I think about this game a lot. At least once or twice a week. It used to be more, but then I became self-employed.

There are a lot of great journalistic thinkpieces and independent navel-gazing out there that very accurately surmise Papers, Please as an excellent depiction of the inherent inhumanity of border control as well as what it's like to live under a fascist regime even in a position of 'power'.

Those are all valid and well done, I love them myself, but there's one angle I rarely if ever see come up:

This game is a shockingly and deeply uncomfortable representation of what it's like to work in customer service, administration, or - god forbid - Human Resources.

It's easy to nod and maybe even laugh when you're told "Dismiss anyone who seems suspicious. Typos are the devil. Anyone from [x] region." I sure did when this game came out.

Then I was put in charge of filtering out CVs and highlighting 'suitable applicants'. I was told to dismiss anyone with inconsistencies or oddities, to immediately shred a CV with any typos, and to be [direct quote] "cognizant of anything unusual on the name front". Many of the people I authorized made it to the interview and failed miserably. Suddenly, the game becomes a lot more real. I quit that job after a year or so.

People often bring up how awful it is to be faced with someone who's broken the rules or is a 'valid rejection' despite making earnest pleas, having family or some other such reason. I often bring up how, working for both a large retailer and a branch of the government which dealt with benefits claimants, this was my average shift. Indeed, if you've been on either side of claiming benefits in the UK (I've been on both), this game goes from uncomfortable to stomach churning. There's a reason I quit the latter job within three months.

And, in both the game and bureaucracy, 'doing good' is at best inconvenient and at worst actively self-sabotaging. It's nice to do good. It's nice to be nice. But apartments cannot be warmed as easily as hearts, and while you may be okay with a heartfelt 'thanks' from a desperate customer/claimant, landlords tend to prefer cash. In PP the consequences are an immediate citation, in reality they're far more insidious. 5 shifts on the schedule turns into 2, and 2 turns into 0. All without a word, a tyrannical silent punishment for the sin of having a soul. Not as instant as a citation, but the effects are the same.

Unlike reality, however, PP believes in empowerment. You, a lowly border control inspector, can potentially dismantle the fascist regime you operate under and really stick it to the machine. It's nice, cathartic even. This game's most emotional moments are often the understated weight of a hopeless person coming up against the dehumanizing maws of fascism and passing through unscathed, conveyed with little more than sprites and brief popup text. Lucas Pope's specialty, honestly.

But in a game so deeply steeped in the miserable, beige parts of the modern world, it's the one part which is sadly divorced from it. A world where middle managers can effortlessly snuff out any act of rebellion is not a world where one goblin in a cubicle can tear down capitalism. Sometimes, your rebellion never gets further than sighing and offering someone a 100% refund when they're only entitled to 75%, and then bullshitting your manager that they had a 'convincing story' (your dad lies better) and 'you were tired' (of the job, perhaps, but the 3 coffees in my body are necromantic).

I come back to this game a lot. I own it on Steam and have for about 7 years now, but I always play it on a pirated copy I stuck on a USB stick ages ago. Dunno why. Maybe it makes me nostalgic for using it to slack off at, ironically, my old receptionist job. I like to read what people think of it, but am always a bit disheartened to see a somewhat rigid interpretation of the game as just about border control, fascism or the Soviet Union. No other game has captured just how corruptive, anti-human and so deeply boring the evils of bureaucracy are.

There's an ending you can get if you remain loyal to the government. You only need to be loyal. Doesn't matter if you're bad at your job, only that the Arstotzkan government knows you say 'thank you sir' as its iron grip tightens around your throat. I got this ending on my most recent playthrough. It reminded me of a good 60% of my managers, and a co-worker I had named Charlie who they kept on despite being in the throes of dementia. I hope he's getting the care he needs.

I don't work admin/clerical jobs anymore. I don't have the inhumanity in me, I'm afraid. The last job I ever worked told me not to say "terminate" when closing a call with a distressed customer because it might make them upset.
The closest I get is when I help people fill out forms for the DWP, or fight sanctions imposed on them for missing an appointment scheduled at 7am when they live 5 miles away. Companies and agencies are staffed by people, and people are easily inconvenienced. Not even the most ardent DWP believer wants to read a 4000 word rebuttal to a sanction they lazily approved on a Friday evening. Sometimes, being annoying is more effective than being compliant.

So, anyway, do you remember Jorji Costava?

I've had Papers, Please on my wishlist for many years. Finally picked it up for very cheap recently as part of the game's 10 year anniversary. Playing it taught me that I've been 10 years late to the party.

In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.

Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.

There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!

This kind of detail oriented, bureaucratic, deadline enforced puzzle solving is exactly the kind of thing my monkey accountant-brain excels at. This game was tough and it stressed me out.

I loved the aesthetics and the subtle world building that encourages you to piece things together through various small hints. There were some legitimate moral quarrels I felt throughout the game which added to the stress of it all.

I wish there weren't so many insta-lose scenarios, but other than that I loved this game. Lucas Pope has suddenly cemented himself as a favorite game developer.

Glory to Arstotzka!

88/100

✅ 81%
Who would have thought that a job as a border crossing inspector and paper work could be so much fun?
That's what Papers, Please offers, with its wonderful pixel graphics, fantastic sound design, reference to history and wonderful storyline.
It's a lot of fun and the story with its 20 different endings is really good. The graphics are wonderful, this pixel design fits perfectly with this genre and type of game.
Truly a masterpiece

up there with pathologic in terms of games that hit a bit too close to home lmao. real post-ussr kids remember! also maybe i am insane but i liked the "boring" part of checking documents maybe i just need to be a clerk irl /j

also i think this was the first game i ever played where gameplay and story interacted so much. and for that it was so much more memorable. i remember oscillating between either finding every decision nailbiting, or succumbing to the routine of the work and doing cruel things, and all the story events that would happen... i don't think any other game left me feeling quite like it.

i also don't think i would ever be able to replay it again because back when i first played it i didn't even realize i was trans or just comprehended the "wrong gender on documents" aspect as much and now i will never be able to face it again </3

I just can't stand this game and its dullness when I've done similar jobs in real life. Hell it was way more interesting in real life, I'm not stuck with the same generic and very limited information so I can actually learn stuff going through someone's files.

So I sure don't work for the soviet governement but I absolutely can't relate to this game one bit. We also made tough calls from time to time but I can't relate it to this game.

I really can't get into this type of gameplay.

One of the seminal entries in the "games Brian Griffin would make" genre, except the surrounding game is decent.

Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.

The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.

It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.

It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.

I've yet to play a game that so thoroughly allows for such compelling moral decision making, weaving narrative and mechanics perfectly. While you yourself are a victim of the totalitarian regime you work for, you wield a large amount of power with that stamp. Of course you have to think of your family, but what benefits your family often time comes at the expense of other innocent people. It's not about whether you are complicit or not but about how complicit you are willing to be. Making these decisions are not easy and are made even more difficult due to your limited time and need for enough money to survive. I felt a ton of pressure to just send people one way or another as quickly as possible and put them out of mind so I could focus on the next person; the constant stream of monotonous work is numbing and yet there are real consequences to your actions whether you know it or not.

But sometimes there aren't. Sometimes you send someone away who desperately needs to get in and nothing happens, you just have to live with what you've done. Games focused around morality are difficult to make because they require confidence that your audience with fully engage with the game and unfortunately I don't think Lucas Pope had that confidence because the inclusion of an endless mode gets rid of everything that makes this game amazing and is not something I'd ever want to play. Yes, being good at the job is very satisfying, but that is a source of horror for me not one of pride or accomplishment.

At the end of each day you get a report on your earnings, expenses, and the well being of your family. It is incredibly distressing to have to decide if your family will go without food or heat for the day, or having to pick which sick family member gets medicine and which does not. Choosing who to trust, who to help, who to ignore, who to throw under the bus, all while keeping your family safe, is virtually impossible and creates an incredibly stressful and sometimes disorienting experience. One moment that really stuck with me out of all the little story threads is when your son gives you a drawing of yourself, calling you a hero. Of course, if you make it to that point in the game you most certainly are not. I'm amazed at how well made this game is it's so fucked up.

Papers, Please is a McCarthyist 'critique' on communism, made by an American who knows nothing about communism.

It is the usual propaganda about the Soviet Union: poverty, brutal regimentation, breadlines, and violent suppression. This is an incredibly reactionary view of the USSR that isn't historically accurate at all, but Lucas Pope, like many conditioned liberals, has bought into it wholesale.

Arstotzka is 1960s East Germany, after the Berlin wall was constructed. The political backdrop is the Cold War, but Pope has taken a side here in exaggerating the 'dystopian horrors' of Communism, while giving the West, especially America, pretty much a free pass. This is a game about immigration, but Pope, a citizen of a country with one of the most brutally hellish immigration processes in human history, thought the best vehicle for this would be a long-gone regime with no relevance on the global stage.

It is telling that Pope's inspiration for the game came from his direct experiences with travel from the US to Asia and back again. From Wikipedia:

"From his travels in Asia and some return trips to the United States, he became interested in the work of immigration and passport inspectors: "They have a specific thing they're doing and they're just doing it over and over again."[8] He recognized the passport checking experience, which he considered "tense", could be made into a fun game.[4][6]"

What led Pope, a white man, to immediately think of Communism when he experienced the hellish ordeal of American Capitalism?

Pope has said that he intentionally avoided references to real world Communist nations for "narrative freedom" in a game that proudly declares "Experience the Communist state of Arstotzka" on its product description page. Also from Wikipedia:

"Pope also based aspects of the border crossing for Arstotzka and its neighbors on the Berlin Wall and issues between East and West Germany, stating he was "naturally attracted to Orwellian communist bureaucracy".[11] He made sure to avoid including any specific references to these inspirations, such as avoiding the word "comrade" in both the English and translated versions, as it would directly allude to a Soviet Russia implication.[9] Using a fictional country gave Pope more freedom in the narrative, not having to base events in the game on any real-world politics and avoiding preconceived assumptions.[10]"

And yet, the end result is exactly that, and somehow even worse. By removing history and specificity, Pope has given himself license to strawman Communism however way he wants. And if someone smart enough calls him out, he can very slyly go "Actually, none of these countries exist, bro ;)."

Pope wants it both ways: he's using real world propaganda in a 'fictionalized' way. But the ghost of Mccarthyism has made Red Peril omnipresent. The player, through Capitalist media and education, is conditioned enough to put the pieces together. When they play Papers, Please, they're thinking of the Soviet Union, they're thinking of China, they're thinking of Venezuela or whatever other State Capitalist country that has been coded Blood Red Commie.

His latest game Unsolicited seems to be an 'anti-capitalist' mea culpa of sorts, focusing instead on...writing emails and junk mail? To Pope, the horrors of Communism/socialism are mass genocide, long lines of immigrants being denied their own freedom, and a ruthless black-hearted government hellbent on using the blood of its own citizens to fuel the war machine.

The horror of Capitalism is spam mail.

Much like Ken Levine and the Bioshock team, Pope's ideal future is neither late-stage capitalism nor communism, but a make-believe in-between. Papers, Please is a damning demonstration of the liberal-fascism compromise that isn't concerned with the history of Capitalist violence. Pope plays very irresponsibly hard and fast with real world anti-leftist politics, which has very real world implications.

Papers, Please is still an incredibly impressive game considering it came out in 2013 and was developed by a single person. No playthrough is the same, and there are a total of 20 endings. But how is a game about mundane labor so much fun?!

Firstly, I think the developer captured the interaction with characters that travel to Arstotzka perfectly: most are impatient, incompliant and rude. They often don't even provide their forged documents to you at first in the hopes you will forget to ask for them, which is something I would imagine real people would try as well. It feels great to deny them entry, especially when they behaved particularly badly. Yet, there are also people who show lightheartedness and love who need your assistance in dire circumstances. Are you going to help them, even if it would technically not be allowed? Papers, Please manages to pull on your heartstrings very well, making you have to choose between what's right and wrong (which everyone has a different interpretation of).

Secondly, the story is packed with temptations for money and revolution, as well as violent scenarios that still jumpscare the hell out of me whenever they happen, even though I have finished the game multiple times now. The first time you play, you really do not know what to expect. This is one of those games you wish would disappear from your memory entirely, to be able to play it blindly once more.

The only aspect of Papers, Please that I find particularly frustrating is the finnickiness of it all. I understand that sorting through documents is like that in real life, but the added items separated from character's documents can really clutter up your workspace, making it difficult to grab, let alone find some of the items you do need.

I'm glad I decided to give this game a go about 8 years ago, because it remains one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. I do recommend people take breaks in between in-game days, as playing the entire game in one go can be quite tiring. Don't be fooled, Papers, Please requires your full attention and concentration the whole way through!

During the press tour for Terminator: Dark Fate, the director Tim Miller in an interview with Polygon was asked about the film's use of border patrol and a detention center from Mexico to the US for one sequence. Quoting directly:

"I tried to walk a line there because it’s a terrible situation, but I didn’t want to vilify border guards. They’re people doing a job. The system is the problem. And even the choice to do it really wasn’t a statement. It really was a function of us putting the story’s beginning in central Mexico and then traveling. It was just a natural evolution of the story rather than me saying or Jim saying or anybody saying, “Hey, we got to make a social comment here.” It was really just an interesting story. I didn’t want to vilify anybody. I have a lot of sympathy for immigrants and the whole process."

Now, obvious to anyone who's actually watched the movie, the film is very much taking a stance on border patrol when the protagonists literally beat up border patrol guards to escape while a Terminator pursues them. So why would Tim Miller explicitly state that 'the choice' to depict border patrol 'wasn't a statement'?

Well, obvious answer is he's a bit of a coward who didn't want criticism for depicting border patrol in a negative light, but digging deeper it also reflects a lack of willingness to criticize systemic issues rooted in border patrol despite literally stating 'the system is the problem'. In order words, he wanted the aesthetics of the setting without having to deal with any of its complexities.

For me, Papers, Please is quite rooted in this type of framework. The setting of the game is the Soviet Union in the 1980s, only with the serial numbers filed off. This means the game is indulging in the aesthetics of what an American thinks the Soviet Union was like, while deliberately being able to shy away from deeper critiques of how this reflects McCarthyism ways of thinking about this real historical setting.

Let's talk what you are literally doing mechanically in the game: going through a minimum wage job and doing it as efficiently as possible, while struggling to make hard decisions about how to budget your home life so your family doesn't starve/freeze to death. The work you are doing is deliberately designed so that you are incentivized to dehumanize the people you determine the fates of by allowing or not allowing to cross the border.

While there are definitely critiques that can be made on the fact the game is humanizing a border patrol officer and not so much the people affected by said officer, on the whole what makes the game feel so dissonant returning to it is that many of its deeper critiques apply to capitalist methods of border patrol rather then the 'communist dystopia' that the game and marketing often insists.

Consider, for instance, that the name of the game 'Papers, Please' is derived from terminology that is commonly associated with Nazi soldiers during the 1940s as popularized by Casablanca, and in modern context is almost entirely associated with border patrol measures in America and not the Eastern Bloc. This indicates the designer of the game is conflating McCarthy propaganda about the Soviet Union with practices that have existed and currently exist in the modern day US. Similar to the example I gave with Terminator: Dark Fate, the designer wanted the aesthetics of a 'brutal regime' without thinking through the implications of what he was pulling from, which makes the game a bit of a political Rorschach test rather then something particularly meaningful on its own.

The idea of a game in which you are forced to be complicit in a regime that is actively cruel to members of society who are disadvantaged is a genuinely compelling concept, and some of the game's best moments come from singular moral decisions you make based on judgements of individual people you personally make. If you're willing to let a poor woman go so she can see her son, how do you justify the denials you make for other people? Where does your moral code have to be discarded so you can get through the day?

The fundamental issue, however, is the game really doesn't want you to think on it any deeper then that. It is using these mechanics in order to create moral complexity in the player's head that is not being reflected in the game itself. Whether you let someone go or not mechanically and narratively often does not particularly matter, compounded by the game's unwillingness to develop The Order of the EZIC Star's politics beyond being an Other to the regime you are under. You are meant to make snap, individual judgements on all of the politics in the game, which functionally only serves to be a mirror to yourself and not act as insightful towards changing your perspective on history or dehumanization despite the game's 20 endings.

As a contrast, part of why the game Undertale is so effective (despite some issues) is that it is a deep mechanical critique of how dehumanization works in RPGs. Instead of ignoring the acts of violence you participate in to level up arbitrary numbers, it treats that as something worth pondering and considering. Why DO you repeat these actions in games? Why has 'mobs of enemies' been normalized within the genre in order to enact mechanical repetition? Undertale seeks to question the structures implied by existing mechanical design, and that is reflected in the narrative itself with how characters react to you due to your actions, since as it turns out if you kill someone's friends they might be a little pissed off.

Ultimately Papers, Please is a very much a product of its time, and in the current year this type of apolitical whatifism is completely at odds to the very real dehumanization of people that is easy to see from casual glances at social media. Dehumanization is not a speculative concept, it is real and it is present now.