Papers, Please

Papers Please is a masterpiece in recreating the modern mundaity of work and its dehumanising effects on us in a modern era of targeted workflows and admin jobs. It managed to make me think about what a game can be , what my attitude towards my working life is and the hierarchies of families. The truly incredible thing is it achieved all this while still somehow managing to deliver a game experience that was still a game and most importantly, fun to play.

As a brief setup you play as a border agent processing applications for entry into your fictional eastern European country. You earn money for every applicant you process and you loose money for errors you make in processing.

You are made to care about you finances through a pretty simple set of systems. You have a family and you must feed them, heat them, keep them healthy and put a roof over their heads. It’s chest beating “MAN MUST PROVIDE FOR FAMILY” stuff at its most primal but it works pretty well. So well infact that pretty early on in my playthrough I realised that I had subconsciously cut my mother in law and uncle out of my family. After every days work the money was so tight I would rather save the $5 I had left incase of any issues down the line than to maintain my extended family in the form of the mother in law or uncle.

That is a pretty starling revelation to realise that a game has, without you even realising, made you think about your family hierarchy and who matters most in times of need. It’s a decision I don’t think many of us in the developed world have to make very often but it made me think of those who must have to face similar decisions on a more regular basis.

I have seen it argued that the family aspects of Papers Please don’t work that well as you are given no reason to care for them as they are just a line of text in a menu and you don’t have any real connection to them. I personally found this made the decisions I made in regards to family carry more impact. Family members were being presented as purely positions within a tree rather than characters with personalities that may have given me the basis to change my decisions. Whether that was a genuine design decision or just a function of a small team, it doesn’t really matter. The end result was powerful to me.

Fending for your family is the crux of the overall meta game and it provides plenty of purpose to the nitty gritty of processing applicants through your border but its in this processing that Papers Please really starts to shine.

Papers Please is an absolute masterclass in UI design. Some people will read that statement and think I have gone crazy. In an age of sleek flat UI an initial glance at Papers Please would lead you to think it’s a complete mess. But that’s the point.

I work in a office that focuses solely on the processing of applications. My work day used to comprise of a pile of applications with attached supporting documents that I would then workthrough to deem eligibility for the product we sold.

It was always a complete mess and there was never enough room to see everything you needed to make a decision at once. We then moved to a document scanning system and went paper free. This made desks empty but increased the workflow clutter tenfold. A screen can only show so much info at a time and our system only let you view one page at a time. It was slow, frustrating and you always felt like something was in the way of you seeing the whole picture as just that, a whole.

Papers please simulates this whole feeling perfectly with its UI. Nothing is automated. For you to receive documents you have to manually pick them up from your counter and arrange them on your workspace which is just a small window in your real life monitor. There is never enough room and documents overlap constantly meaning you always struggle to feel truly efficient.

As the days progress and more rules are added to qualify for entry the space just gets less and less and every single additional pressure requires you to manually perform a new action. Not sure on a persons ID? Finger print them, manually hand them the slip, manually check it, manually stamp the passport manually pass them each of their 5 documents one at a time. It sounds like a nightmare but it isn’t and it makes me realise something about our real life working day.

People love a rhythm, we like to see repetition because it confirms we know what is happening. Papers Please shows that even when a task is relatively mundane, as long as it has a certain rhythm and you can feel yourself getting better at it over time, there is enjoyment to be had.

I genuinely started off slightly stressed playing Papers Please. I was constantly worried about cash and if I was processing enough applicants. Given time though I improved and realised I could afford to support my family (minus those tag alongs). Its right about that time when Papers Please starts to show its narrative head and you realise there is slightly more going on here than at first glance.

I won’t ruin specifics as they are some of my favorite moments in the game but you start to see some people at your border control more often than others and each of these people have their own set of requirements from you. It starts off with simple things such as a request to let a wife through (she doesn't have the right docs) but over time more nefarious requests start to be made that have story consequences for the whole of your nation.

These serve to break up the processing of applications very well and they give the whole game a narrative thread from day one through to the end. They also serve as branching points to give the game around 20 different endings. Ive currently seen about six and there is some good variety in there.

It’s in these character interactions that I started to think about how much a job can dehumanise us. There are people trying to get through my border that will have zero nefarious intent. They simply have a document that is one day out of date. It doesn't matter though because they never get put through by me. In a real world situation I would probably ruin lives by taking such a hard line approach but the paycheck justifies some pretty inhumane actions in Papers Please. Papers Please made me think about how many people in real jobs will take the same justification home with them every night.

Stylistically Papers Please is also a success. It plays on our preconceptions of eastern Europe in some pretty nice ways. The colour pallet is muted. The music is stereotypical of what we would expect and there is plenty of nationalist imagery. The game over screen even proclaims GLORY TO ARSTOZKA! I’ve never been to eastern Europe so I’ve no idea if any of this hits the nail on the head but it certainly matches our preconceptions of 1980s eastern Europe.

Papers Please is a rare game and a game that could only exist in this modern self publishing world we seem to be in now. It’s a measure of how far gaming has come as a medium that a game that simulates a mundane job can be so high on so many people game of the year lists.

In previous years a risk such as Papers Please would never have been taken. A singular creators vision had nothing but barriers to overcome if they wanted to get to market. This is no longer the case and I hope Papers Please is the first of many games in the coming years that subvert our expectations as to what a game is.

Ultimately, and this is going to sound pretentious, I think Papers Please could prove to be one of the first stepping stones that lets us make strides towards games loosing the tag “game”. The medium can be so much more than the play thing the title “games” suggest and Papers Please proves that.