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    Papers, Please

    Game » consists of 5 releases. Released Aug 08, 2013

    A graphical adventure game about Cold War-era immigration control, where players take the role of an immigration inspector who must control the flow of people entering a fictional Soviet-style nation. Glory to Arstotzka!

    The emotional impact of Papers, Please

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    Wemibelle

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    Edited By Wemibelle
    An example of the game's full-body scanner
    An example of the game's full-body scanner

    NOTE: I originally wrote this for my own site, so it's probably a little more broad than necessary for a gaming site like this one.

    Recently, I’ve been playing a decent amount of Papers, Please (3-ish hours, according to Steam). If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game where you sit at a border checkpoint and must check entrants’ documents for a variety of things to decide whether or not they are allowed into your country. As the game progresses, the rules change to match recent events and new protocols get added on a regular basis. It eventually becomes a crazy mental checklist of a variety of different variables including appearance, expiration dates, and tons of other things in order to verify whether or not someone is allowed through. It’s a great deal of fun for emulating such a menial task and I highly recommend it.

    There are several points where the game is obviously trying to have some sort of message or moral quandary. Do you refuse a woman’s entry because her papers are wrong even though her husband just went through ahead of her? Is a direly-needed bribe, one that could buy food for your own family, enough to get you to break the rules just once? Possibly the most depressing moment, however, is when you get access to an X-ray scanner. This scanner takes full-body pictures of the entrant and shows you their completely nude form in shockingly clear detail. The usual intended purpose is to check for contraband or weapons, usually taped somewhere to the body, but there is one other reason for it as well.

    Sometimes, the gender on the entrant’s passport and the gender of their character model don’t seem to match up. You are supposed to prod the person on this and scan him or her to check their gender for correctness. At first, I just saw this procedure as an attempt to catch those entrants who were using some sort of fake passport and posing as another gender Their unwillingness to answer the question “Are you a man or a woman?” was due to fear of being caught and possibly detained. It was just another bullet point to check on my list of things-to-do.

    However, I soon started wondering if this was the case. What if the creator, Lucas Pope, instead wanted these particular entrants to be seen as trans people trying to outwardly project the gender they want to be? What if the the wrong gender on the person’s passport was just the rigid rules of society forcing his or her true gender to be displayed on the passport, even though he or she ached to be seen as otherwise? When this thought occurred to me, I started to feel very disgusted with myself every time I was forced to scan a person to confirm their gender; it was as if I was outing his or her’s closest-guarded secret, something one should never do to a person EVER. That question “Are you a man or a woman?” took on another meaning. I was asking that person something he or she most likely heard on a regular basis, a depressing question that reminded him or her that gender is seen as binary by society. It was almost enough to get me to stop playing entirely, for fear of outing yet another hidden.

    I wasn’t expecting these feelings when I started playing Papers, Please. The X-ray scanner and stark, nude photos were something I had seen before in earlier coverage of the game, and they had elicited different feelings of disgust; I knew that I was seeing someone naked without their permission, something that the other person didn’t even seem to realize I could see (that’s the way the game makes it seem, at least). The idea of outing trans people is even worse than that to me, having the knowledge that I’m seeing such a conflicted, personal part of their lives. My interpretation of these particular entrants may be incorrect, as it’s possible that Pope never intended them to be seen as trans, but I stand by it. I also feel it gives the game even more impact emotionally. It may be horrible to allow a person through whom a woman begs you to deny, saying that he will kill her if he gets through, but I still think that outing a trans person’s biggest secret will weigh most heavily on my mind from my time with the game.

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    bgdiner

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    #1  Edited By bgdiner

    Though I feel as though you read into that X-ray mechanic a bit too much, you did do a nice job explaining your feelings; great piece.

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    skrutop

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    Nice read. I took away from the game that instituting increasing security and bureaucracy into the control of the border did nothing to make it safer for anyone. Terrorists jumped the wall and killed guards, I missed important details that let contraband through, or I actively helped people cross who shouldn't have.

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