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Papers, Please has always been an indie darling: and I do have a lot of respect for it! It’s one of the best examples to my mind of how mechanics can impart a mindset in the player, and how the mindset can tell a story all by itself. On some level, I do think it’s still one of the best examples of interacting with authoritarian power structures I’ve ever seen, and how it makes you think, feel, act within them. It is absolutely a triumph from a purely mechanical standpoint, and definitely deserves most of the accolades it got. I’m not here to argue Papers, Please is secretly bad: it’s not. It’s really good, and if you want a game that explores the ways mechanics can truly help you engage with and understand your relation to the concepts at play, you should absolutely play it. That being said, something has always bugged me about this game. Less for what it is on its own face, and more for the ways in which it interacts with the culture around us, and how the game doesn’t seem to recognize the context in which it has been released. I want to discuss how the context of a game can seriously impact the message it sends, and why that is a concern that should not be ignored.

Papers Please is an amazing puzzle simulator where you will play the role of a serious man – an inspector on the border between countries that are enemies. The events take place in 1982 in a fictional state Arstotzka. The main character gets the job on the border and controls the immigration process. Papers, Please is very reminiscent of chess, it’s easy to pick up and very hard to master. You’ll find the initial processing of applicants a fair challenge and enjoyable, and will quickly master noticing minute discrepancies in traveler data. Papers, Please is a game in which its ever-changing rules create a claustrophobic experience for the player, who feels as though the game’s processes actively work against them, rather than in the service of gradual mastery or slowly-mounting difficulty. Papers, Please is a fun and interesting game, which requires you to play the role of an immigration inspector. Your role is to ensure everyone passing through the country’s border has clean and proper papers. Moreover, you need to follow an evolving set of immigration laws, making tough choices to let people through the border. Papers Please 2021 George and the Printer One-Way Ticket (Ep. 2) Papers Please Papers Please 2020 Papers Please Roblox Papers Please 3 Papers Please 2 Pokko Spacebar (2020) Hikari’s Station FTD: Fixin’ To Die Laser Guy Lunch Crush Last Train Home Papers Please Kogama.

So, to get the obvious out of the way: Papers, Please is clearly based on the Eastern Bloc in the 1900’s, pulling from the aesthetic of the USSR and the political tensions and happenings of the time. You’ve been drafted into the role of the border guard, dealing with the quickly changing policies and rules of the region, as a war has ended. Domestic policy will harshly punish you and your family for not upholding state policies in your job, no matter how inhumane. Broadly, then, this is clearly meant to be an allegory for the authoritarian tendencies of the USSR, and how such a system has impacts on the average people who must live in such a system. The aesthetics of the game, the music, all of it is clearly meant to evoke this time period and political unrest that came along with it. On the surface, I have very little issue with such a framing. The USSR was indeed an authoritarian state that perpetuated many imperialist tendencies, with the requisite impacts on the citizens such a system inevitably invites. It’s not a state worth defending, and it is a well known and striking example of an authoritarian state in history, making it a fair choice to frame allegorically as a critique and exploration of authoritarianism. The game itself avoids any bad history by making a fictional world instead of a piece of historical fiction, and this serves it well, leaving the focus on aesthetics and ideology instead of the fraught history that an indie game of this scope probably wasn’t equipped to handle. That being said, I don’t have an issue with this game… by itself. However, no work is released in a contextless void, and this is where I find Papers, Please tends to stumble. It was an indie game being released in the modern age to a primarily western audience, and man, it did not seem to understand the problems with that.

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The red scare is an extremely well documented phenomenon in many of these areas, particularly in America. For a variety of political reasons (that I do NOT have time to get into), communist infiltration was a fearmongering tactic pushed by the state, along with a general distaste for the ideology being promoted. In particular, the overtly authoritarian structure of the USSR led the majority of the public to conflate communist ideology with authoritarian government structures. In essence, the west was framed as capitalist and capitalism being free, and the USSR being communist and communism being restrictive and authoritarian. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that this definition of communism is hot nonsense: read even a tiny amount of theory and it’s clear that communism is an economic system and is matter of fact, stateless. Regardless of your feelings on the ideology, it is simply factual that communism and authoritarianism are separate entities, not hand in hand at all. Regardless, there has been a concerted effort in many western nations to conflate the two, and to make people think of authoritarianism as communism, inherently. This means that unfortunately, exposure to critiques of the authoritarian aspects of the USSR means that many people will assume that these critiques then apply to the ideology of communism across the board. Media wishing to discuss the USSR in an honest framing runs into this issue then, and without proper consideration is going to lead people into an inaccurate application of the message. Perhaps this is unfair, but it is a real consideration that needs to be taken in a culture so steeped in the effects of the red scare. Papers, Please does not really take this into account one bit.

So, here’s the problem. Papers, Please is clearly a pointed experience meant to only communicate ideas about authoritarianism. Nothing about the economic system of the fictional Arstotzka is told, and you’re even paid with bonuses and deduced pay for mistakes, something rather opposite to communist ideology. All the political elements of the game relate to the power structures of government, and plot points such as a citizen uprising focus on such issues, rather than the economics. The entire scope of the gameplay revolves around how an individual deals with harsh and uncompromising state policy, for crying out loud. Papers, Please, is so clearly about authoritarianism, and yet, the use of USSR aesthetics is inevitably going to mislead a lot of people into thinking it’s about the economic system of communism at the same time. I remember when I was younger, not as tuned into politics or history, and I played this game? Download paypal hack tool free fire. Yeah, I genuinely thought this was a critique of what communism would lead to, about how the USSR’s stated goals would always lead to this. How many people with a similar level of engagement with these topics are going to take this away from the game, particularly in the culture they’re in? Maybe this is unfair to the game, but this is a genuine problem it doesn’t want to contend with. Understanding of leftist politics is not promoted in many areas of the world for many reasons, and a nuanced history of the USSR even less so. If you release a work that is going to mislead anyone with a baseline understanding of the topic, and you know most of the people who will engage will have that baseline understanding, is that not in some way irresponsible on the part of the creator? Papers, Please, implies the USSR was broadly not good for its citizens due to the authoritarian elements of the state, and while this is a reasonable assertion on its own, it is not a clear assertion within the context of a common western mindset.

I wonder how Papers, Please will come off in the future. In 100 years, perhaps the red scare will have passed, and somebody will want to go back and play this game. How will it come across then? Will the messages about authoritari