Papers Please (

2013

)

The communist regimes of Eastern Europe were some of the most singular in all of human history. Generally, every government, no matter how tyrannical or cruel, can boast some base of support within its populace. Sometimes this support is broad, stretching across the bulk of the population, other times it's concentrated in the hands of a small minority (usually scared shitless of the majority they are oppressing). Yet with only the exception of Yugoslavia, and to a lesser extent Romania, this was not the case in the communist regimes of the Eastern Block. These were governments that existed not because their people called them into power through democratic elections or non-democratic revolution, but because they were the lands that the Red Army happened to occupy when Germany capitulated. At best, some could boast a small native communist party before the war (like East Germany), but others (like Poland) were so fundamentally opposed to the new regime that it was genuinely difficult to find any genuine support for the government outside of its highest offices. These countries existed for decades with no popular support whatsoever, being held up solely by the terror their secret police inspired and the threat of military intervention from Moscow. Once the threat of the latter was removed by a reformist government in the USSR, they promptly evaporated. As one observer quipped: “What took 10 years in Poland, took 10 months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany and ultimately 10 days in Czechoslovakia.”

I say all this because it is probably difficult for my readers to imagine what life in one of those countries was like. Even if you happened to be reading this review from an authoritarian country, it is most likely a more traditional dictatorship. When we imagine an authoritarian country, we imagine something like Nazi Germany or Maoist China, a nation that can conjure up fervent loyalty in at least a minority of the population. We do not think of a country where literally everyone is merely playing along with the official fiction, pretending to be a devout adherent to the party while silently lining their pockets with every scrap they can sneak away. Yet, it is this kind of world that Papers Please transports us into. Indeed, you could argue that the world of Paper’s Please is even worse than what actually existed in our reality. At least, in reality, the rest of the planet wasn’t so completely fucked that people were lining up by the thousand to migrate into East Germany! Here though, the fictional Eastern Block nation of Arstotzka is somehow the land of milk and honey for the swarms of desperate refugees that flood its singular border checkpoint every day. Everything we see of Arstotzka tells us that the place is a total shithole, so imagine how bad the rest of the world must be!

You take on the role of a minor bureaucrat, assigned by lottery to man this solitary checkpoint. The pay sucks, and unlike most bureaucratic postings you’re not only expected to work but incentivized to do so, as your meager salary is determined by how many applicants you can process per day. Even worse, there is an invisible and infallible checkpoint after your own one that detects all your mistakes and penalizes you for them accordingly. This is the only aspect of the game where the illusion of being in an Eastern Bloc nation falls apart, hasn’t developer Lucas Pope ever heard the old Soviet joke? “We pretend to work they pretend to pay us.” Of course, this is a necessary departure with reality, because without the possibility of failure then there is nothing to compel us to continue to play or master the game’s systems. Indeed, we’ve given ample in-game reason to give a shit about getting this right, because, in addition to looking after yourself, the player character is also burdened with a whole family (a wife, a son, an uncle, a mother-in-law, and later on a niece that can be adopted). If you make too many mistakes at the checkpoint, you can look forward to them starving or dying of illness. They may have no in-game representation aside from circles with their status printed on them, but it makes a compelling motivation all the same.

At first, your duties are pretty light. All you have to do is check to see if entrants have a valid Arstotzkan passport and if they do let them in. Given the strict, no foreigners policy, I’m surprised that so many emigres from across the region even bother to line up at the checkpoint. However, things begin to grow in complexity and challenge with each new day. Starting with the country’s decision to allow in foreigners and then rapidly spiraling as they demand more and more layers of paperwork and regulations until you’re stuck leafing through a veritable notebook of documents for every entrant. That developer Lucas Pope managed to turn the act of examining immigration paperwork into a compelling core gameplay loop is a feat onto itself. The difficulty curve here handled quite deftly, and you’re given ample opportunity to learn and master the various rules before the game changes things up. The only real exceptions are diplomats and refugees who each have unique paperwork but show up so infrequently that I usually forgot that they even existed. The rules change every day, so everything stays fresh and interesting throughout the entire playthrough.

Since your pay is so pitiful and the rules for managing immigration so cumbersome, you’ll quickly find yourself falling into the average mentality of a real-world Eastern Bloc citizen: hardened cynicism tempered with a keen eye for opportunity. At one point, I denied an entrant with out-of-date paperwork who let out an exasperated sigh and said something to the effect of “I shouldn’t have paid for all this stuff… I should have just saved my money and used it for a bribe.” At this point, I nodded in agreement, as I would have definitely let her through if she’d just slipped me a couple of credits. Indeed, my favorite recurring character in the whole game was a drug smuggler who always had a fat bribe ready for me when he got to the front of the line. As the game progressed I felt myself settling comfortably into a familiar attitude, the same brutish street smarts I’ve seen on so many family members from post-communist countries. I mouthed along with the patriotic pieties, saluted my boss when he turned up every other week to inspect my performance, and then went right back to lining my pockets without missing a beat.

A lot of games wrestle with moral choice systems because there is insufficient reason to be evil. Part of this is just game designers being too chickenshit to actively incentivized immoral or amoral decisions. As a result, you get things like Fallout: New Vegas [2010] where the majority of your companions will desert you if you side with the “bad guys” but everyone will stick by your side if you back the “good guys.” However, the bigger issue here is usually with the player, not the game and the kind of evil actions they are called on to perform. Despite propaganda to the contrary, the average gamer is just a regular person with regular fantasies. They want to feel important and heroic; not barbaric or cruel. Aside from a few psychos, nobody wants to enslave people or kill innocent bystanders or do any of the evil shit that video games with options for evil playthroughs generally have you doing. Papers Please fixes this by dialing back the scope of your misdeeds to a more manageable level. You’re not killing anybody you’re just taking a couple of dollars under the table to let somebody with an expired visa slip by. Maybe it’s not morally correct, but I’ve got more pressing concerns, like keeping the heat on before my whole family comes down with the flu. Besides, it’s painfully obvious that following the rules is hardly any more moral. The government of Arstotzka is corrupt, cruel, and frequently incompetent and following the party line will probably hurt more people in the long run. Indeed, if you’re a stickler that demands every I be dotted and every t crossed you can look forward to an early game-over screen when a well-connected diplomat with shoddy paperwork turns up has you imprisoned for holding her up at the border.

The real moral quandaries are when you’re called to break the rules for no immediate benefit to yourself. The best example of this happens later on in the game after you’ve gotten close to one of the guards you learn that he has a sweetheart coming in from a neighboring country. She’s all alone in the world, and desperately in need of help. Of course, she doesn’t have her paperwork in order. If you’ve gotten the hang of the game by this point, you can pretty easily let her slip by and take the fine, but if you don’t have the eye for paperwork you could be limping along barely making ends meet. As a result, there is a very real temptation to kick her ass back across the border and go about your day. Reuniting a pair of lost lovers is a good deal easier if your family isn’t waiting for you back at your apartment, shivering and hungry.