It’s been more than a year now since the full version
of Lucas Pope’s now fairly well-known instant-hit indie game “Papers, Please”
was released on Steam, and even though there are plenty of reviews about the
game itself already, there are some fundamental concepts that I feel have been almost
if not completely left out from any and all articles about the game that I’ve
read so far[1].
This often seem to result in misunderstandings regarding the game’s theme along
with the misconceiving of some gameplay mechanics as flawed or problematic in
terms of gameplay balancing, while in my experience it’s clear that they’re
designed so in order to effectively support the aforementioned theme.
Papers, Please, is, both in its Steam description
along with its introductory text on Lucas Pope’s website, introduced as a
“Dystopian Document Thriller”. It’s set in the year 1982 in the fictional
communist state of Arstotzka, a country which has just finished a 6-year war
with the neighboring country Kolechia. The division of the border Town Grestin
into East and West is central to the setting, as the player takes the role of a
passport inspector in East Grestin at a border checkpoint between the two when
the border is opened for the first time after the war. The Inspector earns
wages each day for each immigrant correctly allowed into Arstotzka, and the
wages are used to pay for the needs of his[2] family.
However, incorrectly allowing people through will result in severe penalties,
forcing the Inspector to be precise and thorough. Being thorough is little of
an option, however, as the Inspector must work very fast, processing as many
applicants as possible in as little time as possible in order to maximize his
wages each day. The core game spans a time period of a single month, starting
at November 23., and maximally lasting until December 24., where holiday
starts. The game progresses in difficulty as new regulations are enforced each
day, making the process of locating potential discrepancies in the paperwork
increasingly complicated.
It’s very obvious from the aforementioned setting that
Arstotzka is a fictional parallel to multiple countries in the now-defunct
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The game is set in 1982, a time
where the Soviet Union in our world was slowly succumbing to severe economic
crisis. The setting in 1982 takes place merely 4 years before the Chernobyl disaster and
7 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, both events which today serve as
significant symbols of the fall of the Union. The crisis is largely central to
the games setting, as the player experiences the consequences of an increasingly
ineffective bureaucratic system working its way towards its own demise in a way
that actually depicts it both in a fairly engaging and also reasonably nuanced
way.
Bureaucracy, as mentioned before, is an important and
extremely fundamental theme for the gameplay in Papers, Please, being
fundamental in setting, but crucial in its core gameplay mechanics. Just to
clarify, TheFreeDictionary.com offers a couple of handy, and in my opinion
extremely effective definitions of the term, the most relevant to the subject
at hand being this;
“3. An administrative system in which the need
or inclination to follow rigid or complex procedures impedes effective action”
In my experience, however, it seems that the degree to
which the game has been built up around this very concept has been largely
ignored. Instead, articles seem to refer to Papers, Please as a game about mundanity,
or about authority and the moral responsibility that comes with it, but that
seems to me like viewing the casing of the game as its core. While those
elements certainly are present in the game, and while they certainly play an
important part in its design, they are not quite fundamental and certainly
aren’t what separates Papers, Please from so many other games. Really, you
don’t need to go much “deeper” than the Mass Effect series to find more or less
difficult ethical choices, but Papers, Please stands alone with maybe a few
much more obscure titles[3] in
its portrayal of the downfall of an entire political and economic system.
And while it’s a clear critique of the Soviet Union,
it’s more nuanced than one might expect from, well, pretty much any game. Especially
considering that there are next to no games whatsoever starring communists
except for war games, and even then the portrayal of them are usually extremely
antagonizing. For example I recall the horrendous atrocity that is the intro to the game Homefront, and even though that’s an extreme example it’s probably the
most common one in games. One of the elements of Papers, Please that I really
like is the fact that the player can actually complete the game while staying
loyal to Arstotzka, something that isn’t normally the case in games taking
place in clearly totalitarian societies. And even though the Inspector’s living
and working conditions are clearly poor, during conversations with one of the
security guards working at the checkpoint it’s implied that living conditions
in the village the Inspector lived in previously are much worse and that
problems in Kolechia are “ten times worse” than in Arstotzka. Additionally, an
immigrant couple from the nearby country Antegria is overjoyed to finally have
escaped from what the husband refers to as “Antegrian tyranny”. Seemingly some
of the other countries have much worse living conditions than Arstotzka, and
there’s no telling if life was even worse before Arstotzka itself became
communist.
 |
| Jorji Costava serves as both a frustrating obstacle and a comic relief in the game. |
Even more notable is the fact that contrary to what
one might expect, at least what I did, a lot of the things that happen at the
border checkpoint aren’t really all that extreme compared to what happens at
border checkpoints in the west. The game tries quite a few times to encourage
some level of comparison between the different neighboring countries rather
than between East and West, but even then the comparison is totally legit. If
you’ve watched any of those Australian or U.S. border security documentaries
that seem to be aired all the time the methods used in Papers, Please really don’t
seem worse. One of the climatic events during the demo was when the Inspector was
ordered to search specifically Kolechians for weapons, something that would be
in direct violation of human rights in our world, but even though that is the
case I don’t think there’d be any doubt that an African or an Arab trying to
get into Europe will be treated much differently than an American or a Canadian.
The game even goes to show the outcry from the media the searches result in,
leading to the “Search all Kolechians” instruction immediately being removed
the following day. Along with this, being scanned for weapons or drugs, even in
the way it’s portrayed in the game, doesn’t seem much worse than literally having your anus searched for drugs, something that real border security does
have authorization to do, in however much of a civilized way that can be
performed. The threat of terror attacks and smuggling is both in Arstotzka and
in our world the reasoning behind such behavior, and it’s presented as real a
threat in the case of Arstotzka as it is in most western countries today, if not
much more so since the Arstotzkan authorities clearly lack the means to handle
that threat, let alone just keeping people at the checkpoint safe.
 |
| The aftermath of the first terrorist attack on day 2. |
Pointing back to the theme of bureaucracy, having
to follow rigid procedures is exactly what the Inspector must do, all during
the development from day 1 to day 2, day 2 to day 3, and so on. Almost all of
the time the game doesn’t become more difficult neither because the player has
to earn more money than what was needed to start out with, nor because his wage
is lowered. The game becomes difficult because the terrorist attacks at the border
in the wake of the Arztotzkan-Kolechian war forces Arstotzkan authorities to
consequently institute new rules to counter it. And these rules are by no means
introduced without reason, as the Inspector himself experiences multiple terror
attacks in which people are clearly critically injured or killed. But in turn, the constantly changing rules
make it more and more difficult to process each applicant without making
errors, which then, in turn, further eats away from the Inspector’s already
barely sufficient paycheck.
Effectively, the Inspector must work more and more in
order to earn the same pay as he started out with initially. Design wise, it
seems clear to me that the player is never meant to be able to work flawlessly,
and the feelings evoked by finally failing to keep up with working conditions
that are, quite frankly, downright unfair is in itself a big part of the game’s
message.
And that’s exactly why the game had to be designed to be damn near impossible to play without
making mistakes, and equally impossible to play while being able to keep track
of all the documents that must be inspected, and double-checked, and stamped,
and handed back to the applicants, and so on. From the moment that I read the
description of the game at Lucas Pope’s website it seemed obvious that this
isn’t a game that can really thrive on being conventionally “balanced” in terms
of difficulty, and most certainly not by being casual-minded or easy, because that
would completely devalue it as a representation of oppressive life in a
bureaucratic socialist state.
Unsuccessfully
trying to keep track of documents, passports and digits taking up more space
than what’s room for on your desk, having to double-check statements of each
applicant, frantically looking for the discrepancies that inevitably may or may
not be there and holding your breath listening for the familiar sound of an
M.O.A. citation ticking up onto your desk after processing every single
immigrant are all examples of the stressfulness of being expected to do a tedious
job that requires an absurd amount of effectiveness and inhuman attention to
detail that only very few people are actually able to even do. While I guess
that Papers, Please is more than possible to complete with only few errors if
you play the game enough times to learn the limits of its structure and the
sequence of the applicants that are scripted, or just play it on easy mode or
something, I feel that it’s a game that kinda just wants you to jump in
heads-first and try feeding your family in this crazy, paperwork-flooded world.
There is nothing to fear. Work hard.
Glory to Arstotzka.
*All pictures are screenshots taken directly from Papers, Please and edited by me.
[1] Which is to say, not a lot. There
is an interesting analysis by First Person Scholar, however, focusing on the
game’s utilization of failure and victory criteria which you might want to
read.
It
can be found here: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-art-of-papers-please/
[2] ”He” referring to the gender of the
player character.
[3] Lucas Pope has made a few other
titles based on the same universe.
