stamps shoot out from the side of the
screen: a green “approved” stamp and an angry red “denied” stamp. I use the second one
to stamp his passport, then drag the documents back to the left, where they return to
normal size. I drag them back through the window, and the traveler walks away. I click
on the loudspeaker again, and my character’s yell of “Next!” brings another traveler to
the window.
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This is just one cycle of gameplay during a typical level, structured by the ticking clock
of the workday from morning to evening. That example shows that the core gamplay of
Papers, Please involves elements of time management along with paying attention to
detail, as in hidden object or puzzle games. The time pressure of each day/level plus the
escalating difficulty of managing increasing numbers of documents and increasingly
specific rules from the Ministry of Admissions means that players are challenged to
become more efficient and precise in the way that they handle people and their
documents. This involves some elements of dexterity in juggling the documents and the
ever-necessary in-game rulebook in a limited space that is liable to become a cluttered
mess in the wrong hands. It also rewards mental acuity in remembering the cities of the
region to detect forged documents, or noticing minor discrepancies in weight, height, or
even a single digit of a long serial number.
With player attention being such an important focal point for the game, it’s important to
note how this tripartite interface guides and structures that attention. A major question is
thus: What is privileged by this structure? In this hermeneutic relation, what is more
easily read, and what in the game world is at the forefront of player attention?
In this case it is certainly not the people. To fully unpack the results of certain design
choices it is often helpful to consider the ramifications of alternate possibilities and of
what could have been. In this case, we might imagine a version of Papers, Please that
used only a “realistic” first-person perspective, in which you saw the world only through
the eyes of the Inspector. Travelers would walk up to the booth, and you would pick up
their documents in a similar way, perhaps using a button to zoom in and examine them
more closely – but the key difference here is that such a perspective, with unified space
and a more personal point of view, would use the scale of person-to-person interaction as
the default. In a way, such a perspective emphasizes the nature of these travelers as
people.
While this sense is not totally absent from the actual game, what we do get effaces and
fragments that sense in multiple ways. The queue provides a distant and detached
perspective where people are seen as a blob of amorphous silhouettes, and even when
they step into the booth they almost seem to fade into the background as they are depicted
in cool colors and muted tones. The most colorful elements in the game are the passports,
which are a bold rainbow of reds and greens and blues. The game’s spatial structure
privileges and enhances the presence of the documents more than the people. This is not
merely in the fact that most of the game’s space is reserved for the documents, but the
documents are also the only objects that directly cross from one section of the game
environment to the other. The player’s ethereal intention, as represented by the mouse
cursor, certainly acts in all three spaces; and we see tiny silhouettes at the top of the
screen marching up in correlation to the faces that show up in the booth, but they do not
cross the dividing lines that demarcate the sections of the interface.
The documents, on the other hand, must pass from left to right, from the booth counter
onto the desk, in order to be read. As they cross the threshold, they are magnified and
grow larger than life; when the player is done with them, they must go from right to left
and shrink back down again. This motion and transformation is visually striking within
the game, and it also happens quite frequently. With the player cycling through these
documents at a rapid clip (and the idea of a cycle is quite important, as I discuss below),
this transition occurs forty or more times during an average level. The motion is certainly
livelier than the people themselves, who primarily remain in one place with an
-- 5 --
unchanging expression matching the ones in their documents. (Perhaps this is another
case of using the limitations of an indie game as assets in conveying a certain kind of
player experience.)
This interface privileges a certain way of looking at the world. Comparing it to the
hypothetical only-first-person Papers, Please, which might be characterized as
interacting with people carrying documents, this game encourages the inverse – dealing
with documents that happen to be carried by people. This is of course a function of
gameplay, as the fun and the challenge come from being skillful with these documents;
but the privileging of documents over people is also part of the game’s thematic
preoccupations with bureaucracy and state control. The connection between these two
avenues of experience in the game is not coincidental, as we can see with a closer
examination of the tactile, tangible qualities of the game and the contours of its sensory
experience.
THE STAMP
Another category in Ihde’s mapping of human-technological relations is the embodiment
relation: the way that tools and implements serve as a channel for human intention upon
the world. The hammer is a quintessential embodied technology, transforming bodily
intention into pointed force. In Papers, Please embodiment can be found on the other
side of the interface, in the controls the player acts upon and the cursor that makes those
actions manifest. Here, the idea of the tangible and tactile quality of things comes to the
fore, and the game uses a number of audiovisual strategies to evoke those qualities.
Although this dimension is subtle and perhaps not something one consciously considers
while playing the game, it is quite important in structuring the world of the game and the
way one plays through it.
The sense of touch here is not a literal one; you do not actually touch any of the elements
in the game, and though one could conceivably play this on a touchscreen tablet, the
game assumes a mouse and keyboard as the default controls and some of the game’s
upgradeable abilities require the use of the keyboard. Nevertheless, just as a game can
produce the embodied sensation of the danger and tension of falling without your body
actually moving through space, there are objects in the game – through the correlation
between what we see and hear, and how we manipulate the controls -- which feel more
tangible and more responsive than others.
The documents you examine certainly fall into this category, and it starts with the simple
user interface response of the sound of rustling paper when you click on a document to
pick it up. This immediate response is matched by the way the documents have a sense of
heft to them, as you have to hold down the mouse to carry the documents around the
screen and from one space to another. You can position the documents anywhere on the
desk and stack them on top of other documents, while within the booth passports and
papers clatter onto the surface of the counter. Some of these aspects dovetail with the
hallmarks of competent and intuitive user interface design, but little touches add up to
create the feel of these documents having manipulability and tangibility. In any case, the
player’s relation to these documents and the specific structure of that relationship could
have been designed in any other number of ways.
Imagine another version of Papers, Please in which instead of the player needing to
handle representations of physical documents, all the relevant information was displayed
in a table on the screen. As a result the challenge in such a version would be dramatically
-- 6 --
reduced, for one thing. If the same type of information were displayed in the same
position on the screen every time (and note that this reflects how the travelers are
positioned in the actual game), that rigidity and sameness would make discrepancies and
errors less difficult to spot. It would also eliminate the difficulty the player faces in
managing and organizing the space available. Part of the game’s challenge consists in
positioning the rulebook and documents on the table so they can be cross-referenced, as
noting discrepancies to question the traveler requires clicking on the rule listed in the
book, and then clicking on the portion of the document that breaks that rule. A player
might also need to compare serial numbers across multiple documents, which may be
difficult to fit in the space allotted and thus requires shuffling and cycling through papers.
A poorly-organized space can lead to a key document being lost under another or left in a
corner, requiring precious seconds to retrieve and bring back to the foreground.
Removing the spatial, tangible qualities of the documents would remove these kinds of
gameplay challenges.
In addition to affecting gameplay, a document-less Papers, Please would (aside from
perhaps requiring a new title) also shift the balance of the player’s intention and attention
as currently split between the people and their documents. Not only are the papers in the
game more vibrant and often appear larger than the people, the player interacts with the
documents more directly. He or she picks them up, moves them from place to place,
clicks on them, and stamps them – all the while the traveler stands motionless across the
counter. In fact (with a few exceptions) the player does not directly interact with these
people unless the people are themselves rendered into documents. The player’s Inspector
character may question a traveler, for instance, but those questions do not become
something for the player to act upon until they are printed out in transcript form. In later
levels, the player X-rays people for contraband or examines their fingerprints to verify
identities; the resulting documents are touched and grasped, while the people are handled
at a push-button remove. In the game the people can only be “read” or “touched” via the
paperwork they provide.
These actions also foreground the other set of elements offered up for player interaction:
the tools at the checkpoint such as the loudspeaker, the button to switch inspection
modes, and above all the set of stamps used to officially approve or deny entry. As
opposed to the untethered free-floating nature of the documents, these tools have fixed
locations. When the player knows what action needs to be performed next, he or she will
already know where the cursor needs to go.
Even without having any knowledge about the game, an observer would probably be able
to guess at the significance of the stamps, as they are the most lovingly crafted and
detailed part of the interface. When the player presses the button to access the stamps, the
spring-loaded tray shoots out from the side of the screen with velocity and momentum;
multiple frames of animation give it a little bounce before the tray settles to rest. When
the player actually uses the stamp on the traveler’s passport, it lands with a meaty thump
and holds for a moment, as if to make sure the digital ink seeps into the digital paper. All
the attention to detail given to this part of the interface (and the detail that draws attention
to it) is fitting, as the choice of which stamp to use and the act of stamping is the key
gameplay decision in Papers, Please. With every traveler and every cycle of gameplay,
all the player’s actions and observations eventually boil down to whether or not to allow
the person in front of them into the country, and the game’s rewards and penalties are the
consequences of that choice.
-- 7 --
Because of the stamp’s importance in almost every meaningful cycle of gameplay, it is
worth considering the significance of the in-game stamp upgrade that the player can
purchase. The player earns money for correctly processing travelers, and one of the things
he or she can spend that money on (beyond food and rent) is an upgrade for accessing the
stamps: instead of having to click on a button on the screen to bring up the stamps, the
player can do the same by pressing Tab on the keyboard. While this change may seem
negligible, it can actually prove to be a boon to efficiency: instead of having to do
everything with the mouse, and needing to move the cursor to click on a specific portion
of the interface, the player can keep an otherwise idle hand on the keyboard and simply
tap the shortcut. The savings may only be in fractions of a second, but in the assemblyline gameplay of repetitive action, those fractions add up – and it is one less thing to think
about.
The upgrade deploys irony on a narrative level (the Inspector must pay out of pocket for
his state-controlled workspace) and on a gameplay level (efficient players with excess
money can easily become more efficient, while someone who’s struggling would not be
able to afford it). But beyond that, the idea of “one less thing to think about” points to the
nature of the experience in Papers, Please. In discussing the phenomenology of
technology – that is, the experience of engaging with technology – one important aspect
is how immediate that technology is to our subjective perception, and how aware we are
of that technology even as we use it. In making access to the stamps more reflexive, the
upgrade also makes the stamps more immediate to the player’s intention: rather than
being located behind a button on the screen that must be accessed with a cursor controlled
by the mouse, the stamps are “relocated” to a tangible, physical button that can be pressed
almost subconsciously. The upgrade modifies the interface and thus also modifies the
player’s experience of the world and the process that the player builds within that world.
THE QUEUE
The structural components of Papers, Please encourage the player to perfect an
algorithmic process: figuring out what steps to take, in what order to take them, and how
to physically execute them in order to complete the task of processing travelers. As a
game, it also throws up challenges to test that process. Generally that challenge steadily
and predictably ramps, as more documents and more rules are added in each level, which
means the player must perfect a more complicated set of tasks. That gradual complication
is also punctuated by extreme moments that call the process itself into question. Through
examining the role of the queue in the player’s experience, we can shed light on the
function of those moments.
While most of the game action takes place occurs in the booth and on the inspection desk,
as discussed above, a significant portion of the screen is devoted to showing the queue of
travelers waiting at the checkpoint along with the border and the guards patrolling it. At
first, this element of the interface appears to merely be ambient window dressing to help
situate the player in the otherwise solipsistic space of the inspection booth. (This is a
function performed by the sound design as well; when there is no traveler in the booth,
the sounds of traffic and the environment outside are at full volume, which also reminds
the player that they need to call the next traveler. Once a traveler steps up and the player’s
focus narrows onto the documents, those sounds fade away.) Indeed, the only element the
player can act upon in this section of the screen is the loudspeaker to call the next
traveler, and because of this the entire queue recedes from the player’s subjective
awareness. With his or her attention focused below, the top of the screen becomes merely
a large peripheral button to press.
-- 8 --
However, the game disabuses that notion rather quickly; in a moment during the second
level, the player’s controls are suddenly locked out and the shutter of the booth slams
shut. The queue up top becomes the center of attention, as a silhouette jumps across the
fence and throws a bomb at a guard before being shot and killed. This scripted event ends
the day and the level; at this point the nature of the queue shifts within the player’s
awareness. Most of the time it remains a benign, background presence as part of the
player’s routine gameplay process, but now it also carries the threat of disrupting that
process. This comes to the foreground in later levels when the player is suddenly asked
not to deal with documents below but with threats from above; the player must defend the
checkpoint by unlocking a cabinet, retrieving a gun, and pointing and clicking in the top
portion to shoot someone. In these moments, the game interrupts familiar routines and
brusquely shifts the space of play; the player must think and act quickly.
In other words, during each day the bottom portion of the screen is a flurry of activity and
attention; when I play Papers, Please I am continuously shuffling documents back and
forth, clicking on buttons and stamping passports. As I approach an optimal and efficient
process of embodied and hermeneutic relations with the game, that process takes shape
within and through my body in elegant, precise action: in visual acuity and manual
dexterity. I develop a rhythm, and this rhythm is matched by the aesthetics of the game’s
sounds. The shuffling of papers, the thump of the stamp, and the blare of the loudspeaker
form a rhythm to match mine. These actions may grow more and more difficult, but most
of the time they do so in predictable and familiar ways; I internalize the process. Yet that
perspective of the queue, which recedes into the background of my perception precisely
because I do not grasp and focus on it as I do with the documents below, always remains
there at the edges of awareness threatening to erupt into something unexpected and to
disrupt my rhythm. It serves as a reminder that there is always something external to the
processes I’m enacting, and that my optimal efficient workflow process does not
constitute the entirety of my engagement with the gameworld; in fact, it is a rather fragile
thing.
Through this vector of experience the fun of the gameplay can be reconciled with the
meaningfulness of the game’s social realism. Of course, the bite of the game’s political
commentary is certainly on display in the narrative content of the moral choices that the
player encounters. In these scenarios the narrative’s characters—asylum-seekers,
criminals, terrorists, corrupt officials, soldiers doing their job—pose tensions against the
exigencies of gameplay. However, the mindset that the game encourages, of focusing on
the documents to the exclusion of the people who carry those documents and who are
represented by them, can be found in the core elements of the gameplay experience itself.
The rules and the story may cue the player towards the embodied action of gameplay
processes, but that embodied action takes on its own importance in structuring the
experience of play and the relation between player and game.
As we play, the rhythm of those processes take form within and through our embodied
perception; in the flow of gameplay they may even appear to the constitute the totality of
the circumscribed world of the game – not in the nations and places and times that lie
outside the inspector’s booth but in the seemingly transcendent qualities of starting and
maintaining a process within it. This is how a fun activity can be inscribed onto the
representation of dreary work, not through simple mimesis but through the similarities of
form and urgency as they act upon the living, perceptive, active body. Papers, Please
completes this series of actions by reminding us through disruptive events that the
transcendence of that process (of bureaucracy) is at best fragile, illusory, and fleeting.
-- 9 --
These interruptions within the world of the game have narrative significance and gesture
towards social significance; but even before we read those events into the narrative as
such, foremost they immediately appear to us on the horizon of experience as disruptions
of our intentionality and embodied action, and thus as threats or hindrances or problems.
In producing that kind of experience, a game such as Papers, Please also evokes a social
process worth reflecting on.
CONCLUSIONS
Returning to the basic formulation of the phenomenological approach, at this point we
can more clearly correlate the objective structures expressed by the game with the bodily
and subjective perception brought by the player to that game. At its core Papers, Please
is a game of error-checking paperwork. And like many other games, it takes what would
otherwise be tedious drudgery and reshapes the experience. It builds drama around it. It
takes an amorphous activity and gives it a definite shape. To play the game is to play with
that shape, and to feel its texture and its rhythm; that shape gives us access to both the
rewards of playing well and also a hint of the social reality from which that shape was
drawn. The Inspector in the game’s story wants to do his job well so he can feed his
family and not die; by the game’s rules, we want to do his job well so we can earn points
and overcome challenges. The act of play, of bringing our embodied intention and action
to the game, links both those facets together.
An experience that builds such a connection must maintain a careful balance between the
player’s actions and the world that flows out from those actions. A game that deploys
social commentary too self-consciously and too didactically runs the risk of making any
sort of play feel trivial in light of a serious issue; it may deliver a message, but must
slough off its sense of “gameness”, and call to question why it was a game in the first
place. On the other hand, a game that uses the political and social charge of real history
without sufficiently connecting it to the actual gameplay experience ends up
marginalizing the reality of that history and treating it as mere window dressing or
theming.
Papers, Please successfully modulates between those two opposite poles with a
gameplay experience that encourages the player to inhabit a role more effectively than
many actual “role playing” games. At no point in playing did I ever “feel like” the
Arstotzkan Inspector, but the mindset cultivated by successful play – a focus on
efficiency, intensive focus on details to the exclusion of everything else, following the
letter of the law – is the same mindset demanded of the Inspector, and calls to mind the
kinds of attitudes one might develop in the shadow of bureaucratic repression. Specific
choices and events in the game bring this idea to the foreground, but even the basic
elements of the game’s structure and aesthetic help this idea suffuse throughout the world
of the game, and into the player’s sensory, embodied, intentional experience.
In a video playthrough of the game, one reviewer noted a missing document, and instead
of continuing to interrogate the traveler to find out more, he merely stamped the denial
and handed back the papers. The reviewer jokingly added, “I don’t give a fuck about your
story” (Scanlon 2013). At that point in the game it was certainly a valid action, and from
the perspective of earning money and scoring points, even the optimal one, because the
story indeed mattered very little when the papers said it all. In the video’s comments one
viewer mentioned having a similar job to the one in the game, and singling out that
moment, they noted that response as being all too common. Papers, Please provides a
gameplay experience that helps the player cultivate and internalize that mindset yet also
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gives the space to step back and examine that attitude, the reasons for it, and the
consequences it carries. In trying to mix the fun of playing games with the weight of
social realism, it’s a strategy as good as any.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crystal Dynamics. (2013). Tomb Raider. [PC Computer], Square Enix.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Indiana UP,
Bloomington.
Frasca, G. (2001). September 12th. [PC Computer, Web Game], Newsgaming.
Uruguay: played 16 February 2014.
Kirkpatrick, G. (2011). Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester UP, New
York.
Lavelle, S. (2009). Opera Omnia. [PC Computer], Increpare Games, London, UK:
played 16 February 2014.
Nielsen, H.S. (2012). Playing Computer Games: Somatic Experience and Experience
of the Somatic. Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus.
Pope, L. (2013). Papers, Please. [PC Computer], 3909: Played October 2013.
Scanlon, D. (2013). “Quick Look: Papers, Please.” Giant Bomb. Available at
http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-papers-please/2300-7787/
(accessed April 2014)
Sobchack, V. (2011). “Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and
Derek Jarman’s Blue”, in New Takes in Film Philosophy. Edited by Havi Carel
and Greg Tuck. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Team Meat. (2010). Super Meat Boy. [Xbox 360], Microsoft Game Studios.
Walker, J. (2013) “Wot I think: Papers, Please.” Rock Paper Shotgun. Available at
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/12/wot-i-think-papers-please/
(accessed April 2014)
Whitehead, D. (2013) “Papers, Please review.” Eurogamer.net. Available at
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-09-papers-please-review/ (accessed
April 2014)
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