Our volunteer Martin has taken a close look at the new computer game ‘Papers, Please’, where you play the role of a border control officer
Blog by Martin Lennon, Media Volunteer
The great appeal of computer games is that they let you play out a fantasy life that you might never have the opportunity realise. But there is a more critical potential for computer games – they can put you in someone else’s shoes and let you see the world from a perspective you might never have imagined or even considered. While it can just be a bit of fun, computer games can help you think about the world in a more nuanced light.
‘Papers, Please’ is a game that puts you in the shoes of people who are not thought of often – border control officers. Set in a fictional Soviet bloc state, the game casts you as a newly assigned border checkpoint inspector. Cooped into a cramped and lonely shed and you are tasked with negotiating an ever more complex set of rules about who can and cannot get into the Arstotzka.
Along the game’s 31 day timeline you come across asylum seekers, human traffickers and shadowy conspiracies. As the front line of the Arstotzkan government you have to apply policy to the complex realities that real border officers come across every day and you need to make the decisions that the British Home Office staff need to make every day. One of the central problems of asylum policy – that asylum seekers often, because of the very persecution that they are fleeing, are often unable to demonstrate their own persecution – as Phil Fogg from the Game Under Podcast noted “It’s a document game where you reject people based on their documents rather than who they actually are.”
Just like any other computer game ‘Papers, Please’ presents a caricaturised and overly dramatic picture of its subject matter, but it ultimately tries to create an honest experience. Lucas Pope, who created the game as a solo project, wanted to recreate “the rigmarole that immigration inspectors do when checking your documents” – something that he has succeeded in. Playing through the game, the pressure of adhering to the byzantine rules become more and more apparent; scouring passports for irregularities, cross referencing serial numbers and hunting down a passed expiration date you come to see every entrant as a liar until proven otherwise. “Finding discrepancies brings a grim thrill, a ‘gotcha’ moment that is plainly at odds with this miserable job.” Tom Hoggins from The Telegraph notes.
This ‘grim thrill’ is probably the cause of most of the brutality we see in the UK’s real asylum system. As I’ve touched on before in this blog the unfairness and injustice we see in the asylum system – when Section 4 support is withdrawn, when unaccompanied minors are wrongly age assessed, and when victims of torture are asked again and again to recount their ordeal – is not really caused by nasty officers at Home Office. It’s caused by a system that judges people by their documents rather than who they really are. A system that forgets that it is dealing with real people, with real fears and who sometimes make genuine errors in their application. It’s a system we’ve built in place of a more compassionate and welcoming asylum system and it’s a system that ‘Papers, Please’ does well to recreate. Even if it is set in Russia.
