In Lucas Pope’s 2013 political simulation Papers, Please, players face an uncomfortable truth: sometimes our public duties demand actions that violate our private conscience. Through what scholar Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric,” the practice of using processes persuasively, the game argues that when institutional obligations clash with personal morality, we have a personal responsibility to balance resistance and our own survival.
The game’s central mechanic is simple: you’re a border checkpoint inspector in a fictional country, enforcing entry rules. Correctly approve or deny passage, and you get a paycheck to keep your family fed, warm, and sheltered. Get it wrong, and you’re fined. Get it wrong too often, and you’re imprisoned. The system seems straightforward until the human element intrudes.
Early on, a woman presents papers stamped for the previous day. When asked, she mentions she was busy and couldn’t make it until now. Perhaps she’s a single mother juggling multiple jobs. Seems innocent enough. Days later, a man is anxious to reconnect with his son after six years apart but has the wrong entry papers. Then, a woman begs you to detain the man behind her, claiming he’ll hurt her, though his papers are perfect. In each case, you can’t clarify their situations, you can only choose to admit or deny their entry. The game’s processes dictate you don’t help them but your conscience says otherwise.
These increasingly high-stakes ethical decisions are intentionally challenging because your public role fundamentally alters your individual moral demands, as philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in his 2012 essay “Ruthlessness in Public Life”. If you ignore the game’s processes and help these individuals, the game punishes you. Specifically, you’re warned multiple times before being fined, then fined multiple times before being imprisoned. This creates a calculated moral economy: haven’t received warnings today? You can admit the woman seeking her son or detain the potentially dangerous man without immediate consequence. The system becomes a zero-sum-game balancing act between personal responsibility to help others and personal responsibility to take care of yourself.
The game’s processes make this balancing act even harder by systemically rewarding moral compromise. Nagel argues that “there is no reason to think that individuals in public roles are released from traditional moral requirements on the treatment of others” but Papers, Please challenges this principle by making cruelty profitable. Throughout the game, people attempt to bypass the checkpoint by scaling the border wall. Initially, a security guard shoots them. Eventually, you’re recruited to do the same, and are paid for every border-hopper you kill. Later, you’re tipped off that someone with a contagious infection is in line. While violence erupts elsewhere as a distraction, you have the opportunity to shoot the infected person, no questions asked. Nagel argues that when public duties become incompatible with accepted moral principles, “there is no substitute for refusal and, if possible, resistance” but when your family is cold and hungry, when you barely make enough to keep the lights on, the game’s processes make shooting people to scrape by disturbingly appealing.
The game’s clunky interface adds excruciating time pressure to these moral calculations. Every document must be clicked, held unnaturally long, and dragged to a reading area one at a time. Try to rush and nothing happens. Try to quickly glimpse at a document and hand it back, nothing happens. The more people you process correctly, the more money you earn, creating frantic urgency. But speed breeds errors, and errors mean fines. You can purchase booth upgrades to work faster but that introduces another cruel choice: starve your family today to potentially earn more tomorrow, or feed them now and hope you can manage both?
Bogost defines a game’s “possibility space” as “the myriad configurations the player might construct to see the ways the processes inscribed in the system work.” Papers, Please uses its possibility space to explore the delicate tension between public responsibility and personal morality. Papers, Please challenges Nagel’s argument that “added power conferred by an institutional role… does not mean that prohibitions against harming others, directly or indirectly, are correspondingly relaxed” through increasingly higher stakes moral dilemmas: What actually constitutes harm? When both action and inaction cause suffering, which do you choose? And crucially, how much moral compromise can you get away with before you’ve abandoned your humanity entirely? The game doesn’t offer comfortable answers. Instead, it creates a system where resistance is always possible, just never easy.
