Following closely to this week’s theme, Papers, Please is a game about choices. What differentiates it, however, from The Stanley Parable, is that the majority of the choices the player must make are under time constraints. The number of correct decisions on a given day determines your salary, and the number of individuals you can process depends on how quick you make choices. This creates two very important influencing factors on the implicit characteristics of our decision-making.
A phenomenon that is well documented in social psychology is that fact that choices under time constraints favour implicit biases over conscious, deliberate knowledge. Biases about how age, gender and race relate to lawfulness are prevalent even if people don’t broadly think they hold them. Just the knowledge of a stereotype is enough for it to seep into the choices you make. In particular, people are more likely to assume young men are more likely to be doing something criminal or “wrong”, rather than elderly women. As a result, the player would be more likely to look for discrepancies in travel documents belonging to individuals who belong to certain groups. In the same vein, stress has the same effect on decision making. I find games with time constraints incredibly stressful for some reason because I always feel like I am not playing fast enough. This definitely hurt my ability to make better informed decisions, especially near the end of a given day when the clock would flash to signal time was almost up. Both of these factors are important to consider, especially because, while we think when playing the game our decisions are made entirely based on rational morality and appropriate analysis of the documents, in reality there is a lot more going on behind the scenes. This is significant because our judgements of our own gameplay and endings are attributed usually to an understanding of our own morality. We think we know why we make the choices we make. In reality, this is not the case in this game.
I agree, really nice, interesting post! I definitely felt what you describe when you say that the stress caused by the time constraints end up influencing what we rely on to make decisions, especially when the time is really close to running out. I feel like this, coupled with the fact that as the game progresses there are more documents that need to be checked, really necessitates those implicit biases when you’re trying to accumulate as much money as you can for your family. I feel like that connects really well to how the game kind of forces the player to be as efficient as possible that it demands a kind of emotional distance from the player. At least fo…
Great post! I think the time constraints in Papers, Please provide a great example of how mechanics that influence the way you approach the game can be just as effective as the plot in communicating certain themes the player. In this case, the fact that choices under time constraints favor implicit biases over conscious, deliberate knowledge, combined with the narrative context of the game, help in communicating interesting ideas about governance and the way power is exercised on certain populations. The fact that you begin to make more snap judgments when fighting against the time limit in order to make more money for your family, but that those judgments carry a certain ethical weight to them--in determining the fate o…