Papers, Please — a game of agonising choices

The year is 1982 and the fictional Soviet-style country of Arstotzka has just opened a border checkpoint in the war-torn city of Grestin. In this time of high political tension, I’ve been appointed by job lottery to work in the immigration booth. I trudge through the grey streets on my first day and see a long queue of people waiting to enter the country. Already weary, I lean into the tannoy and call “next!”

These first moments of Lucas Pope’s breakout indie game Papers, Please, first released in 2013 and launched on mobile this month, will seem unusual to players raised on action games. How could this gloomy exercise in bureaucracy be anything other than tedious? Play for an hour, though, and you’ll discover one of gaming’s most politically incisive, startlingly original experiments.

On the surface, my job in the immigration booth seems simple: check that each applicant’s papers are in order and then decide whether to accept or reject them, crowning the decision with a stamp. I must look for discrepancies in their documents and at first often miss small details — a misspelt name, or passport numbers that don’t match up. But the more I play this elaborate game of spot the difference, the better I get and the more satisfying it feels.

Each morning I receive a telegram imposing Byzantine new rules about who is permitted to enter Arstotzka. On one day I must reject all applicants from the neighbouring state of Kolechia, on another foreigners are suddenly required to bring an “entry permit” instead of an “entry ticket”. These changes add challenge to my daily tasks and infuriate prospective migrants. Yet I have no choice but to enforce this inscrutable bureaucratic system.

Why do I have no choice? Because at the end of each day I go home to my family and must decide how to allocate my meagre wages. Do I pay for food or heating today? I can’t afford both. Before the end of the first week my son falls sick from the cold and I cannot afford medicine. He dies, and I return to work the next day. In Papers, Please you must choose between responsibility to your family, your job and your conscience.

I also feel sympathy for the characters who enter my booth each day, posing interesting conundrums. There’s a secret organisation that wants you to join them in working to destabilise the government. Elsewhere a woman asks me not to allow entry to a dangerous man further back in the queue. When I see him, his papers are in order so I approve his entry. The following morning I see in the newspaper that she has been murdered. A common industry maxim says that “a game is a series of interesting decisions”. Few releases take this to heart like Papers, Please.

Over time, I sense myself hardening. A guard gives me cash for detaining people rather than simply turning them away. In order to keep my family alive, I soon find myself arresting applicants for even small infractions. This game ruthlessly confronts us with our own capacity for inhumanity. Behind this lurks another idea: how the structure of an authoritarian state can reduce a person’s sense of moral responsibility for their actions. If Hannah Arendt had made a game to explore the banality of evil, it would look something like this.

It is impossible not to reflect on contemporary geopolitics while playing Papers, Please. The stories from my booth evoke the Syrian refugee crisis, Trump’s “Muslim ban” and the British plan to deport refugees to Rwanda. At one point there is even a pandemic and I must start checking that applicants have the correct vaccination certificates. The game expertly shows how society’s most urgent questions play out at the border.

As Christmas approaches, I go rogue. Hearing of an upcoming audit, I decide to forge passports for my family and flee to the neighbouring country of Obristan. This is just one of the game’s 20 possible endings. Now for the first time I’m on the other side of the booth, standing in line nervously, clutching fake paperwork. I am praying that when Obristan’s inspection officer gets to me, he will see more than a sheaf of papers. That he will see my hardships, my tiredness, the difficult choices I’ve had to make. That he will look me in the eyes and see that I am human.