Papers, Please
Papers, Please is a constructivist simulation of life in a highly controlled fictional Eastern Bloc country in the late Soviet era. The player is assigned the job of taking and inspecting paperwork for travelers at the highly restricted border checkpoint. When you are at work, you check that everyone’s paperwork is in order, watch for forgeries and smugglers, and question people you deem suspicious. Succeed at meeting your quota and your supervisors will reward you. Fail, and your pay will be docked (or worse, since there are terrorists on the loose…) You also are asked to interact with your home life, albeit in an abstracted way, through trying to provide food and medicine for your wife, child, and extended family. Yes, Papers, Please lets you learn at a very deep level about some of the quotidian decision-making of eastern-block-communist life, but it also links that historical vignette, videogames as a whole, and you (the player sitting in front of a computer) into the whole complex of history, including computer technology’s development for military purposes. Contrast Papers, Please with those inevitable museum AR game/apps that let you turn around and see (usually called “experience”) a photorealistic version of a scene floating on your $1000 iPhone. One of the core aspects of imagining a place for games in the arts is to understand what we already know in the other arts are just as true in games: simply representing an experience and what the work of art does are two very different things. We know not to ascribe value simply because a painting of a flower looks technically very much like what we assume the “real” source flower, similarly, games that get us to engage with history are best when they eschew digital realism (sometimes called “immersion”) and give us a deep sense of the underlying logic of the historical moment, and its specific connection to our own place in the world, and the technology used to depict it.
Creator: Lucas Pope
Link: https://papersplea.se/
Connections:
Anselm Keifer - Besetzungen
Amelia Rosselli - War Variations
Franz Kafka - The Castle