Papers, Please

Papers, Please :

Congratulations! The results of the October lottery of jobs have been summed up! You are the winner!

Contact the Ministry of Entry at the Grestin checkpoint immediately to take office.Your family will be provided with an apartment in East Grestin, in an 8th class residential building. Glory to Arstotzka!

The six-year war between the communist Astotzka and neighboring Kolechia has just ended, and as a result, Arstotzka has managed to regain her rightful half of the border town of Grestin.

You are an immigration inspector, your task is to control the flow of people entering Arstotzka from Kolechia through Grestin. Among the crowds of immigrants hoping to find work in the country and other visitors are smugglers, spies and terrorists.

You have only the documents provided by the entrants and the simple screening, screening and fingerprinting systems set up by the Ministry of Entry. With this meager arsenal, you will have to decide who can be allowed into Arstotzka, who should be refused, and who should be arrested.

The six-year war between the communist Astotzka and neighboring Kolechia has just ended, and as a result, Arstotzka has managed to regain her rightful half of the border town of Grestin.

You are an immigration inspector, your task is to control the flow of people entering Arstotzka from Kolechia through Grestin. Among the crowds of immigrants hoping to find work in the country and other visitors are smugglers, spies and terrorists.

You have only the documents provided by the entrants and the simple screening, screening and fingerprinting systems set up by the Ministry of Entry. With this meager arsenal, you will have to decide who can be allowed into Arstotzka, who should be refused, and who should be arrested.

Papers, Please :

Congratulations! The results of the October lottery of jobs have been summed up! You are the winner!

Contact the Ministry of Entry at the Grestin checkpoint immediately to take office.Your family will be provided with an apartment in East Grestin, in an 8th class residential building. Glory to Arstotzka!

Papers, Please is a puzzle simulation video game created by indie game developer Lucas Pope, developed and published through his production company, 3909 LLC. The game was released on August 8, 2013 for Microsoft Windows and OS X, for Linux on February 12, 2014 and for iOS on December 12, 2014. A port for the PlayStation Vita was announced in August 2014, and was then released on December 12, 2017.

In Papers, Please, the player takes on the role of a border-crossing immigration officer in the fictional dystopian Eastern Bloc-like country of Arstotzka, which has been and continues to be at political hostilities with its neighboring countries. The game takes place at a migration checkpoint. As the immigration officer, the player must review each immigrant and return citizens' passports and other supporting paperwork against an ever-growing list of rules using a number of tools and guides. Tasks include allowing in those with the proper paperwork while rejecting those without all proper documents, detaining those with falsified information, and balancing personal finances.

Papers, Please was positively received on its release, and it has come to be seen as an example of an empathy game and a demonstration of video games as an art form. The game was recognized with various awards and nominations from the Independent Games Festival, Game Developers Choice Awards, and BAFTA Video Games Awards, and was named by Wired and The New Yorker as one of the top games of 2013. Pope reported that by 2016, more than 1.8 million copies of the title had been sold.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Papers, Please focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982.[3] At the time frame of the game, Arstotzka has recently ended a six-year-long war with the neighboring country of Kolechia, yet political tensions between them and other nearby countries remain high.

As the checkpoint inspector, the player reviews arrivals' documents and uses an array of tools to determine whether the papers are in order for the purpose of arresting certain individuals such as terrorists, wanted criminals, smugglers and entrants with forged or stolen documents; keeping other undesired individuals like those missing required paperwork or expired paperwork out of the country; and allowing the rest through. For each in-game day, the player is given specific rules on what documentation is required and conditions to allow or deny entry which become progressively more complex as each day passes. One by one, immigrants arrive at the checkpoint and provide their paperwork. The player can use a number of tools to review the paperwork to make sure it is in order. When discrepancies are discovered, the player may interrogate the applicant, demand missing documents, take the applicant's fingerprints while simultaneously ordering a copy of the applicant's identity record in order to prove or clear either name or physical description discrepancies, order a full body scan in order to clear or prove weight or apparent biological sex discrepancies or find enough incriminating evidence required to arrest the entrant. There are opportunities for the player to have the applicant detained and the applicant may, at times, attempt to bribe the inspector. The player ultimately must stamp the entrant's passport to accept or deny entry unless the player orders the arrest of the entrant. If the player has violated the protocol, a citation will be issued to the player shortly after the entrant leaves. Generally the player can make two violations without penalty, but subsequent violations will cost the player increasing monetary penalties from their day's salaries. The player has a limited amount of real time, representing a full day shift at the checkpoint, to process as many arrivals as possible.

The player's immigration checkpoint workstation shows the current arrival (left center), the various paperwork the player is currently processing (bottom right), and the current state of the checkpoint (top half).

At the end of each in-game day, the player earns money based on how many people have been processed and bribes collected, lowered by penalties for protocol violations, and then must decide on a simple budget to spend that money on rent, food, heat and other necessities in low-class housing for themselves and their family. The player must also make certain not to earn too much money in illegitimate ways, lest his family be reported and have all the money they had accumulated thus far confiscated by the government. As relations between Arstotzka and nearby countries deteriorate, sometimes due to terrorist attacks, new sets of rules are gradually added, based on the game's story, such as denying entry to citizens of specific countries or demanding new types of documentation. The player may be challenged with moral dilemmas as the game progresses, such as allowing the supposed spouse of an immigrant through despite lacking complete papers at the risk of accepting a terrorist into the country. The game uses a mix of randomly generated entrants and scripted encounters. Randomly generated entrants are created using templates.

A mysterious organization known as EZIC also appears, with several of its members appearing at the checkpoint, giving the inspector orders to help bring down the government and establish a new one; the player can choose whether to help this organization or not, letting their members through to assassinate certain powerful individuals the organization deems too corrupt to live and even personally killing two rival agents for the organization.

The game has a scripted story mode with twenty possible endings depending on the player's actions, as well as some unlockable randomized endless-play modes.

Development

Lucas Pope accepting an award for the game at the 2014 Game Developers Conference

Papers, Please was developed by Lucas Pope, a former developer for Naughty Dog on the Uncharted series. Pope opted to leave Naughty Dog around 2010, after Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was released, to move to Saitama, Japan, along with his wife Keiko, a game designer herself. Part of this move was to be closer to her family, but Pope also had been developing smaller games along with Keiko during his time at Naughty Dog, and wanted to move away from "the definite formula" of the Uncharted series toward developing more exploratory ideas for his own games The two worked on a few independent game titles while there, and they briefly relocated to Singapore to help another friend with their game From his travels in Asia and some return trips to the United States, he became interested in the work of immigration and passport inspectors: "They have a specific thing they’re doing and they’re just doing it over and over again."He recognized the passport checking experience, which he considered "tense", could be made into a fun game.

While he had been able to come up with the mechanics of the passport checking, Pope lacked a story to drive the game. He was then inspired by films like Argo and the Bourne series, which feature characters attempting to infiltrate into or out of other countries with subterfuge. Pope saw the opportunity to reverse those scenarios, putting the player as the role of the immigration officer as to stop these types of agents, matching up with his existing gameplay mechanics. He crafted the fictional nation of Arstotzka, fashioned as a totalitarian, 1982 Eastern Bloc state, with the player guided to uphold the glory of this country by rigorously checking passports and defeating those that might infiltrate it. Arstotzka was partially derived from the setting of Pope's earlier game The Republia Times, where the player acts as editor-in-chief of a newspaper in a totalitarian state and must decide on which stories to include or falsify to uphold the interests of the state. Pope also based aspects of the border crossing for Arstotzka and its neighbors on the Berlin Wall and issues between East and West Germany, stating he was "naturally attracted to Orwellian communist bureaucracy". He made sure to avoid including any specific references to these inspirations, such as avoiding the word "comrade" in both the English and translated versions, as it would directly allude to a Soviet Russia implication. Using a fictional country gave Pope more freedom in the narrative, not having to base events in the game on any real-world politics and avoiding preconceived assumptions.

Work on the game began in November 2012; Pope used his personal financial reserves from his time at Naughty Dog for what he thought would be a few weeks worth of effort to complete and then move onto a more commercially viable title. Pope used the Haxe programming language and the NME framework, both open-source.[ He was able to build up structures he and his wife developed for Helsing's Fire, an iOS game they developed after moving to Japan, as this provided the means to set how much information about a character could or could not be shown to the player. This also enabled him to include random and semi-random encounters, in which similar events would occur in separate games, but the immigrant's name or details would be different Much of the game's design was about the purposely-"clunky" user interface elements of checking paperwork, something that Pope was inspired by from his earlier programming experiences from using visual programming languages like HyperCard.[ Pope found that there was a very careful balance of what rules and randomness could be introduced without overwhelming the player or causing the balance of the game to falter, and cut back on some of the randomness he initially wanted. Pope attempted to keep the narrative non-judgemental about the choices the player made, allowing them to imagine their own take on the events, and further kept elements like the player-character's family status screen shown at the end of each day simple so that it would not affect the player's take on these results.

As Pope developed the game, he regularly posted updates to independent develop forum TIGSource, and got helpful feedback on some of the game's direction. He also created a publicly available demonstration of the game, which further had positive feedback to him. Pope opted to try to have the game submitted to the Steam storefront through the user-voted Greenlight process in April 2013; he was hesitant that the niche nature of the game would put off potential voters and had expected that he would gain more interest from upcoming gaming expositions. However, due to attention drawn by several YouTube streamers that played through the demo, Papers, Please was voted through Greenlight within days.

With new attention to the project, Pope estimated that the game would now take six months to complete, though it ultimately took nine months. One area he expanded on was to create several unique character names for the various citizens that would pass through the game. He opened up to the public to supply names, but ended up with over 30,000 entries, with more than half he considered unusable as they did not figure the types of Eastern European names he wanted or were otherwise "joke names". After the Greenlight process, Pope started to add other features that required the player, as a lowly checkpoint worker, to make significant moral decisions within the game. One such design was the inclusion of the body scanner, where Pope envisioned that the player would recognize this being an invasion of privacy but necessary to detect a suicide bomber. These also helped to drive the game's narrative as to provide rationale for why the player as the passport checker would need to have access to these new tools in response to the larger events in the game's fiction. After being successfully voted on Greenlight, Papers, Please was being touted as an "empathy game", similar to Cart Life (2011), helping Pope to justify his narrative choices. Pope also recognized that not all players would necessarily appreciate the narrative aspects, and started to develop the "endless" mode where players would simply need to process a queue of immigrants limited only by the player making a certain number of mistakes.

Pope released the game on August 8, 2013 for Windows and OS X systems, and for Linux machines on February 12, 2014.

Pope had ported the game to the iPad, and was considering a port to the PlayStation Vita though noted that with the handheld, there are several challenges related to the game's user interface that may have to be revamped. The Vita version was formally announced at the 2014 Gamescom convention in August 2014. With the iOS release, Apple required Pope to censor the full body scanner feature from the game, considering the aspect to be pornographic content. However Apple later commented that the rejection was due to a "misunderstanding" and allowed Pope to resubmit the uncensored game by including a "nudity option" The iPad version was subsequently released on December 12, 2014. The Vita's version was released on December 12, 2017.

By March 2014, Pope stated that he was "kind of sick to death" of Papers, Please, in that he wanted to continue to focus on more smaller games that would only take a few months of time to create and release, and had already spent far too much in his mind on this one. He expected to keep supporting Papers, Please and its ports, but had no plans to expand the game or release downloadable content, but does not rule out revisiting the Arstotzka setting again in a future game.

Papers, Please is a puzzle simulation video game created by indie game developer Lucas Pope, developed and published through his production company, 3909 LLC. The game was released on August 8, 2013 for Microsoft Windows and OS X, for Linux on February 12, 2014 and for iOS on December 12, 2014. A port for the PlayStation Vita was announced in August 2014, and was then released on December 12, 2017.

In Papers, Please, the player takes on the role of a border-crossing immigration officer in the fictional dystopian Eastern Bloc-like country of Arstotzka, which has been and continues to be at political hostilities with its neighboring countries. The game takes place at a migration checkpoint. As the immigration officer, the player must review each immigrant and return citizens' passports and other supporting paperwork against an ever-growing list of rules using a number of tools and guides. Tasks include allowing in those with the proper paperwork while rejecting those without all proper documents, detaining those with falsified information, and balancing personal finances.

Papers, Please was positively received on its release, and it has come to be seen as an example of an empathy game and a demonstration of video games as an art form. The game was recognized with various awards and nominations from the Independent Games Festival, Game Developers Choice Awards, and BAFTA Video Games Awards, and was named by Wired and The New Yorker as one of the top games of 2013. Pope reported that by 2016, more than 1.8 million copies of the title had been sold.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Papers, Please focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982.[3] At the time frame of the game, Arstotzka has recently ended a six-year-long war with the neighboring country of Kolechia, yet political tensions between them and other nearby countries remain high.

As the checkpoint inspector, the player reviews arrivals' documents and uses an array of tools to determine whether the papers are in order for the purpose of arresting certain individuals such as terrorists, wanted criminals, smugglers and entrants with forged or stolen documents; keeping other undesired individuals like those missing required paperwork or expired paperwork out of the country; and allowing the rest through. For each in-game day, the player is given specific rules on what documentation is required and conditions to allow or deny entry which become progressively more complex as each day passes. One by one, immigrants arrive at the checkpoint and provide their paperwork. The player can use a number of tools to review the paperwork to make sure it is in order. When discrepancies are discovered, the player may interrogate the applicant, demand missing documents, take the applicant's fingerprints while simultaneously ordering a copy of the applicant's identity record in order to prove or clear either name or physical description discrepancies, order a full body scan in order to clear or prove weight or apparent biological sex discrepancies or find enough incriminating evidence required to arrest the entrant. There are opportunities for the player to have the applicant detained and the applicant may, at times, attempt to bribe the inspector. The player ultimately must stamp the entrant's passport to accept or deny entry unless the player orders the arrest of the entrant. If the player has violated the protocol, a citation will be issued to the player shortly after the entrant leaves. Generally the player can make two violations without penalty, but subsequent violations will cost the player increasing monetary penalties from their day's salaries. The player has a limited amount of real time, representing a full day shift at the checkpoint, to process as many arrivals as possible.

The player's immigration checkpoint workstation shows the current arrival (left center), the various paperwork the player is currently processing (bottom right), and the current state of the checkpoint (top half).

At the end of each in-game day, the player earns money based on how many people have been processed and bribes collected, lowered by penalties for protocol violations, and then must decide on a simple budget to spend that money on rent, food, heat and other necessities in low-class housing for themselves and their family. The player must also make certain not to earn too much money in illegitimate ways, lest his family be reported and have all the money they had accumulated thus far confiscated by the government. As relations between Arstotzka and nearby countries deteriorate, sometimes due to terrorist attacks, new sets of rules are gradually added, based on the game's story, such as denying entry to citizens of specific countries or demanding new types of documentation. The player may be challenged with moral dilemmas as the game progresses, such as allowing the supposed spouse of an immigrant through despite lacking complete papers at the risk of accepting a terrorist into the country. The game uses a mix of randomly generated entrants and scripted encounters. Randomly generated entrants are created using templates.

A mysterious organization known as EZIC also appears, with several of its members appearing at the checkpoint, giving the inspector orders to help bring down the government and establish a new one; the player can choose whether to help this organization or not, letting their members through to assassinate certain powerful individuals the organization deems too corrupt to live and even personally killing two rival agents for the organization.

The game has a scripted story mode with twenty possible endings depending on the player's actions, as well as some unlockable randomized endless-play modes.

Development

Lucas Pope accepting an award for the game at the 2014 Game Developers Conference

Papers, Please was developed by Lucas Pope, a former developer for Naughty Dog on the Uncharted series. Pope opted to leave Naughty Dog around 2010, after Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was released, to move to Saitama, Japan, along with his wife Keiko, a game designer herself. Part of this move was to be closer to her family, but Pope also had been developing smaller games along with Keiko during his time at Naughty Dog, and wanted to move away from "the definite formula" of the Uncharted series toward developing more exploratory ideas for his own games The two worked on a few independent game titles while there, and they briefly relocated to Singapore to help another friend with their game From his travels in Asia and some return trips to the United States, he became interested in the work of immigration and passport inspectors: "They have a specific thing they’re doing and they’re just doing it over and over again."He recognized the passport checking experience, which he considered "tense", could be made into a fun game.

While he had been able to come up with the mechanics of the passport checking, Pope lacked a story to drive the game. He was then inspired by films like Argo and the Bourne series, which feature characters attempting to infiltrate into or out of other countries with subterfuge. Pope saw the opportunity to reverse those scenarios, putting the player as the role of the immigration officer as to stop these types of agents, matching up with his existing gameplay mechanics. He crafted the fictional nation of Arstotzka, fashioned as a totalitarian, 1982 Eastern Bloc state, with the player guided to uphold the glory of this country by rigorously checking passports and defeating those that might infiltrate it. Arstotzka was partially derived from the setting of Pope's earlier game The Republia Times, where the player acts as editor-in-chief of a newspaper in a totalitarian state and must decide on which stories to include or falsify to uphold the interests of the state. Pope also based aspects of the border crossing for Arstotzka and its neighbors on the Berlin Wall and issues between East and West Germany, stating he was "naturally attracted to Orwellian communist bureaucracy". He made sure to avoid including any specific references to these inspirations, such as avoiding the word "comrade" in both the English and translated versions, as it would directly allude to a Soviet Russia implication. Using a fictional country gave Pope more freedom in the narrative, not having to base events in the game on any real-world politics and avoiding preconceived assumptions.

Work on the game began in November 2012; Pope used his personal financial reserves from his time at Naughty Dog for what he thought would be a few weeks worth of effort to complete and then move onto a more commercially viable title. Pope used the Haxe programming language and the NME framework, both open-source.[ He was able to build up structures he and his wife developed for Helsing's Fire, an iOS game they developed after moving to Japan, as this provided the means to set how much information about a character could or could not be shown to the player. This also enabled him to include random and semi-random encounters, in which similar events would occur in separate games, but the immigrant's name or details would be different Much of the game's design was about the purposely-"clunky" user interface elements of checking paperwork, something that Pope was inspired by from his earlier programming experiences from using visual programming languages like HyperCard.[ Pope found that there was a very careful balance of what rules and randomness could be introduced without overwhelming the player or causing the balance of the game to falter, and cut back on some of the randomness he initially wanted. Pope attempted to keep the narrative non-judgemental about the choices the player made, allowing them to imagine their own take on the events, and further kept elements like the player-character's family status screen shown at the end of each day simple so that it would not affect the player's take on these results.

As Pope developed the game, he regularly posted updates to independent develop forum TIGSource, and got helpful feedback on some of the game's direction. He also created a publicly available demonstration of the game, which further had positive feedback to him. Pope opted to try to have the game submitted to the Steam storefront through the user-voted Greenlight process in April 2013; he was hesitant that the niche nature of the game would put off potential voters and had expected that he would gain more interest from upcoming gaming expositions. However, due to attention drawn by several YouTube streamers that played through the demo, Papers, Please was voted through Greenlight within days.

With new attention to the project, Pope estimated that the game would now take six months to complete, though it ultimately took nine months. One area he expanded on was to create several unique character names for the various citizens that would pass through the game. He opened up to the public to supply names, but ended up with over 30,000 entries, with more than half he considered unusable as they did not figure the types of Eastern European names he wanted or were otherwise "joke names". After the Greenlight process, Pope started to add other features that required the player, as a lowly checkpoint worker, to make significant moral decisions within the game. One such design was the inclusion of the body scanner, where Pope envisioned that the player would recognize this being an invasion of privacy but necessary to detect a suicide bomber. These also helped to drive the game's narrative as to provide rationale for why the player as the passport checker would need to have access to these new tools in response to the larger events in the game's fiction. After being successfully voted on Greenlight, Papers, Please was being touted as an "empathy game", similar to Cart Life (2011), helping Pope to justify his narrative choices. Pope also recognized that not all players would necessarily appreciate the narrative aspects, and started to develop the "endless" mode where players would simply need to process a queue of immigrants limited only by the player making a certain number of mistakes.

Pope released the game on August 8, 2013 for Windows and OS X systems, and for Linux machines on February 12, 2014.

Pope had ported the game to the iPad, and was considering a port to the PlayStation Vita though noted that with the handheld, there are several challenges related to the game's user interface that may have to be revamped. The Vita version was formally announced at the 2014 Gamescom convention in August 2014. With the iOS release, Apple required Pope to censor the full body scanner feature from the game, considering the aspect to be pornographic content. However Apple later commented that the rejection was due to a "misunderstanding" and allowed Pope to resubmit the uncensored game by including a "nudity option" The iPad version was subsequently released on December 12, 2014. The Vita's version was released on December 12, 2017.

By March 2014, Pope stated that he was "kind of sick to death" of Papers, Please, in that he wanted to continue to focus on more smaller games that would only take a few months of time to create and release, and had already spent far too much in his mind on this one. He expected to keep supporting Papers, Please and its ports, but had no plans to expand the game or release downloadable content, but does not rule out revisiting the Arstotzka setting again in a future game.