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Writer's pictureJersey Fonseca

Papers, Please: Creating Wicked Problems Through Relevancy & Structure

When I first read Miguel Sicart's Wicked Games: On the Design of Ethical Gameplay, I was a bit skeptical as to whether there truly can be a game that can invoke true ethical gameplay. I had two critiques after reading it. The first, which Sicart points out, is that most decision making in videogames rarely do they actually leave the player feeling as though that their decision has impacted their experience. Even if there are games that have multiple endings, you can typically just go back and experience the alternate endings or watch them. The experiences leading up to those alternate endings are rarely diverse enough to make a player feel as though they have truly missed out on something. An example of a game that comes to mind is Bioshock. The decision whether to kill a little sister or not does not truly impact the game until a very small portion in the ending. At this point, it is easy to just look at the second ending on Youtube. This is one of the reasons why we can just watch both endings in class and talk about it.


My second critique is that because games exist outside of the real world, it is hard for players to truly empathize with it. I may only be speaking for myself, but in a game like Bioshock, I have a hard time empathizing with the moral dilemma of killing a little sister for Adam because I would never be in a situation where I would need to decide whether or not to kill a little girl. I believe this is why games like Grand Theft Auto exist. Players can take a space where actions have no consequences in their real lives. As a result, players will explore and kill people without a flinch because the game is understood as a space with those possibilities.


While these are challenges that are tough to overcome through videogames, I think Papers, Please does a very good job. I will show how I believe the game resolves the second critique and how this leads to the possibility of resolving the first.


As mentioned, I personally have a hard time empathizing with games that I cannot see myself in. I acknowledge that there is a lot of bias in this post because I have family members that are immigrants. Needless to say, I have clearly seen many of the complex decisions that come with dealing with immigration. However, I think this game can apply to players who have not experienced issues of immigration in their family. It's very convenient that we are playing this game when heated discussions about immigration issues are expanding globally. Rarely am I able to read the news without reading about immigration and the dilemma of giving people a place to stay while also opening up potential dangers. Regardless, Papers, Please's subject matter is much more palpable than First-Person Shooters, Fantastical games, etc.


Because of this, it is easier to feel as though your decisions have an actual impact. For instance, there comes a point in the game when a woman tells you "If I go back to my country, I will be killed." I think what is truly successful here is that you are not the one that has to kill the character, but your decision practically does so. This perfectly intertwines the severity of killing characters that games like Bioshock try to recreate, while taking out the disconnect about killing someone while never being able to relate to it. I believe this is even more successful because you never even see her die... You are left to your conceivable imagination to experience the consequence of your action. Even if you are able to go back and change your decision, you now need to face having less money to properly provide for your family. Again, you never directly see this, so you are left to your imagination.


Interestingly enough, games often attempt to visually provide every detail to create a more realistic experience for the readers. But instead, I believe Papers, Please succeeds because it leaves some of the events in the game to the imagination of the player. This forces the player to actually think about what they are doing rather than passively watching the scenes. I believe this helps actually create a wicked problem and forces the player to reflect on the actions they are performing, an essential element that can easily be missed when facing a problem proposed to invoke moral decision-making. As Sicart suggests, it is very difficult to create wicked problems in games, but Papers, Please's complexity in consequences along with the storytelling structure indeed create a wicked problem that put players in a complex position that other games fail to.

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