The son, wife, mother-in-law, and uncle of the player character of Papers, Please are just circles that state their status and a line of text stating their familial relationship to the player. The complete lack of development of these characters -- they don’t even have names -- makes the emotional effect of this fictional family on the player questionable. Even so, mere words indicative of family were enough to make me and the group I was playing with worriedly exclaim, “our son is dying!” as we saw “very sick” written menacingly in a red circle above our “son.”
The same could be extended to the other characters; even the faces of those intending to enter are pixelated and not always clear, and their facial expressions do not change. Regardless, the text dialogue is enough to assign emotions to the hopeful travelers and make the player feel conflicted if the law-abiding choice doesn’t seem to be the most ethical one.
And while I often didn’t pay much attention to this while being bombarded with papers, the upper part of the interface that showed the outside was, to me, very successful in evoking fear and shock. For example, during the attack on one of the days, the featureless pixelated body climbing over the wall and the responding gunshots of the other, featureless, pixelated bodies came as a surprise; the representations of humans barely better than stick figures were able to inspire an impressive amount of fear in me.
All of this brings to mind Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which I read for a class on comics last quarter; there’s a lot of similarity between comics and visual games (namely pixel art) when it comes to the stylization of people, faces, and how they can still be very impactful on the reader or player. McCloud notes how humans see people and faces in all sorts of places, and how readers can identify more easily with a symbolic representation due to how universal it is. He also discusses how text is the ultimate abstraction. Papers, Please seems to work with visuals/texts as abstraction in a few different ways: the family designations are enough to motivate the desire to keep them alive despite the lack of developed characters, let alone pictures of even names of them; the possibility of identifying with any of the figures on the outside allows the player to insert themselves into the situations like running from an attack or rushing in after the wall is torn down; and, perhaps straying from McCloud here, it also serves to make the figures a lot more mysterious and thus unsettling, an effect that would be missing if everyone was rendered photo-realistically.
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McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
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