Your entire job (and the entire game) is this: decide who can come into the country, and who can't, according to their documents. You look for inconsistencies: misspelled issuing cities wrong dates of birth mismatching photos. The player's character has a family, for whom they need to make enough money every day to provide housing, food, and heat. Tensions with surrounding countries are high, and the border has only just been reopened after a long war with Arstotzka's neighbor, Kolechia. Papers Please casts the player as a nameless border officer in the fictional Eastern-Bloc-y country of Arstotzka in the mid-1980s. And how that choice isn't extraordinary or even intentionally malicious, it's the most mundane thing in the world.
I imagine the resulting biopic where I am played by some Hollywood up-and-comer hoping for an Oscar nomination.īut I've played Papers, Please, a 2013 "dystopian document thriller" game put out by Lucas Pope, and I'm afraid that I know something a little darker about myself: how easy it is for me (and you, and all of us) to follow rules. This policy is wrong." I imagine the accompanying swell of music & the shift into a more technicolor world.
It's easy to imagine what I would do if I were one of the people being addressed by that plea: I imagine myself standing up to some boss, quietly stating, "No, absolutely not. It seemed such a simple thing when it was stated like that.
It was a clear directive: stop enforcing policies that are hurting real people. One speaker came up and, in the middle of their speech, directly challenged law enforcement, ICE agents, congresspeople, etc. Speakers went up, one by one, each with their own personal way of encouraging our community to take a stand against mass deportation, xenophobia, and policies that threaten and affect members of our community. I went to the San Francisco Gender Strike, a feminist march against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE").
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