How much agency do we have under a system? How do the choices we make (as individual actors) impact a larger system? How do we reproduce the social relations around us, perhaps even unwittingly?
For me, these are the questions that Papers Please asks, and what the experience of playing Papers Please answers. The game is set in a communist regime (eerily resembling our own), where you play as a border agent controlling the flow of citizens. The mechanics are simple: you examine documents, interrogate, and then deny or allow people to pass through. These decisions seem simple at face value: if the documents are incorrect, you must reject them; otherwise, you incur a cost. But the answers are not so simple once you realize that you are responsible for the lives of families, victims of sex trafficking, balanced with your own needs and interests. Papers Please demonstrates our profound agency even under constraints — true and relevant especially in a late capitalist world, where “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”
I think this threads the needle between two predominant narratives in the cultural imagination: one, the idea that we are all cogs in the machine, and we must revolt against the system, but until then there is no point in doing anything because the revolution doesn’t seem to be happening soon. Second, the idea that we are completely moral, rational agents who have full control over our circumstances, and you can always just make it to the top through good, honest work. Yes, I apologize for these vague narratives, gesturing towards what we might call the two sides of the contemporary culture wars, woke and anti-woke. But I don’t mean for any of this to be inflammatory in any way. Both of them are simply answers to the question: how much agency do we have?
In Papers Please, you are subject to many political constraints as a member of the “bureaucracy” yourself. The core mechanic of the game is comparing documents, one after another, and then making choices. The incentive of the game is to move as fast as possible (to make money), to be as greedy as possible (to make money) and to execute the orders you are told to execute (to make money). You are under time pressure to execute the comparisons correctly, and if you don’t, you are ticketed. But that pits you against your own moral judgment, and against your own fallible human instincts.
For example, in one encounter, the newspaper displays this serial killer that is fleeing another country, and that very serial killer is passing through. His documents are completely correct; there’s nothing wrong with them. If you let him through, you know that that would be objectively, morally bad. If you don’t, you will be ticketed. There are many other encounters and/or choices like this, where you can choose to detain people with document discrepencies (earning you money) or merely deny them entry (no reward for you, but less evil). And this isn’t a perfect moral choice, where you have endless time to deliberate: you need to make this choices fast, almost instinctively.
But the game does not crush you underfoot by its restraints. The best way to play the game isn’t to immediately follow all the orders; actually, it’s to follow all the orders and disobey them strategically. Every day, you have two opportunities, two “warnings,” to be wrong, to execute your own judgment even under constraints. You CAN deny the serial killer or the mob boss, but only occasionally, and that choice is yours. In this moment, you are acutely aware of the fact that yes, you do have agency, despite the competing incentives. You incur some level of risk when you disobey, a lower level, since you now have fewer opportunities to make mistakes; but you do have the power, if you choose to do so. I certainly felt so.
Ultimately, I think the game is an argument for moral agency in this world: to make the best choices even under constraints, to allow yourself to incur risk on behalf of other people, EVEN AS you are a “cog” in the machine. The machine is not some mysterious entity, only people making decisions, only people like YOU making decisions either in their own interest or on behalf of other people. This is true whether the “machine” is the capitalist overlords or communist bureaucrats. Yes, perhaps there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but some consumption is more ethical than others, and some people have more agency than others. Yes, maybe you, even you, have some agency in what you do (or don’t do) for this world.
