Papers, Please is a puzzle game created by Lucas Pope, where the player works as a border inspector, approving and denying entry into the country of Arstotzka. I’ve always thought fondly of Papers, Please since I used to play it as a kid on my older brother’s laptop. Back then, I simply loved stamping everything, analyzing passport photos, and matching up finger prints. It feels strange now because I understood none of the Cold War references, authoritarianism, or moral weight of the game, I just liked the thunk of the stamp. Looking back, that childhood experience may be the most honest reading of Papers, Please: I was doing the job perfectly, and I understood nothing about what the job meant. Papers, Please shows that complicity often begins not with cruelty, but with the quiet belief that following orders is the same as being innocent.
[Image of the document inspection desk.]
As the game begins, the task seems simple enough: check documents, approve or deny entry, repeat. But as the days pass, the list of rules keeps changing, and the work becomes harder to hold in your head. At first, I tended to be lenient. I let personable people like Jorji Costava through because he had gone through the trouble of making his own passport and seemed mostly harmless. I denied people like Dari, after the Pink Vice dancer warned me he was dangerous. But after getting docked five credits and failing to afford medicine for my family, my game ended quickly: arrested for debt.
[Image of my first playthrough to an unsuccessful ending.]
On my next playthrough, the choice became much colder: them or my family. I stopped reading so carefully. I denied people left and right, ignored dialogue, and tried to get through as many people as possible. Nagel, in “Ruthlessness in Public Life,” describes how public roles can create a “slippery moral surface,” where officials feel insulated from the weight of their decisions because the office stands between them and their actions. Papers, Please exemplifies this with its systems: time pressure, dense rules, constant penalties, and the repetitive labor of dragging documents across the desk. The game does not ask the player to become cruel. It asks the player to become efficient. As days went by, names, faces, and pleas began to dissolve into the queue, not because I didn’t care about the people, but because the game makes moral attention expensive. The game doesn’t explicitly turn you into a cruel player, but it does just that by making you busy.
[Image of denying a woman whose husband that I already approved asked me to treat her well.]
Ian Bogost would call this a procedural enthymeme, where the game leaves the moral conclusion unspoken and makes you complete it yourself. My ending made that conclusion impossible to avoid. My family and I were imprisoned for debt because I had been too lenient. The moment I read that ending, I knew I had to change. That is the message Papers, Please forces you to realize, mercy is a luxury I cannot afford.
That deterioration is rendered most starkly in the body search mechanic. After a terrorist attack, the next day’s memo requires all Kolechian travelers to be searched. In dialogue, you tell each person they have been selected for a “random search,” but there is nothing random about it. The sound of the search photo sounds almost like a crime scene photograph being taken, as if there is evidence being collected, of something done to a person.
[Image of the initiating the “random” search.]
The most unsettling part is how satisfying the whole routine begins to feel. The more people you turn away, the less citations, the more money, and the better you have done. Bogost argues that procedural rhetoric works by making players enact an argument rather than simply receive one. Papers, Please does this perfectly, training you to feel successful and satisfied by something that is deeply disturbing.
[Image of the armed guard taking away a detainee.]
I want to push back on one thing. The game’s procedural argument is so effective at making complicity feel inevitable that it can obscure the degree to which you are still choosing. Nagel would say the plausibility of the institutional excuse is “inversely proportional to the power and independence of the actor.” The inspector in Papers, Please has very little power, but he has some, which is why every ending where you comply feels deeply uncomfortable and hollow.
After revisiting this game from childhood, the stamping mechanic still stays with me, because the game doesn’t ask you to think about it. It asks you to do it, feel satisfied doing it, and then sit with what that satisfaction means.
