Winning to Fail: How Papers, Please Encourages Accuracy

In most games, failure is a straightforward affair. Whether it’s the abrupt cinematic ragdoll of a Bethesda title, a carefully rendered death animation, or even the simple YOU DIED of a soulsborne title. Games like to toy with the presentation of a failure, but rarely the motivation behind it. We don’t tend to take damage or lose lives on purpose, unless you’re following that l’appel du vide feeling of flinging yourself off a cliff. After a handy quick save, that is.

Obviously, the result of failure might matter, and the presentation might be geared towards that. In Final Fantasy 14’s party wipes; you die, the screen quickly fades to black, and you’re given a big, encouraging: FORWARD! with all of your cooldowns recharged. You and your party are ready to go again, having learnt from your mistakes. But dying or failing a mission in a game is almost always because of a lack of skill, whether it be mechanical or tactical. You didn’t press the buttons right. You failed the escort quest. You missed that platform.

Papers, Please stuck with me because it’s the first game that incentivised me to choose failure, while at the same time wanting me to get better. It’s coming up to its ten-year anniversary, but I’ve rarely seen games do what Papers, Please did in quite the same way. Some come close; the narrative experiences of This War of Mine or Frostpunk will often ask you to take statistical dents to preserve your morality. Interstellar groundhog day simulator The Outer Wilds will often encourage you to mess around and find out, as death is impermanent. But rarely is the choice so plainly presented, and rarely is the impact so immediately felt.

In Papers, Please, you take the role of a border control officer for the fictional country Arstotzka. You sit in a claustrophobic booth, with the din of hundreds of hopefuls warbling in the distance. You can see them at the top of the screen; black silhouettes huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, purposefully vague so your subconscious can invent stories about them. Meanwhile, when one does finally walk in front of your booth, it’s uncomfortably personal.

The hopeful’s face only takes up a small portion of the screen, but that’s your ‘first person view’, that’s your corner, your booth, and they’re in it. You’re made to feel just as boxed in as they are. They’ll hand you your passport, and from there its on you to scrutinise it with meticulous detail, all the while they’ll tell you something about their life. “I can’t wait to return home,” says your first encounter, and their passport checks out! Glory to Arstotzka.

The game will quickly make things more complicated. You have to reject someone who’s waited in line for eight hours. Someone makes a mistake on their prior paperwork and is turned away. A mother wants to see their son who they haven’t visited in six years, but their documentation’s wrong. You’re the final say in whether they get to enter the country. Allowing a incorrect passport doesn’t end the game immediately; after your shift you’ll be penalised for each infraction against your rulebook, and you have bills to pay.

You can lose at Papers, Please. There are twenty different endings, many fatal (or even just Dickensian in nature). However, avoiding these grim fates isn’t your only motivation for success. Each genuine mistake you make stings because you soon realise those penalisations are a resource. If you choose to care about the tired, emotive eyes of those pixelated travellers, you know each honest mistake you make is a lost opportunity to let someone off the hook.

Papers, Please wants you to get better at your job so you can fail on purpose. The more accurate you are, the less infractions you incur. The less infractions you occur, the more opportunities you’ll have to be kinder further down the road. There’s no intrinsic reward; it’s not like you’re getting a score multiplier for stringing together a long combo; there are no stats to boost or scoreboards to land on. It’s just you, two stamps, and the choices you make.

While completionists might shoot for all possible endings, Papers, Please initially forces you to weigh your morality against the survival of your family. The state of Arstotzka starts to tighten the noose around your ethics over time, and the question of ‘does this person deserve to be let through?’ becomes ‘have I done well enough today to allow this?’ Or, in other words, ‘Did I do well enough to fail?’