A slip of paper should not be able to change your conscience. Yet, in “Papers, Please”, I found that it does. The start of the game feels personal. Each person you deny has a different reaction: some are sad, some are desperate, some are angry. The first few times that I rejected someone, I felt guilty watching them walk away. But when I let my emotions rule, I quickly received a pink slip with a citation on it, and my own family lost money. After a few of these citations, my hesitation began to disappear. I carefully inspected the rulebook and became more concerned about missing an error than sending someone away.
The most unsettling part about “Papers, Please” is that it starts to make harshness feel procedural. While the work itself is repetitive – inspect, interrogate, stamp – these actions began to reorganize the way that I was thinking. My concern shifted from “should I help this person?” to “is this person’s documents valid?” Instead of just telling a story about a harsh border guard, the game makes us participate in the conditions which make the harshness feel okay. It does this without ever taking away agency, and instead teaches the player to feel that some choices are responsible and others are reckless. Compassion turns into risk and progress takes the form of accuracy. The morally correct choice differs from the procedurally correct one, but it becomes natural to choose the latter in the name of progress.
Other narrative games execute something similar, even though they attach progress to different actions. For example, in “Bastion”, progress comes from recovery and expansion; namely, bringing back a core, unlocking more of the map, and rebuilding the Bastion. The consistency of this loop makes restoration feel caring, before the ending questions that desire. In “Slay the Princess”, progress and violence go hand in hand. The game uses repetition of the same storyline to make violence feel less horrifying and more like a way forward. Like “Papers, Please”, these games organize choices in a way that some feel like advancement and others feel like failure.
This is what Ian Bogost, in his book Persuasive Games, helps explain through his idea of procedural rhetoric. This states that games make arguments through systems, not just story or dialogue like other mediums. These narrative games persuade using the structure of action, reward, and consequence. “Papers, Please”, “Bastion”, and “Slay the Princess” all use this to address the question of what counts as moving forward in different ways. Progress in these games is not a neutral mechanic, and after enough repetition, it becomes a way of teaching players which actions feel justified and the only reasonable option.
This idea matters because progress in games is usually treated as normal – it seems natural to think that progress means moving forward, unlocking more levels, or reaching the end goal. These games show that it is not this simple and that progress is designed, it doesn’t just happen on its own. A game dictates what counts as moving ahead and uses its systems to convince the player that this is natural. While the player still makes choices, these are shaped by the game’s structure that punishes some actions and rewards others. Because of this, progress is not simply about pacing. It shapes what the player experiences as meaningful, reasonable, and correct.
Bogost helps explain what these games are doing and how they are in a unique position to do it so well. His claim is that games are distinct because their rules are expressive. They are able to model a process and require that the player participates in it. This is also what distinguishes this kind of medium from what a novel or film can do. A book can tell us that a border inspector is becoming numb to suffering or a horror film can show a frightened person going through their options until violence feels inevitable. But through these forms, the consumer can only be an observer. With games, the player is involved in and experiencing this system. I am not just observing an official, I am the one checking the dates and stamping. I am the one interacting with the princess and weighing my choices. This suggests that when a game is structured with progress systems, it can make the values feel lived instead of just witnessed.
“Papers, Please” demonstrates this exceptionally. The game distills its main idea in a very straightforward manner. There are no cutscenes, speeches, or external narration that tells the player the effects of bureaucracy; because of this, the player has to pay attention to the actual loop itself and experience these ideas for themselves. The repetitive nature of each day in the game is not just for the purpose of becoming efficient, but it creates a way of seeing. The entrant becomes easier to view as a set of documents rather than an actual human. This is why the citation slip is so important. It is not just an external punishment, but a demonstration in what the system thinks matters. Because the system punishes “wrong” compassion and rewards the “right” accuracy, over time the player views the latter as the more reasonable choice.
The game teaches this lesson in an especially effective way by integrating the player’s family into the reward system through the savings screen at the end of each day. This screen is how the choices the player makes becomes personal. The more mistakes the player makes, the less heat, food, and medicine remain for their own family. This makes the game’s ethical problem a lot more difficult than a simple choice between rules and compassion. The choice is not just choosing to help a stranger, but choosing whether or not that is worth risking the family’s wellbeing, and even lives, for that. The game intertwines the country’s demands with the player’s own interests. This makes it possible for the player to justify to themselves that procedure is not morally wrong, but actually a form of caretaking. The system is persuasive in the way that it turns bureaucracy into something that can be seen as care for one’s family.
This complication is important because it prevents the argument from becoming too simple. “Papers, Please” is not just about showing that systems are cruel and players should resist them. It asks what happens when resistance is expensive and procedure offers a more fruitful path. From an external perspective, it would be easy to say that the humane choice is always correct, but this is much more difficult to make once sitting in a booth under time pressure with dwindling savings. This game doesn’t simply make cruelty attractive, but it makes it seem reasonable and a way of preserving order and survival.
The Dari Ludum scene particularly makes the player feel this tension. In this level, one of the women hands the player a note saying she is afraid that Ludum would force her and her sister to work at the Pink Vice brothel, and asks the player to help her. When Ludum arrives, the player finds that his papers were perfectly valid and there is nothing in the rulebook that could be used to justify denying him. At this point, the player knows something that the system does not register. The game shows that the choice that felt morally right was wrong according to procedure. By now, the game has already trained the player to understand procedural correctness as progress. The game shows how a progress system can create a world where the morally wrong action feels like the one that keeps things going.
The claims of philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his essay “Ruthlessness in Public Life,” can help explain what is happening. He argues that official roles can create “moral insulation”, the feeling that one is acting in their official role and not as their private self, and use this to justify the ethical issues of the action. This feeling can arise when playing “Papers, Please”, where the player thinks they are just doing their duty and are forced by their position. Like Nagel says, “one is only following orders or doing one’s job” becomes a dangerous excuse, as in this case, following the rules exactly is putting the woman at risk. “Papers, Please” makes this excuse feel very tempting, but it is far from innocent. The game does not only simulate bureaucracy; it induces the moral psychology of acting in a role with progress systems and procedures that control what can feel reasonable.
Repetition is crucial to “Papers, Please”, because the game does not persuade through a few pivotal choices, but through the accumulation of ordinary, mundane ones. A single denial can feel personal, but after multiple days in the game, the player starts to adopt the logic of the checkpoint. Repetition makes procedure more automatic and subconscious, leading the player to be desensitized to the actual humans in front of them. This is what makes the game’s progress system unsettling. It shows how moral compromise can come from not necessarily one shocking choice, but from a habit built through routine, until the player is no longer considering what is actually morally right.
While “Papers, Please” shows that progress can make harshness feel rational, “Bastion” demonstrates that progress can also convince the player that what they are doing is morally correct. This approaches progress from a different angle, but still demonstrates how progress mechanisms can act in a persuasive manner. In “Bastion”, the player’s movement forward comes from expansion and rebuilding. The Bastion expands as cores are returned, the Kid becomes stronger as weapons are discovered, and more locations are unlocked as creatures are defeated. Through this, the game builds a reward system which makes restoration feel good. A player is directly told they are helping, not just through the nostalgic feeling that drives the desire for restoration, but rather the physical satisfaction of unlocking, building, and going forward. Progress here looks like repair.
This visible repair is important because it attaches goodness to restoration before the game ever asks the player to make a choice about restoration. There is a sense of satisfaction that comes with bringing something back and seeing the world become larger and more stable. This is strengthened by the frozen bodies and Rucks’s narration, which encourage the player to interpret rebuilding as compassionate. Rather than domination or control, it feels like care. This is what makes the final choice powerful: by the time restoration is questioned, the player has already been trained to desire it, and this desire feels morally correct.
From this, we see that “Bastion” pushes the argument further by showing that progress systems do not only discipline, they can also charm. Progress can be made to feel generous and kind rather than harsh and punishing. The player’s complicity can come from not just fear of losing but from the pleasure of helping. This difference shows that the claim is not that games should be reduced to modes of negative coercion. “Bastion” shows a softer and almost more persuasive version of the same idea of progress. It convinces the player to view themselves as a sort of savior and helper. Progress is not neutral here either – it is teaching morals in the form of a reward loop.
What makes “Bastion” especially interesting is that the game waits to challenge restoration until the end, after the player has already formed an emotional investment in the game. If the game had begun with the question of if rebuilding was the right thing to do, the player could have held distance from the start. Instead, “Bastion” uses repetitive sequences – enter a new level, fight, find the core, return it and expand, unlock a new level – to encourage attachment to restoration throughout the game. This makes it a test of whether the player is able to separate the pleasure of rebuilding from the actual goodness of rebuilding. The game poses the question of whether the desire to restore came honestly, or if the system has been convincing and manufacturing that desire through its progress system.
“Slay the Princess” approaches this idea from another direction by tying progress not to obedience or care but to decisiveness and violence. The game begins by commanding the player to kill the princess in the basement. At first, the player often chooses to hesitate, try to ask follow up questions, or take alternative paths. Eventually, the princess begins to attack the player and it becomes apparent that the princess is not innocent and that the narrator might have been correct. This turning point is important because it represents how the game changes the player’s idea of what is right and wrong. The initial instinct is finding an alternative to killing the princess, but the game’s structure does not allow for this hesitation. This is the shift that Simon Parkin alludes to in his New Yorker essay “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?”, where violence feels justified and necessary, not because it is correct, but because it becomes easier to accept.
Moreover, “Slay the Princess” utilizes repetition in its procedure to cause the player to justify certain actions. It continuously brings the player back to the same scenes and same dilemmas, sometimes with slight variations. This accumulation of these repetitions creates a sense of what counts as progress. The player has to learn that they must adapt their choices in order to avoid being faced with the same outcome over and over again. The system rewards certain paths by making those choices push the story forward in a different direction. Because of this, violence begins to feel less problematic and more like a way to make progress.
The “good ending” especially reveals this idea. If the player immediately kills the princess without any hesitation and directly follows the narrator’s wishes, they are taken to the “good ending” screen. This makes it seem like the choice of violence and compliance is rewarded. This cements the form of progress that the game is trying to build. The game does not simply make violence one possible branch among many other plausible options. It repeatedly places the player into a structure where a decisive action is the only thing that moves the story forward. The game is making a claim not just about violence, but about the relationship between action and uncertainty. Progress takes the form of choosing resolution over hesitation, and because this resolution is often so violent, violence appears to be the way of moving forward.
Considered together, the three games form a pattern. In “Papers, Please”, progress affects moral decisions by tying success to obedience and survival. In “Bastion”, progress feels like caring restoration and links success to rebuilding. In “Slay the Princess”, progress urges action by associating success with decisiveness and violence. Each of these games teaches the player to value a different kind of behavior, showing that progress systems can encourage different moral habits based on what actions they frame as the route forward. Not all progress systems are identical, but they have the ability to teach and direct judgement. These three games provide distinct demonstrations that progress systems are not simply mechanical, but they make certain values.
Progress in games should not be discussed as obvious or neutral. Progress systems are so powerful because they do not simply track where the player is in a game. They shape how the player learns to interpret what they are doing. When a game rewards one action and punishes another, it is not only managing pacing; it is determining what the players will experience as meaningful and justified. These three games persuade through the same general mechanism of action, reward, consequence, but they use it to teach different values. In each case, the game is teaching what counts as the right kind of action through the form of progress itself. Therefore, the progress system itself is part of the game’s argument.
Once again, consider the pink citation slip. It seems small, just another one of the government materials alongside the passports and rulebooks. However, it is actually quietly influencing a way of thinking. It doesn’t just tell the player they made a mistake – it shows them what kind of mistake the system cares about and what kind of action will be recognized as progress. This is what links it to the recovered cores in “Bastion” and the “good ending” in “Slay the Princess”. Each of these seems like a simple marker of advancement, but it is also a lesson in what kind of actions are reasonable. Progress in these narrative games is not just about moving forward, but a way of teaching players what kind of behavior is best. This is what makes these systems dangerous. They do not force the player to stop thinking. They control this thinking and change what the player believes is morally right.
References
Bogost, I. (2007). Procedural rhetoric. In Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. MIT Press.
Nagel, T. (1976). Ruthlessness in public life. In Mortal questions (chapter text hosted by Oxford).
Parkin, S. (2013, September 16). How evil should a video game allow you to be? The New Yorker.
