RWP Week 7: Papers, Please, Procedural Rhetoric, and Ruthlessness in Public Life

Playing as a border checkpoint officer in Arstotzka, a country newly out of war with tight immigration control, Papers, Please felt like a constant tug-of-war between personal morals, emotional persuasion, self preservation, and duty to one’s position and country. I went in expecting the game to mainly be about checking documents quickly, but it quickly became much more morally complicated than that. Each person standing at the border had a story or a reason, yet I was also responsible for following the state’s rules, earning enough money to keep my family alive, and protecting the country from incoming threats. After reading Nagel’s Ruthlessness in Public Life and playing through several increasingly difficult moral decisions in Papers, Please, I would argue that the game shows how public roles can make choices that would otherwise feel immoral seem justified when they are framed as service to a larger institutional goal. However, the game complicates this by making personal survival inseparable from public duty. When following the rules is what allows you to feed, shelter, and protect your family, responsibility becomes much harder to judge. Through its systems of inspection, family expenses, and repeated moral decisions, Papers, Please argues that personal responsibility does not disappear inside a public role, but it becomes unstable when institutional duty, fear, and survival are all working against moral judgment.
I appreciated the game’s approach to slowly raising the stakes as the gameplay progressed. At the beginning, the rules were fairly straightforward: only let citizens in with a valid passport. For the first several minutes, I felt like there was no real reason not to follow the law. The rules were simple, and because the role felt more administrative than moral, the implications of my actions did not bother me. However, as more rules were introduced, including checking entry tickets, verifying work passes, denying people from certain countries, inspecting for forged documents, and responding to changing government orders, the game became more complex, and so did the morality. Initially, I still tried to stick closely to the rules I was given. I refused bribes, denied people who gave emotional explanations for missing documents, and at times started operating almost on autopilot. This reminded me of the Milgram obedience experiment, where people continued carrying out harmful actions when those actions were framed as being directed by an authority figure. In Papers, Please, no one is standing over me telling me exactly what to do, but the rulebook, citations, and orders from the institution I was working for created a similar pressure. In retrospect, I made decisions that I probably would not have made if the role felt more attached to my own identity.
This connects closely to Nagel’s argument in Ruthlessness in Public Life. Nagel explains how public roles can morally insulate people from their actions because they see themselves as fulfilling a duty for an institution or simply doing the job assigned to them. I felt this happening while playing Papers, Please. When I denied someone entry, it did not always feel like I was personally making a choice that could affect someone’s life, but instead that I was just a pawn operating based on Arstotzka’s rules. That being said, this distance became harder to maintain when the game forced me to confront people as individuals rather than just documents. One moment that especially challenged this was when a woman was missing a crucial document but claimed she was a mother who needed to see her son. The rules told me not to make an exception, but my own judgment and emotions pushed against that. Even though I knew I could be penalized, I chose to let her in. This moment changed the way I perceived my role because it reminded me that every denial was not just a procedural action, but a personal decision with consequences for someone else’s life.
Papers, Please complicates this even further through its penalty system. Every time I made a mistake or chose compassion over procedure, I risked receiving a citation, losing money, and being unable to provide for my family at the end of the day. The occasional terrorist attack was not easy to ignore either. It made me wonder whether some of the people asking for exceptions could be lying, and whether letting them in meant allowing my own morals to cause harm to the country I had a duty to protect. Suddenly, the stakes felt much higher. Going a step further, every mistake directly affected the money I needed for food, heat, medicine, and rent. As the game progressed, I found myself becoming less generous, not necessarily because I cared less, but because I was scared of what each exception would cost my family and my country. Helping a stranger at the border could mean my own child going hungry, and even though it was a game, that was not a tradeoff I was willing to make. This made responsibility feel much harder to locate. I was still responsible for my choices, but those choices were being shaped by a system that made compassion financially and politically dangerous.
Bogost’s idea of procedural rhetoric becomes useful here. In Persuasive Games, Bogost argues that games make arguments through their systems and procedures, not just through story, visuals, or dialogue. Papers, Please fits this well because it does not simply tell the player that institutional power can make ordinary people complicit in harm. Instead, it makes the player participate in that institution over and over again, navigating difficult choices under pressure. The repeated act of checking documents, stamping passports, watching the line grow longer, and managing penalties is what creates the argument. This reminded me of something I think about often: people are usually quick to criticize others actions and say they would have done things differently, but many ethical decisions involving power, duty, and survival are not that black and white. The stakes feel different when you are the one making the decision, operating on incomplete information, and relying on the mental framework you have built through the game. In that sense, the game structure strengthens Nagel’s point because it makes moral insulation something the player experiences directly. I was not just reading about how public roles can distance people from their actions. I was feeling that distance form as I became faster, more suspicious, and more focused on avoiding penalties.
The game’s argument about personal responsibility feels strong because it does not fully excuse the officer’s actions, but it also does not let me pretend those actions are made in a clean moral vacuum. By tying every decision to institutional rules, the country’s security, and family survival, Papers, Please shows how responsibility can become blurred without disappearing. At the end of the day, the player is still the one stamping the passport, but the game makes clear how much pressure sits behind each stamp.