Papers, Please (2013) puts the player in the role of a border-checkpoint inspector in the authoritarian state of Arstotzka, examining travelers’ documents against a daily-updated rulebook while earning enough to feed a family whose names appear on a balance sheet at the end of every shift. The game raises the question at the center of Thomas Nagel’s “Ruthlessness in Public Life”: what happens to personal responsibility when a person acts inside an institutional role? After playing the game, I argue that Papers, Please uses what Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric to enact Nagel’s account of how institutional roles erode moral perception, and proves the argument by doing it to the player. My own experience playing the game, in which I forgot my dying family and dismissed a traveler whose death I would later read about in the morning paper, is the argument’s evidence.
This game really brings personal responsibility to the forefront because as the player, I am simply trying to survive. I literally forgot about my family; they all died and the game ended because of this. The only thought on my mind was that I needed to do my job correctly so I could earn enough to get through the day and make it to the next. The stressors are constant: the threat of being penalized for letting through someone I should not have or denying someone I should have approved, not having enough money to feed my family, the ever-changing rules I kept forgetting, the day going by too fast to stamp enough passports. This is what Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric”: the practice of “authoring arguments through processes” (p. 29) rather than through words or images. The game never tells me that institutional pressure narrows moral attention. It simply builds the conditions in which my attention narrows, and lets me arrive at the conclusion myself.
After a certain point, I stopped caring about my family or the people whose passports I was stamping. Their faces all started to become one, as I focused on stamping as many passports as I possibly could just to break even. I had no savings and my family was dying, though I started caring less about this as the game went on. It became a never-ending loop: never stamping enough passports because I could not keep track of the rules, then making a mistake because a new rule was added, then not making enough money to do anything, and starting over the next day. This is the moral condition Thomas Nagel describes in “Ruthlessness in Public Life.” Public roles, he argues, give their occupants “a slippery moral surface” (p. 1) that appears to absorb the moral weight of acts performed inside them, leaning heavily on consequences and impartiality until the role’s logic insulates the actor from the harm they cause. Nagel insists this absorption is a moral error, but the game made it feel like the only rational way to keep playing (p. 90).
The game’s procedural rhetoric, however, does more than demonstrate this erosion of moral perception. There was a particular moment when a traveler passing through to Arstotzka turned out to be a sex worker who slipped me a pamphlet-looking note. I did not let her through, because earlier in the game I had been penalized for approving someone whose stated purpose did not match their work permit. I tried to apply the same rule here, but the game penalized me again. However, this time, I was supposed to let her through. I had also denied her pimp entry. After I denied her visa, she slipped me a note saying she and her sister were being persecuted by her boss and were in danger. I did not know what to do with it. The next day, the newspaper the game gave me each morning reported that two girls, the sex worker and her sister, had been killed by their boss. I forgot to take a screenshot, but the moment sat with me for a long time. In my rush to follow the rules and ensure my own survival, I had forgotten there were actual lives at stake. This is the limit Nagel insists public morality cannot cross: “the strongest constraints of individual morality will continue to limit what can be publicly justified even by extremely powerful consequentialist reasons” (p. 89). The role’s logic of processing efficiently and applying rules impartially just to survive the day had produced exactly the kind of harm action-centered morality is supposed to prevent.
What stays with me is not the game ending when my family died, but the newspaper the next morning. Two women died because I applied the rules correctly. Nagel says the absorption excuse of blaming one’s actions on their job grows weaker the more power the actor has. The player has almost none, and the game made that powerlessness feel like permission. I think Papers, Please is both a moral education and a moral excuse, and I am not sure I can tell which one I received.
