It’s 1982 and the fictional Soviet-style country Arstotzka has just opened a border checkpoint in the war-torn town of Grestin. In this time of high political tension, I was hired by the job lottery to work in the immigration booth. I trudge through the gray streets on my first day and see a long line of people waiting to enter the country. I’m already tired, lean into the tannoy and yell “next!”
These first moments of Lucas Pope’s breakthrough indie game Papers, please, first released in 2013 and launched on mobile this month, will seem unusual to players who grew up with action games. How could this bleak exercise in bureaucracy be anything but tedious? Play for an hour, though, and you’ll discover one of gaming’s most politically sweeping, surprisingly original experiments.
At first glance, my job in the immigration office seems simple: check that each applicant’s papers are in order, then decide whether to accept or reject them, and stamp the decision. I have to look for discrepancies in their documents and in the beginning I often miss small details – a misspelled name or passport numbers that do not match. But the more I play this comprehensive game of spot the differences, the better I get and the more satisfying it feels.
Every morning I receive a telegram imposing new Byzantine rules about who may enter Arstotzka. One day I have to reject all applicants from the neighboring state of Kolechia, on another day foreigners suddenly have to bring an “entry permit” instead of an “entry ticket”. These changes challenge my day-to-day tasks and enrage future migrants. Yet I have no choice but to enforce this inscrutable bureaucratic system.
Why don’t I have a choice? Because at the end of each day I go home to my family and have to decide how I’m going to divide my meager wages. Do I pay for food or heating today? I can’t afford both. Before the end of the first week, my son gets sick with the cold and I can’t afford medicine. He dies and I go back to work the next day. In Papers, please you must choose between responsibility for your family, your job and your conscience.
A lottery allocates jobs in this fictional Soviet-style country
I also feel sympathy for the characters who come into my booth every day and pose interesting riddles. There is a secret organization that wants you to work with them to destabilize the government. Elsewhere, a woman asks me not to let in a dangerous man further down the line. When I see him, his papers are in order, so I approve his entry. The next morning I see in the newspaper that she was murdered. A common motto in the industry says that “a game is a series of interesting decisions”. Few releases take this to heart like Papers, please.
Over time I notice that I am getting harder. A guard gives me money to detain people instead of just sending them away. To keep my family alive, I soon find myself arresting applicants for even minor infractions. This game relentlessly confronts us with our own capacity for inhumanity. Behind this lies another idea: how the structure of an authoritarian state can diminish one’s sense of moral responsibility for one’s actions. If Hannah Arendt had made a game to explore the banality of evil, it would look something like this.
It’s impossible not to dwell on contemporary geopolitics while playing Papers, please. The stories from my booth evoke the Syrian refugee crisis, Trump’s “Muslim ban” and the British plan to deport refugees to Rwanda. At some point there is even a pandemic and I have to go check that the applicants have the correct vaccination certificates. The game skilfully shows how society’s most pressing questions play out at the border.
As Christmas approaches, I go rogue. Hearing of an upcoming audit, I decide to forge passports for my family and flee to neighboring Obristan. This is just one of the game’s 20 possible endings. Now I stand on the other side of the booth for the first time, nervously queuing, with fake paper in my hands. I pray that when the inspector from Obristan comes to me, he will see more than a pile of papers. That he will see my hardships, my fatigue, the difficult choices I’ve had to make. That he will look me in the eye and see that I am human.
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