Everything Smooth as Ice

Lucas Pope: who would’ve thought Naughty Dog ever employed people with original ideas?

I think the most impressive achievement of Papers, Please is not the fact that it took a mind-numbingly boring task and somehow turned it into a legitimately entertaining, flow-inducing activity – it is the fact that this may be one of the first games I have ever played in which the core mechanical systems of the game and the story were united in such an incredible, effective way. Papers, Please is a triumphant example of the medium used for its highest artistic potential: mechanics as metaphor; gameplay as theme; challenge as message.

Papers, Please is ostensibly about approving valid documents and denying invalid ones at a border checkpoint, but it keeps things loose with regards to the real end goal of the game. You can lose, certainly, if you perform poorly enough at this task, but your proficiency to control how and when you fail also provides you with ethical agency. The game regularly prompts you to compromise your apparent function in favour of decency, trust, or the promise of revolution – it asks you to set your own goal, and to express your values, but it does so entirely through the mechanism of approving or denying passports.

This is what Papers, Please does that other games (usually) do not: it presents the player with meaningful, consequential, expressive choices, but it does so as part of the core gameplay, by altering the contexts and input variables of that gameplay. When a revolutionary insurgent asks to be let through with forged documents, you are still playing the same game as before: your pay stub will suffer for letting that person through, which might cause you to lose the game. Maybe, if you are not watching closely, you will miss the forgery and let that person through accidentally. Maybe you were doing badly beforehand, and you have to deny them just to avoid losing the game. Maybe you deny them on principle, because you do not trust the rebels, or because your job is to screen out forged or flawed documents and you just want to do your job.

When you compare Papers, Please to another game that features the same kind of branching storyline fraught with perilous ethical dilemmas, like, say, Mass Effect, you can see much more clearly the difference in the execution: Mass Effect’s core gameplay is combat action, but the only times the player is presented with serious moral choices are as strict “A, B, or C” events in dialogue trees. These set the context for battles, or happen as a consequence of battles, but the combat mechanics are wholly independent of the storytelling aspect of the game. Mass Effect is a fantastic game, but it keeps its narrative, its themes, and its metaphor in one zone, and its core action in a different one. Papers, Please makes no such compromise – mechanics, challenge, metaphor and story are as one; true ludonarrative resonance.