Papers, Please is an engaging, unique, and fun game for Windows PCs. In this RPG simulation, you serve as an immigration inspector, checking everyone’s papers at the border. Your job is to stop. Papers, Please is a quirky little independent game, in which the player has to stop certain people from crossing the border into their country. The twist that makes this game unique comes in the form of. Papers, Please is very reminiscent of chess, it’s easy to pick up and very hard to master. You’ll find the initial processing of applicants a fair challenge and enjoyable, and will quickly master noticing minute discrepancies in traveler data.
Papers, Please has always been an indie darling: and I do have a lot of respect for it! It’s one of the best examples to my mind of how mechanics can impart a mindset in the player, and how the mindset can tell a story all by itself. On some level, I do think it’s still one of the best examples of interacting with authoritarian power structures I’ve ever seen, and how it makes you think, feel, act within them. It is absolutely a triumph from a purely mechanical standpoint, and definitely deserves most of the accolades it got. I’m not here to argue Papers, Please is secretly bad: it’s not. It’s really good, and if you want a game that explores the ways mechanics can truly help you engage with and understand your relation to the concepts at play, you should absolutely play it. That being said, something has always bugged me about this game. Less for what it is on its own face, and more for the ways in which it interacts with the culture around us, and how the game doesn’t seem to recognize the context in which it has been released. I want to discuss how the context of a game can seriously impact the message it sends, and why that is a concern that should not be ignored.
Papers Please Cheat Sheet
So, to get the obvious out of the way: Papers, Please is clearly based on the Eastern Bloc in the 1900’s, pulling from the aesthetic of the USSR and the political tensions and happenings of the time. You’ve been drafted into the role of the border guard, dealing with the quickly changing policies and rules of the region, as a war has ended. Domestic policy will harshly punish you and your family for not upholding state policies in your job, no matter how inhumane. Broadly, then, this is clearly meant to be an allegory for the authoritarian tendencies of the USSR, and how such a system has impacts on the average people who must live in such a system. The aesthetics of the game, the music, all of it is clearly meant to evoke this time period and political unrest that came along with it. On the surface, I have very little issue with such a framing. The USSR was indeed an authoritarian state that perpetuated many imperialist tendencies, with the requisite impacts on the citizens such a system inevitably invites. It’s not a state worth defending, and it is a well known and striking example of an authoritarian state in history, making it a fair choice to frame allegorically as a critique and exploration of authoritarianism. The game itself avoids any bad history by making a fictional world instead of a piece of historical fiction, and this serves it well, leaving the focus on aesthetics and ideology instead of the fraught history that an indie game of this scope probably wasn’t equipped to handle. That being said, I don’t have an issue with this game… by itself. However, no work is released in a contextless void, and this is where I find Papers, Please tends to stumble. It was an indie game being released in the modern age to a primarily western audience, and man, it did not seem to understand the problems with that.
The red scare is an extremely well documented phenomenon in many of these areas, particularly in America. For a variety of political reasons (that I do NOT have time to get into), communist infiltration was a fearmongering tactic pushed by the state, along with a general distaste for the ideology being promoted. In particular, the overtly authoritarian structure of the USSR led the majority of the public to conflate communist ideology with authoritarian government structures. In essence, the west was framed as capitalist and capitalism being free, and the USSR being communist and communism being restrictive and authoritarian. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that this definition of communism is hot nonsense: read even a tiny amount of theory and it’s clear that communism is an economic system and is matter of fact, stateless. Regardless of your feelings on the ideology, it is simply factual that communism and authoritarianism are separate entities, not hand in hand at all. Regardless, there has been a concerted effort in many western nations to conflate the two, and to make people think of authoritarianism as communism, inherently. This means that unfortunately, exposure to critiques of the authoritarian aspects of the USSR means that many people will assume that these critiques then apply to the ideology of communism across the board. Media wishing to discuss the USSR in an honest framing runs into this issue then, and without proper consideration is going to lead people into an inaccurate application of the message. Perhaps this is unfair, but it is a real consideration that needs to be taken in a culture so steeped in the effects of the red scare. Papers, Please does not really take this into account one bit.
So, here’s the problem. Papers, Please is clearly a pointed experience meant to only communicate ideas about authoritarianism. Nothing about the economic system of the fictional Arstotzka is told, and you’re even paid with bonuses and deduced pay for mistakes, something rather opposite to communist ideology. All the political elements of the game relate to the power structures of government, and plot points such as a citizen uprising focus on such issues, rather than the economics. The entire scope of the gameplay revolves around how an individual deals with harsh and uncompromising state policy, for crying out loud. Papers, Please, is so clearly about authoritarianism, and yet, the use of USSR aesthetics is inevitably going to mislead a lot of people into thinking it’s about the economic system of communism at the same time. I remember when I was younger, not as tuned into politics or history, and I played this game? Yeah, I genuinely thought this was a critique of what communism would lead to, about how the USSR’s stated goals would always lead to this. How many people with a similar level of engagement with these topics are going to take this away from the game, particularly in the culture they’re in? Maybe this is unfair to the game, but this is a genuine problem it doesn’t want to contend with. Understanding of leftist politics is not promoted in many areas of the world for many reasons, and a nuanced history of the USSR even less so. If you release a work that is going to mislead anyone with a baseline understanding of the topic, and you know most of the people who will engage will have that baseline understanding, is that not in some way irresponsible on the part of the creator? Papers, Please, implies the USSR was broadly not good for its citizens due to the authoritarian elements of the state, and while this is a reasonable assertion on its own, it is not a clear assertion within the context of a common western mindset.
I wonder how Papers, Please will come off in the future. In 100 years, perhaps the red scare will have passed, and somebody will want to go back and play this game. How will it come across then? Will the messages about authoritarianism come through clearer? If somebody does not associate the USSR’s brand of state with what leftist ideologies inherently are, will they not be misled by what this game is saying? It feels like this is the mindset that Papers, Please should be taking place in, clearly understanding what it’s about, and being able to engage with it on those honest terms. The game wants you to understand the specific messages and framing it provides, understanding how an oppressive state gets people to think. It’s not about anything else! And yet, the game seems to assume that players will come in with a clear and focused mind, but I’m sorry to say, that is not the reality this game released into. I would not be shocked if many people had their notions against “communism” in their mind strengthened as a result of playing this game, seeing it as a critique of this economic system because no part of the game really does much to push back against their faulty premise. I don’t know how fair this is to the game, but at the same time, I can’t deny that part of its legacy is showing people that their red scare cultural assumptions are correct. That’s a problem, right? We can talk all day about how Papers, Please would be taken in a void, how somebody would read it if they had no cultural exposure to the red scare, but really, that’s never going to happen. It was a game released primarily in western markets, it’s had most of its exposure in these areas, and it doesn’t seem to want to consider that. It wouldn’t have needed much, but even a little bit of consideration could have gone a long way.
Maybe this isn’t fair: isn’t it on the individual to properly understand what a work is putting out? Maybe, in some ways, but at the same time, regional considerations exist in creative works for a reason. Imagine if you made a story entirely based off a Chinese cultural touchstone, assuming the audience is familiar with it, and then released it primarily in America with no guidance for that audience. They’d be completely confused and lost about the primary scope of the story: they aren’t familiar with this touchstone! It wouldn’t be fair to expect them to be. This is why localization exists and takes time, because works often need to be slightly molded and fit into the area they’re releasing in to make sure the audience will get what’s being put down. While this isn’t localization, the underlying premise of a piece of work needing to match the audience where they stand is a common consideration. Fandom zines, for example, often proceeded on the assumption that the reader was already interested and needed no explanation of the fandom: but that style would never be used when trying to explain what’s up with this group to a newcomer. So much stuff in life is explicitly crafted to be suitable to the mindset of an intended audience, so when a piece of work clearly has failed to take this into account, I think that’s worth criticism. How much, how severe, and how much this reflects on the game? Well, that’s up to the individual.
Papers Please Cheat Sheet
I’ve made my stance clear: I think this game has clearly failed to consider how the messages it sends out will be taken, and as a result becomes lesser in the time and place it was released in. You can’t divorce games from the context around them, and as a result, I think this has severely muddied the legacy Papers, Please holds in a noticeable way. You might disagree: but I think it’s clear that, in some way, a failure to consider audience reactions has produced an effect of some kind. This doesn’t diminish what Papers, Please has done well, but a careful consideration about the ways in which the aesthetics used affected the audience response is important. I’ll still never forget how scared of the fictional government the mechanics made me, how it made me ignore the humanity of others for my own perceived safety. That said a lot to me, and it made me consider my own relation to power structures and how I act under them. But regardless, this game is not perfect, and I worry it ended up pushing an uncritical red scare view in many people because it failed to consider the mindset that they’d hold. Games are more than what they are in a void: they’re whole experiences that rely on the context and culture they’re being experienced in to truly form a picture of the effect the work will have. I think it’s extremely important to consider when games become lesser because of the world around them: perhaps it’s unfair. But then, games will never be experienced in a void. It’s just more honest to consider their effects as they really are.
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There’s a certain dehumanizing impulse that comes with mastering game systems. It is articulated through the dissonance between Nathan Drake as-he-appears-in-cutscenes and the Nathan Drake whose actions correspond to a controller’s thumbsticks. It is the reason why genetic algorithms have been used to plan the “perfect” build order in StarCraft 2. Processes are fertile ground for privileging economy of action and thought. This is so ingrained in contemporary game design that player progress is often measured by the increasing complexity of game mechanics: by adding new abilities, introducing more difficult foes, more challenging environments, etc.
In his 2013 book, The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul briefly examines the motivations of players that obsessively “min-max” or optimize their gaming strategy, often to the detriment of their sense of fun; players will find an effective strategy and continue to use it, even though it turns what should be a fun experience into a mind-numbing, repetitive chore (60-61). Juul suggests that this behaviour illustrates what he calls the “paradox of failure,” which is “the combination of a short-term goal of avoiding failure and an aesthetic goal of engaging in an activity that includes failure” (62). He goes on to say that designers must “[make] sure that the path of least resistance is also the most interesting one” (62). Juul’s general point is that games (and in particular, video games) are always a form of emotional gambling, and his main assertion in the text is “failure in games tells us that we are flawed and deficient. As such, video games are the art of failure, the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure” (30).
It is this focus on failure and human flaws that, on the surface, suggests a useful convergence between Papers, Please (2013) and Juul’s The Art of Failure. Papers, Please is a game in which its ever-changing rules create a claustrophobic experience for the player, who feels as though the game’s processes actively work against them, rather than in the service of gradual mastery or slowly-mounting difficulty. Rather than concern itself with traditional fail states, Papers, Please exposes the player to ambiguous failure and typically treats “failure” as an “ending.”
Set in a dystopian version of the 1980s, the player takes on the role of an immigration officer for Arstotzka, a fictional Eastern Bloc country. Every day, the player receives edicts that make their job more difficult. Even when these edicts add new mechanics (new document types, lists of wanted criminals, etc.) it is also an agglomeration of newer, more subtle points of failure for the player. In addition to the steady difficulty creep of ensuring that the documents of every NPC are in order, players must also provide for their family. For every NPC that is successfully processed and properly approved or denied, the player receives $5. If the player approves someone with faulty documentation, or rejects someone that should have been cleared, they are not paid and receive a warning. After 3 warnings, they are then docked $5 for every subsequent error. Fail to make enough money to cover rent at the end of the day, and the game ends. Fail to make enough money to feed your family and pay for heat, and your family will fall ill. If you are not able to provide medication soon enough, a sick family member will die. Lose all of your family members and, again, the game ends.
Add to these constraints the very real possibility that a terrorist attack will cut the day short – every day is on a timer, meaning fewer NPCs will be processed – and Papers, Please quickly convinces the player that the optimum strategy is to immediately reject suspicious documents, ignore pleas for mercy or assistance as every doubt entertained is wasted time and a step closer to losing a loved one or ending the game entirely. Without being pedantic, Papers, Please perfectly critiques that dehumanizing impulse of mastery even as it introduces a moral dimension that goes well beyond simple binary choices. Players are neither Hitler reincarnate nor a saint. They’re just doing their level best in a situation where every new rule, every new mechanic works against them. The only thing that the player needs to excel in Papers, Please, is time, which becomes ever more scarce and important as the game progresses.
In Papers, Please, the question is: can you, the player, live with yourself if you follow the “path of least resistance” or optimal strategy in terms of the game’s mechanics. To return to Juul’s suggestion that designers must make the path of least resistance the “most interesting,” designer Lucas Pope did not create a balanced world for the player – the “path of least resistance” is interesting only in retrospect. It demands that players engage completely with the mechanics and ignore any narrative justification for their actions beyond the premise of the game; players are only faced with the consequences of those actions in an ending cutscene. It embodies what it means to be an unthinking cog in a great uncaring machine in a way that leaves the player with a real feeling of culpability. Which is to say, players taking the “path of least resistance” actively ignore Pope’s excellent narrative elements, which taunt with their alluring suggestions of escape from the banality of checking documentation. However, it is at this point that Papers, Please illuminates a few of my problems with what Juul has to say in The Art of Failure.
Juul asserts throughout his text that “failure” is an intrinsic aspect to games, which raises the question: how does this work for games without fail states, or games that do not conform to traditionally-defined fail states. In fact, when asked about Every Day the Same Dream (2009), a game in which players are presented with an “everyday” routine not unlike Papers, Please and also features a non-traditional approach to fail states, Juul’s response was a little problematic.
Juul initially tries to brush Every Day the Same Dream off as anomalous, a parody of traditional game design. Then he shifts to talking about games as a sort of personal goal-setting, not unlike players self-imposing their own sets of rules, which certainly comes up later in the book in the form of a triad of goals that players largely set for themselves: Completable goals (typically to be completed once, like a single-player campaign), Transient goals (things to be repeated, like winning a certain amount of multiplayer matches) and Improvement goals (fixated on continuous personal improvement). And finally, Juul traps himself, fluttering helplessly against the cage of ill-defined failure and success that he himself built, especially as the fail/success binary applies to subjective, personal experiences. And for Juul, “games are always personal” (90). For Juul’s text to work, it requires that games meet it on its own terms – traditional game design with pre-designed fail states (or players that are already engaged in setting their own voluntary constraints – which, as I’ve noted before, are often already in the service of critiquing traditional game design).
Fundamentally, Juul’s failure lies in his definition of failure: “there are two types of failure in games: real failure occurs when a player invests time into playing a game and fails; fictional failure is what befalls the character(s) in the fictional game world” (25). Both are predicated on the goals of the player and the ostensible goals of the player character generally lining up. This is immediately problematic in any game that attempts to explore the fissures between a player’s expertise and how that articulates itself through amoral or asocial behaviour. While Papers, Please is the putative topic of this article, I’ve had to spend far more words than I’d like trying to shore up Juul’s concept of “failure” to the game. Make no mistake, Papers, Please is just one game among many that already does more with failure than Juul manages to throughout his entire text. Papers, Please does this by dint of its non-traditional approach to narrative.
Early on, the player is contacted by a mysterious group of revolutionaries, EZIC. They ask you to break the rules. EZIC’s initial requests are benign enough: let through some people who do not have proper documentation. However, as the game progresses, EZIC will demand more of the player. They will give you absurd amounts of money (which, in turn, will arouse suspicion from your neighbours). They will ask you to kill. They co-opt the player’s story such that it is folded into the story of revolution, of resisting a corrupt regime. It is EZIC’s story of resistance that most closely resembles traditional video game narratives, where the player must act for an ephemeral “greater good.” However, following EZIC’s instructions has also led to my death or arrest many, many times.
The way that Papers, Please handles fail states is this: if a player can’t pay their rent, they’re sent to debtor’s prison and the game ends. They can then reload the last day they completed and continue on with their story. If a player loses all their family members, the game ends again, but they can roll back to whatever day they wish and play from there. If the player follows EZIC’s instructions closely, they will eventually be arrested. The game ends, and the player can continue from their latest day or hop all the way back to the day that EZIC first contacted them. What Juul might consider real failures are just endings to one particular story. One instance of a player interacting with the game. Every ending is treated exactly the same way, with a few screens of text and graphics that outline the player’s fate. Most of which are predictably bleak, and would constitute a Juul-ian “fictional failure,” but the harsh sting of those fictional fail states is subverted by the game’s bleak atmosphere. The player anticipates that things are not going to go well for their character, and adjusts their expectations accordingly. The only time that the game clearly expresses any sort of preference in terms of player behaviour is with “Endless mode.” Initially, players only have access to Story mode. To unlock “Endless mode,” players must end the game with their job intact. This means that they must ignore EZIC. They must incur as few citations as possible. They must sublimate any heroic impulses and ignore the NPCs that ask for help. They must “master” the game by being unsympathetic, by privileging game processes over their humanity.
Papers Please Free Download
Be a good, unthinking and obedient cog within the game’s machinations and Papers, Please will reward you for it. It is as potent an indictment of game mastery as I have encountered, and 2013 has seen its share of AAA titles that have tried to complicate the heroic narrative tropes that accompany mechanical mastery or otherwise critique the affective inhumanity of procedural mastery – often problematically, and rarely with resounding success. At every turn, these huge budget games have had to kowtow to certain established design decisions. Whether it’s by including incongruous arena-style combat sections or by insisting that a female protagonist cannot resonate with some putative target demographic until she is forced through a slasher film apotheosis into a survivor/“final girl” figure, these AAA titles compromise too much (or just have too much going on) for me to accept that their criticism is successful. In a year in which the games industry at large has started making efforts across the board to address its pervasive privileging of mastery, it’s all the more impressive that a small indie game like Papers, Please manages to outdo them all. And yet, it is a good sign that there have been so many games that gleefully complicate the concept of player “failure” and “success” in 2013. It makes it harder for Juul to write off Papers, Please as a simple deviation from traditional game design.