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.
"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.