Crossing Borders, Transgressing Bodies: 'Papers, Please' and Procedural Collusion

• In Event: Procedural Transgression: The Emancipatory Potential or Failure of Ludic Media

Abstract

The paper will examine Lucas Pope’s computer and mobile game Papers, Please (2013), which explores dehumanization in the immigrant border-crossing by directly charging the player with imposing authoritative violence on vulnerable human bodies. In the game, you play a customs officer controlling the passport check of a recently opened border to a fictional, but clearly East European Soviet republic, examining the passports and papers of people attempting to enter for inconsistencies. Each day, both the rules, the documents, and the player’s powers expand, up to the ability and necessity to have petitioners imprisoned, or strip-searched. The game offers the player a chance to subvert the dehumanizing logic of the border crossing, and act like a human being, but punishes them if they choose to do so. At the same time, the only way to get away with acts of human decency and kindness, is to otherwise perform your job with perfect machine-like efficiency. The game asks you to become an efficient, inhuman machine, offers the opportunity for redemption and humanity, and then makes it clear than only by consistently behaving as a machine, can they get away with occasionally being human. I examine Papers, Please as a work exploring the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the national and the human: charging the player with responsibility to violate the boundaries of other human beings, in order to protect the national boundary, and to violate the national boundary, to protect their own humanity.

Author

• Daniil Leiderman, Texas A&M University