In addition to its overt messages concerning morality within a bureaucratic setting, I think that Papers, Please addresses moral issues in a very unique way.
The rule which denies one person entry into Arstotzka and grants me money to feed my family, is the same rule which sends that person to the death squad back home. In “Experiencing the Banality of Evil in ‘Papers, Please’”, Scott Juster mentions how moments like these in Papers, Please are meant to reinforce the idea that, in real life, and often in the most tragic circumstances, immoral acts are committed when morality falls to the whims of bureaucracy. To complicate things even more, every once in a while, you will come across someone who is desperately begging you to let them into the country so they can avoid facing a firing squad back home, or someone whose documents check out yet turns suicide-bomber not more than 10 seconds after crossing the border. By the end of my run, which lasted just over an in-game week, most of my family was dead. I just couldn’t let enough of the right people into the country to make sure I had enough money at the end of the day to get my family some medicine and keep them warm. In my play-through of the beta version of the game, supporting my family felt like as Sisyphean task. You’re paid money for each person you allow into the country, but penalized if you’re careless and let someone who has invalid or missing documents through the borders. At the end of each day, you’re presented with a kind of score summary which tells you how much money you made (or lost, if you did a crappy job that day), along with a summary of the health condition of your family members. As an immigration inspector, your character does his job first and foremost to support his family. Papers, Please is also a thought-provoking game which has an interesting moral twist to it. It all sounds so cumbersome, but the game somehow makes dealing with these issues a challenging yet rewarding experience. After inspection, you drag his/her passport underneath the stamp, and then click on the stamp itself to accept or deny the entrant into the country.
To browse through documents, you have to drag and drop them yourself from the entrant’s side of the desk to yours using your mouse. The progressive difficulty of the game is counterbalanced by how satisfying and addictive the gameplay mechanics can be.
Your rule book gets more and more complex as each day passes, however, making the inspection of each entrant’s documents an even more challenging and time-consuming process than it was the previous day. After stamping the first few passports, you enter a trance-like state where inspecting the documents of the next entrant is almost entirely an instinctual process.
0 kommentar(er)
