Approve/deny?
Dystopian border control simulatorPapers, Pleaseturns 10 years old this week, and developer Lucas Pope has marked the occasion by demaking it. Created in collaboration with Keiko Pope, the resulting browser-basedLCD, Please"runs" on a mocked-up LCD console, akin to Nintendo’s Game & Watch. Pope is also celebrating the anniversary by donating $100,000 to the International Rescue Committee.
Much has been written about Papers, Please and the line it treads between efficiency and empathy, together with the fine detail of its satire of the immigration process and Soviet bureaucracy. John Walker (RPS in peace) summarised it as follows in hisoriginal review. “Its lofi graphics and static setting join its focus on mundanity and repetition under pressure to suggest something that sounds about as far away from ‘game’ as you might imagine.” But he added that it’s “an engrossing, creeping affair, almost rogue-like in its grip on you to last longer, work faster, abandon principles more freely”.
I think that recasting Papers, Please as an LCD game brings those “simple pleasures” to the fore, inasmuch as I used to play on LCD handhelds as a child, and the demake strips out a lot of the sobering narrative context. The stately way each piece of documentation beeps into view makes me giggle. But the LCD faceblot effect also lends the game an eerie new dimension which makes me thankful that it doesn’t (as far as I can tell) include the original’s option to strip-search migrants. And perhaps the experience is all the grimmer for being presented in such a twee, condensed fashion: I’m trying to imagine how I would feel about it if the demake had been released first.
I have similarly mixed feelings aboutthe anniversary promotion at large, which converts the original game’s visual and narrative choices into the language of a press release. It takes the form of a propaganda doc from the Arstotzkan “Ministry of Scheduled Celebration”, hailing the “five million inspectors” who have played since launch. There are Papers, Please-themed shirts, posters and stickers from the Ministry of Fabric, and atemporary discounton the original Papers, Please from the Ministry of Discounts & Flash Sales. The mock-handheld LCD demake is described as an “inspector training tool”. A question for the comments thread: is all this a satire of video game promotion, or has the promotional element engulfed the satire?
