Video games have always been a part of my life. Occasionally these games will stick with me after I finished them or moved on. Few have stuck with me like the bleak bureaucracy of “Papers, Please”. In Papers, Please you play a man living in the fictional communist nation of Astotzka with his extended family. The premise is that you won a government lottery for the coveted job of border control officer. You must review the documents for entering the country and determine with the goal of allowing those in with the proper paperwork and denying all others. It feels like a simple and perhaps an even boring process, but the trick is that the game is playing you.
The game play almost exclusively is in the border control booth where you work. During your working time you have a view of the outside. Despite taking up a third of the screen, the only thing you can do in that area is summon the next person into your booth from the never ending line of people. In the booth proper you have a rule book, a voice recorder (used for interrogating people), and your stampers “APPROVED” and “DECLINED” to determine the fate of the person seeking entry to Astotzka.
A typical interview goes along these lines. Person walks in and hands you a passport and other documents. You need to review these to make sure they reflect the right names, dates, countries, and other details. If their paperwork is in order you stamp “APPROVED” in their passport and if not you stamp “DECLINED”. Then you return all their documents and they depart. When you find “Discrepancies” you can question the person about it, or just reject them outright. You’ll discover it is usually faster to do the later.
When your workday is done it is time to get paid. If you worked hard and processed enough paperwork then you will have money for rent, food, and heat. If you didn’t you may need to choose where the money goes. This is where your family comes in. They are never seen, they are just status indicators on the side of the screen, OK or not. If you can’t afford food and heat they will start to become sick and die.
You virtually sit in this booth and look up at the never ending line every 10-30 seconds to summon the next person, processing as many of these people as you can so your family can eat. If you make mistakes your get fined. It feels stressful, mundane, numbing and that is when they hit you. The people ask to defect through you. They ask to allow their loved ones in without the proper paperwork. They ask you to overlook a paperwork irregularity. Do you? What about when that exception can result in something worse than a fine?
The trick with Papers, Please is that it shows you how a bureaucracy can force harsher treatment for the “greater good” and how these rules can force you, the player, to dehumanize others for the sake of your family and your job. This is why it sticks with me the way it makes me forget empathy and instead red stamp passports and watch these virtual people leave disheartened. Yet this is something all too familiar in our modern society through the DMV, TSA security screening at airports, or even phone support. People numbed by the bureaucracy and the endless lines of people they are forced to process. What Papers, Please reminds me is that the person trying to do their job isn’t the problem, it is the bureaucracy and how their harsh rules, unquestioned, came into being.
I’ll leave you with this adaptation of Papers, Please. Glory to Astotzka.
JeremyCodes 