![]() The game never pauses or highlights the moment, but it has created a choice whose consequences are born from the layered systems that your actions are built around. One man comes through without trouble and says his wife is right behind him. See, the individuals that pass through your booth don’t always just stand there. Or for the malicious character whose papers are all in order. ![]() Yet, the game has no consideration for the person whose paperwork would have been in order had they made it to the front of the line the day before the rules altered. If your paperwork isn’t in order is the rationale for keeping people out, and all of these reasons are very real concerns. Without the right paperwork, the person could be a terrorist trying to take down the glorious country of Arstotzka or a drug smuggler or sick or a wanted criminal. Others upend the mechanical system in play by presenting circumstances that the rules have no consideration for. Most are simply people that you process with little trouble or incident. Papers, Please attachs names, faces, and stories to the people passing through your little booth. The moral considerations that the game presents you with are a result of the purely narrative elements that are placed upon rather rote mechanics. The buzzer that sounds when the pink slip of a citation prints out to let the player know that that player has improperly processed someone can even cause irritation or dread. The mechanics grind at the player and may even be demoralizing. That fate is still a consequence of the player’s work speed and attention to detail. The fate of your family may be under threat, but it is still wholly predicated on your ability to do your job well. ![]() Still at this point, the game continues to offer a skill based challenge. As you get better at processing people, the game complicates your ability to do so, as the government will add new rules and regulations (almost arbitrarily at times) nearly every day - something new that you have to watch out for or a new form that has to be processed or notarized. As time goes on, you’ll have memorized many of the place names and international facts that you need to know through the sheer repetition of fact checking, but early on, you will end up looking everything up to make sure that all the people who pass through have paperwork that is in order. Also, the game is stacked in favor of not earning enough early on as you are still getting the hang of things. Additionally, expenses pile up as their needs become greater. Satisfying the needs of your family becomes more difficult should you fail to make enough one day, leaving someone you love hungry or sick. Now you are working towards a goal and one that the game effectively resets each day. That money is then used at the end of each day to pay the living expenses for your family - rent, food, heat and medicine. The player receives money at the end of the day for each successfully processed individual and gets docked pay for each mistake made past the first two. How fast and thorough can you be? Left to just this, the game becomes a high score chaser, but then Papers, Please complicates the situation. ![]() At this level, there is no moral or ethical dilemmas to be explored. And there is also a timer that represents the work day. The people wishing to pass through, give you their papers, and the player matches the relevant information to what your little book says is permissible. What the gameplay amounts to is essentially an information matching game. Here we have a game whose entire mechanical concern is giving a pass or fail to the people coming through a border checkpoint. One game that was mentioned in response to the original post, in what has now become a series, that has created a real sense of emotional consequence to the player’s action was Papers, Please. The player’s emotional state is a continuous thing that is affected by the moment to moment play of the game. Yet, such an attempt would have to be outside of those special moments. Last week, I left off by asking if the player’s own emotional state should be the measure by which we understand a game’s consequences. But within the safe boundaries of a video game, creating a consequence by external means is an ineffective measure of making them matter, as the rewards in terms of the game itself often end up being considered more than the moral or narrative implications of the choice. Still, though, the event is highlighted as a choice.įor choices to matter, they need consequences. Some, like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, up the pressure to choose by adding a timer. Most games effectively pause during these moments to give the player the chance to consider the scenario. The game slows down, highlighting that what is being presented to us right now is a choice. Choices in video games are often given to us in a moment.
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