I think that the Gamasutra article by Cory Johnson which we read for this weak did a fantastic job of describing the rewards structure within Papers, Please. By creating a variety of competing incentives, the game forces you to consider tradeoffs in potential situations. The potential tradeoffs combine diegetic motives, such as earning more money so that your virtual family can continue to live comfortable, with those that more directly affect the player, such as moral choices which may cause one to feel uneasy and streamlining upgrades to the game's user interface. It would be great to let this mother into the country to see her son, but if my pay get's docked then I may not be able to get heating for the next night.
One aspect of the game which contributes to the novelty and efficacy of its reward structure is the way in which the game implements timing. Each day effectively lasts 12 in-game hours - from 6 AM to 6 PM. The player is driven by a financial incentive to process as many people as possible in order to maximize the amount of money that they take home at the end of the day. Therefore, there are tradeoffs between being thorough in your document reviews and trying to rush through them, though the later results in the citations. After playing for a bit, I found myself relying partially on the dialogue in order to assess how long I should spend on processing a character. There was one NPC who, after being asked why they were trying to enter the country, responded that their presence had been requested and handed over a diplomatic visa. In my experience, no characters who entered under such permits had lied or forged documents, and the way in which he spoke sounded authoritative. I barely even scanned his documents before hitting the "accept" stamp.
The time limit adds a distinct feeling of tension to the game. There is a large degree of moral ambiguity to many of the choices. With regards to siding with the state of Arstotzka or EZIC, there is not enough information given about each to really know if either of them is wholly in the right (the newspaper articles only provide scant hints). Though these specific choices are part of the larger narrative, there are many one-off in-the-moment choice where the player has little time to decide what the right course of action is - letting the person in or not. Sitting here and pondering whether the mother getting re-united with her son is worth the possibility of my son getting sick is not really an option if I want to get a decent paycheck. Unlike games such as Skyrim, where you can sit and ponder what dialogue option to choose before making a decision, this quick decision making forces you to rely more on moral instinct and make such calculations largely subconsciously. It would be fascinating to see an assessment of people's decisions on their first play through, and how factors like the amount of money they had affected what they decided to do.
The main other use of money, besides supporting ones family, is spent on getting upgrades for the booth. These include pressing space bar to enter inspection mode or being able to hit tab in order to whip out the handy dandy stamp bar. The only reason why these upgrades are worth getting is because it can shave milliseconds off your processing time and, therefore, possibly earn you a little more currency in the long run. Having a time constraint gives such upgrades value. Additionally, the primarily click-based interface has an interesting effect on how the game affects the player. Personally, I found it to be a little clunky but, once I got the hang of it and purchased some upgrades, more streamlined. However, using the mouse to individually click through the pages of the rule book, or find the right country on the map in order to verify the issuing city of the passport, necessitates that the player learn the game's mechanics better, start to memorize aspects of the rulebook, and overall learn a skillset similar to how someone in a similar job would. Clicking adds a degree of intentionality to the gameplay, where you can feel yourself thinking through every step you make without the process being wholly automated. The game is only made more clunky and difficult by the fact that the majority of player interaction is occurring in the bottom right quadrant in the screen, with the top half being solely dedicated to the visuals and the bottom left illustrating the booth itself. This creates an aspect of organizational management to the game, where progression is unlocked not simply by moving through the branching story but is felt by improving one's own ability to preform efficiently. Failing to improve one's own abilities with regards to the game's will make it extremely difficult as it increases in difficulty and more rules are added. Overall, this adds its own dimension of difficulty to the game and stacks with previously discussed levels of incentives in order to create an engaging and mechanically deep experience.
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