The Aggressor Papers, Please
About the game
The game “Papers, Please” was made and published by "Lucas Pope” in 2013.
It belongs to the genre of “Puzzle Simulation”.
It is a single-player game. | It is a multi-player game. | It features both single-player and multi-player mode.
The game is classified by the database as one with a "Designated Aggressor,” a “Fictional Setting,” and a “Passive Player Role.”
About the Aggressor Categories
Aggressor Type: Designated
- This game features the “Designated Aggressor." It indicates that the game tends to focus on one side of the conflict, either constantly or episodically. The Aggressor(s) are set by the narrative and rules of the game and cannot be changed by the player, meaning that the perspective on the Aggressor is fixed.
Setting Type: Fictional
- This game has a fictional setting that, nonetheless, is strongly influenced by historical events or processes. This can serve to provide a layered sense of meaning or separation between darker or more serious topics of history and sometimes requires the player audience to do more decoding in order to grasp the historical commentary.
Player Agency: Passive
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In this game, the role of the player's agency towards the Aggressor(s) is limited or even completely disabled, their role therefore often passive. The player tends to witness the aggression or acts within it, but is unable to take action against the cause of the aggression, i.e. the Aggressor themselves.
Individual Assessment
“Papers, Please” takes a very distinguished approach towards the question of the Aggressor, as it does not feature a war or explicit conflict. Yet it deserves a mention in this database for the imagery of the Aggressor that can be found in it. The player is in a fictional totalitarian regime resembling the Soviet Union and has won the job lottery to become a border agent checking documents for immigrants. Over the course of the game, bureaucracy intensifies and the player is shown a rather corrupt regime, presented multiple options to help resistance operatives or help the regime by even being handed a live weapon. International conflict and tensions are implied, yet not directly experienced as open warfare. By suspending the player in a very individual position within the system, it is focusing on enduring the situation and limiting direct options for change.
Further reading:
Morrissette, Jess. “Glory to Arstotzka: Morality, Rationality, and the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy in Papers, Please.” Game Studies 17, no. 1 (July 2017). https://gamestudies.org/1701/articles/morrissette.
Pfister, Eugen. “Überwachen und Strafen im digitalen Spiel.” Billet. Spiel-Kultur-Wissenschaft, February 15, 2017. https://doi.org/10.58079/uj5v.
Mattli, A. “Policing the Border in Lucas Pope’s Computer Game ‚Papers, Please‘.” Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 41, no. 41 (2023): 99–117. https://doi.org/10.33675/SPELL/2022/41/9.
