My first attempt at Papers Please I was jailed. Almost immediately. My attempt at being a good border officer resulted in going through all my paperwork, eating up most of the day and ultimately making just 5 dollars less than I would have needed to pay my rent.
In a way, that first play-through was throwaway, but in another it shifted my perspective. For context, let it be known I’m the type of player who won’t choose the “mean” text in a game to avoid hurting the NPC. On my first run through I had not even noticed the option existed to NOT buy food or heat until the game forcibly ticked them off and my budget still wasn’t enough. On my second one however, I strategically began to avoid my family’s needs. If they weren’t hungry, I didn’t buy food. If they weren’t cold, they could do without heat. Medicine seemed urgent at first but upon discovering “very sick” status existed even that became a factor to toy with.
I very well could have continued this trend further detached myself from my fictional family, but certain updates seemed to force me to be reminded of my nature as a person rather than as an objective driven gamer. An example of this is the son’s request for a Christmas present.
The crayon box was, if I recall correctly, 25 credits. That is the equivalent of the player’s rent. In a game where the changes are constant, any day may be cut short and income is always unreliable what purpose could there possibly be to making this purchase?Yet I did. I am unsure if this was due to pity or the expectation that it would somehow lead to profit but I made the choice. The result was a drawing by my fictional son of how cool he thought his fictional dad was. I put it up. I promptly received a 25 credit fine. It cost me double my rent to indulge my son and there was absolutely no benefit at all to this. In fact I later learned if I had not taken it down it could have cost me the entire play through after the hours I spent painstakingly trying to provide for these fictional freeloaders. But then why did I keep them around?
Despite the results, the drawing was humanizing. There was a son at home who thinks of the player as a hero, and that feels like something worth protecting. Never from that point on did I intentionally consider killing off a character. (Although I did slip up and lose one.. sorry uncle. RIP) In fact when I was asked if I wanted to take on another family member despite knowing the punishing nature of the game, I still agreed.
This time I was pleasantly rewarded with her savings, which carried me to the end of the game.
In the end I was almost able to escape with my entire family. Almost. I was short... 5 credits. (Sorry Mom-in-Law... RIP.) Along with processing the humbling realization that 6 hours later I was right where I started, 5 credits short of a victory, I did learn a lot from my experience with the game. There were indeed consequences to my decisions in the game and the results of these were not always explicitly clear prior to making the decisions. No specific decision was explicitly encouraged. Reversing them was not an option because the game lacked a save state and every day was a small victory. My decisions felt important, and my wariness towards the game’s system only enhanced my experience. Was I not feeding my family because I wanted to win? Or because I was immersed and knew that the sacrifices were necessary for some ultimate goal? Did my mentality shift as I was playing?
I’m not certain about the first two questions, but my thoughts decisions changed throughout the game more than once as I both learned to exploit the system and was made to interact with the characters. Ultimately my failure could just as easily have been taken as an indication that I needed to be more callous or one that I should have been more careful in order to save everyone. Given that the player character himself doesn’t seem to experience needs, why didn’t I try simply saving myself? What new challenges would that have led to?
The way different players interact with Paper’s Please leads to different conclusions and challenges our viewpoints. In that way it is a valuable experience and exploration of ethics in a game.
First off, this was an incredibly entertaining read. Thank you for those captions on your pictures -- they gave me a good laugh. Your experience with Papers, Please is very interesting to me because of how different it was from mine. Like you, I often tend to worry way too much about the well-being of NPCs in video games. As a result, it didn't even cross my mind to stop providing for my family and simply let them all (or even just a few) die off in order to make it further in the game. I definitely wanted to make it as far as I could, so it wasn't that I was unmotivated... the anti-family solution just never crossed my mind.…
I'm so glad you chose to write about this. I have always been fascinated with NPCs and what causes us to choose to care about them or not. It perhaps comes down to a personal connection with what we know is not a real person, but we still recognize as having needs and feelings within the game. If GTA is taken as an example of a game with high levels of NPCs, there is always a way to overcome the deterrents to mistreat the pedestrians of the game such as cheat codes or successfully evading the police, but despite this, there are many people who choose to avoid running them over whenever possible. This complicates things because there is no…
I enjoyed the story of your playthrough of Papers Please, and I think the feelings evoked by the game and the personalized nature of your encounters with the people whose passports you are assigned to check, shows the importance of player-centric readings. I think the emergent narrative properties of papers please is so interesting, your experience with the humanization of your family and the son created such a meaningful moral choice in the game, but not one of the explicit ones that the game has like whether or not to let through Sergiu's girlfriend, instead this one was whether or not you would take care of your family or your savings first. The different bonds you may or may not…
I had a very similar experience playing Papers, Please. Like you, I initially met my family’s needs until getting arrested. I then minimized the portion of my salary spent on family, thinking that I was “strategic.” One element of the game that I found to be particularly interesting was the different representations of consequences. I think your point about how you saw your family’s status as “a factor to toy with” raises some important questions. Why does the game showcase pieces of strangers’ identities, but our family is depicted as circles and expenses? To me, it seemed as if the developers aimed to distance the player from their character. In “Play and Be Real about It: What Games Could Lear…