Papers, Please
Lucas Pope
PC, Mac, iOS, Vita
Rarely are games capable of being as deliberately uncomfortable as Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please. By casting you as an immigrations officer manning the border of the fictional nation of Arstotzka, it first presents your position as a glorious gift from the country’s fabled Labor Lottery program. However it quickly becomes clear that this “prestigious” position isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
For starters the pay isn’t very good. When you’re making life or death decisions, contending with terrorists and/or freedom fighters (depending on your point of view), and going over immigrant documents with a fine tooth comb, a mere $40-60 a day doesn’t really cut it. Especially when it becomes clear what kind of staggering responsibility you have to your employer, and the complications this has to the everyday citizens, refugees and migrant workers of the surrounding nations.
This is one of Papers, Please‘s most subversive elements. By placing your character in such dire financial circumstances, it literally forces you to choose between the survival and well-being of your family or your own moral paradigm. The game features an in-game clock which is running constantly and while you may wish to be thorough, the ticking of time sometimes forces your hand, often to the detriment of yourself or the person on the other side of the booth. Sometimes both.
When you are paid a mere $5 per processed immigrant, you begin to take on a cold disposition. You become machine-like. You know how much of your daily wage is going toward your rent, how much to heat your apartment, and how much to feed your family. There will be times when you will have to choose between buying medicine for your sick father-in-law or buying your son a birthday present. Worse still, there will be times when the poor denizens who come before you will entreat you for help.
Some cases are particularly worrying. One woman will implore you to block access to the man who hired her and her sister for a job. She fears that he means to pimp them out once they are in his grasp. When the man arrives though, his papers are 100% in order. Will you risk not feeding your son or heating your flat, not to mention your very employment, to help this woman? What about a political refugee who tells you he will be killed if you don’t let him in? Or a woman who wishes to visit her dying son just beyond the border checkpoint?
No day is an easy day in Arstozka, and with your small position of authority, these are the kinds of agonizing predicaments you will face. In that sense, it’s hard to see how anyone could find a game like Papers, Please to be fun in any sense of the word. The work bandies between the tediousness of skimming over paper work and the audacity of strip searching or detaining people in order to do your job correctly.
The sheer variety of issues and circumstances that the game calls to mind is staggering in this regard. With sources and inspirations that range from the immigration crisis in the United States to the various forms of Communism throughout the last century to racial and cultural profiling to the fearful implications of phrases like “I was just following orders”, Papers, Please unnerves players and shakes them to their core, forcing them to evaluate and then re-evaluate everything they initially think about the concepts of right and wrong.
As an evocative piece of art, Papers, Please is utter perfection. It is a game that makes us think about politics, morality, ideology, and our own personal responsibility to the world, and to the struggles of our fellow man. As a dystopia, it is the utter definition of a nightmare, as it is impossible to look into its soot and gun-powder covered mirror without seeing a distorted version of one’s self staring back.
