Papers, Please: The 'boring' game that became a smash hit
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Specifically, the tension comes from the fact that you are in some fictional former soviet state, which just opened up a border security crossing again. You've been posted to man it, and now live with your family in a government housing estate. You have a finite amount of time to process people through the security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and more convoluted as the game goes on).
At the end of each day, your income and expenses (for rent, food, electricity, medicine for your son/wife/elderly parents as needed) are shown. The tension comes from rushing to process enough people to ensure you don't have to go without food, or turn off electricity, or not medicate your family. However, if you make too many mistakes by rushing, you get fined too much and you don't get to care for your family.
It's really far more gripping than you'd expect because the whole art style, audio and interactions (both between days via a daily newspaper, and with the people as they enter through your booth/events that unfold during that) really help paint a picture of a desolate former soviet wasteland of poverty and misery. Couple that with the distilled essence of 'putting food on the table for your family so they don't starve' being the motivating factor, and it can be quite high-tension to try to not have your family inevitably starve and freeze to death with crippling illness.
For $5 (if you grab it during a steam sale), it's worth the experience for sure. I'd have been happy paying the standard $10 for the unique experience it offers.
Gotta say, after only playing the game for about 20 minutes your review was entirely accurate and I can't wait to make my girlfriend play the game...
[0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation... (probably not SWF)
It's like there's an invisible control just after yours that never misses.
I mean, no-one believes that a border crossing is only open for a few minutes only per day, any more than they believe there's an all-powerful control after yours. It's like how the Sims put in toilet requirements for simulation purposes, but it turns out that your character can go without the toilet for a couple of days, then miss half a shift at work because of a visit.
1. It indeed gives the impression that your work is monitored, which should not be the case.
2. It's a mechanism to give you penalties, but it does not really affect the story-line in itself. It would have been great if a person you let pass by mistake actually ends up changing the situation (i.e. becoming a terrorist the next day or something) and therefore introducing more regulations to make your work more difficult.
3. It could have been done in a more subtle way. For example, the guards at the right of the screen could do a random check on top of the ones you do, and find out, not 100% of time but at a certain ratio, you actually make/made mistakes.
I feel bad having just written this.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.msg966317#...
Thanks for bringing that to my attention
[1]: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/loadingreadyrun/...
* you have a limited time every day to review people at the border.
* you are paid per person processed.
* mistakes result in unpaid work. More than 3 mistakes results in penalty on your pay.
* regulations get more and more complicated as you go, making it more difficult to process many people, and making yourself prone to mistakes.
* your family well-being is conditioned by how much you make every day.
* events and personal situations try to touch on your emotional side to incite you to let some people pass (or refuse passage) - making it more difficult to earn your money as well - while giving some hope of later positive effects.
It's really intricate.
The only issue with the game is that it's kind of short, and the main point of the game after a while is to try to go through the story several times to see how your actions can make a difference in the story.
It all comes down to the choices you make. At one point, for example, someone with their papers in order comes through and says his wife is next in line. Her papers are not in order. What do you do? Split up the couple to make your money? Or cut them a break and get a demerit.
You can even help drug smugglers and refugees, if you so choose. Or you can earn extra cash by locking up people who simply have an expired certificate.
Few games give you or support this type of narrative freedom.
Day one, only people from Arstotzka are allowed in. Easy enough. Picture on passport has to match the person coming up though. Expiration date has to be after the current date, too.
As the game progresses, laws are added, removed, valid papers are added, combined, etc etc etc. Eventually you end up having to check people and their papers for 15-20 points; miss one, you get fined.
Also, there's 20 different endings, depending on your decisions and performance in the game (go broke, help the rebels, etc).
I haven't looked at passport control the same way since then. Also pretty sure passport control I've been to is much less stringent than that in Papers, Please.
GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA
What is even more chilling is that this was day-to-day business in many European countries less than 30 years ago.
Moreover, I've found myself becoming rather patient with people who work in the TSA directly because I now know how shitty their lives must truly be.
Ah I see, this is the fictional part of the game
We're living in quite the renaissance of game exploration. I wonder if the indie game genre will continue to flourish or if this is a temporary moment of history. Regardless it is probably as strong as it has ever been right now.
Gone Home is another recent and interesting "game" to check out: http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/
Some people might not like to hear this, because Steam is a DRM platform. But if the Pirate Bay had a similar ability to promote the development and sale of indie games, it would have happened already.
Steam provides an infrastructure and API to perform this check, but the developers decide whether to use it. There are many games on Steam which don't use this DRM, and can be launched directly from their install directories even if Steam isn't running.
That said, Steam is still not as un-DRMed as GOG, which provides a pretty installer you can copy and back up and do whatever you want with, but it's pretty good.
I fell in love with the game ever since I saw the YouTube trailer and read some of his game dev diaries...It's hard to think of a modern game that has such limitations -- the color palette, the clunkiness of the interface, the unforgivingness of the scoring system -- for such artistic intent.
But what I think is particularly noteworthy and inspiring was how Pope didn't make the game as a political statement. He (from what I remember in his early podcasts) thought about the idea while waiting in customs, and wondered if a game could be made of the drudgery of this work. His commitment to making a game that excelled as a game resulted in a game that was actually fun, while being an artistic achievement and politically engaging, for sympathizers of both the state and the refugee.
(As counter-examples, I think "Cart Life" is also an amazing achievement in art, but not a very good game because of unintentional bugs. Also, most artistic games in which you mostly just walk around until the game ends).
David Simon, who created "The Wire", complains quite bitterly that his intent was to make a show that raged against institution and bureaucracies, and yet people only talked about Omar and all of his other characters...Simon did such a great job of plot and characterization that it overshadowed his political aims. I kind of see "Papers, Please" as the opposite of that...Pope just wanted to make a great game, and he did such a great job of it that it turned out to have a compelling political message.
Anyway, it has my vote for being included in the MoMA's video game collection. And it's inspired me to go back into games programming, at least as a hobby.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/the-game-never-...
> But actually, the comments I made that seem to critique viewers who found The Wire late were not so intended. I thought, when I made that remark, that I was speaking to the reporter not about viewers in general, but specifically about folks pursuing the recent bracket-tourneys about best characters, shows, scenes, etc.
It was to that silliness -- and nothing more -- that I tried to say simply this: The folk sponsoring such belated silliness were not there when the show aired. Now, years removed, they parse it piecemeal and to meaningless effect. And rarely in the debate of Omar v. Stringer or Season Two vs. Four does anyone argue, say, the drug war, or the role of public education or the vagaries of market capitalism. That's the wearying part for me.
That people find the show when they do, or that people like or dislike what they will -- who can take offense at that? But is it okay to admit the Omar-is-so-cool bracket tourneys don't interest people who made the show? That debate about what we got right or wrong about urban America would be, to us, more purposeful and validating?
Apparently, no such context conveyed, either through my fault or in the edit of the Q&A, or both. Sorry if anyone thinks I was actually complaining about people liking The Wire, or when they got there. I wasn't. My critique went to how certain media folk assess the story, and how empty that stuff seems to our real purpose.
I agree with David Simon...because every real fan knows that Bunk is the real star ;)
As for not everyone looking at series like the Wire the same way, that's just natural. I'm sure a lot of people think Papers, Please is a shit game too. Can't argue with taste, can't steer people's priorities when it comes to TV shows either. The Wire for example needs a lot of attention and concentration to watch; a lot of people have some TV show on in the background, and only pay attention when something (or someone) draws attention to them.
1. The art and design are almost unchanged from the original Photoshop mock.
2. Pope is wonderfully gracious to the other indie developers who give initial feedback.
3. He engages really well with the influx of new people that appear whenever his (at the time) beta game gets featured on a gaming news site. He has a knack for knowing which suggestions to consider, and explains to fans why the others won't work with the game. It demonstrates a level of maturity, both in personality and in craft, that few other game developers seem to have.
4. In the post-release update, he details the internal tools he built to manage the game's development, especially its day-to-day plot.
You are correct in his way of dealing with people, really suggests a level of maturity, confidence and open mindedness about him. I like the way that he seems to seriously consider people's ideas, and is not afraid to incorporate me wines into his game. The fingerprinting for example.
Lucas had made a couple of nice mini-games before that showing how relatively unconventional gameplay can be quite fun if attached to a good premise. The Republia Times is pretty much the same emotional concept but with different gameplay.
A big part of the game being a hit IMO was the beta was just out there for download, and it was a very polished first third of the game. A few large blogs picked it up, and at that point, if the game is any good, it'll just sell a whole lot. The demand was so big that Steam approved it for Greenlight out of schedule: It was greenlit after just a week or two on the process.
Either way, It's a game that is very easy to recommend.
>Papers, Please is that game. It manages to ask (and importantly, not answer) questions of duty, safety, privacy, family, self-interest, and morality through an incredibly simple, focused set of mechanics based around checking transit papers and stamping passports.
Also, instead of feeding your family, the object of the game should be to keep your EFF-friendly colleague from going rogue, :p
I learned about Papers Please from nerdcubed on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV-6YSye2Vo
I bet he hasn't spent anything on, say, a google ad campaign.
One thing to realize is that game reviewers like Yahtzee and especially TotalBiscuit always have their eyes open for new games that have new gameplay. That is, games with game mechanics that have never been thought of before. So if anyone here happens to make one, and it's fun, then you'll probably be able to get picked up by TB. And since he has >1M YouTube subscribers, that's quite a lot of publicity.
(Papers, Please was picked up by TB. It's how I heard of it.)
Looking at it a little cynically for the moment ... in the old days, the main bottleneck that prevented everyone from having their own commercial computer game was money and juice with publishers, while the second-place bottleneck was juice with console manufacturers. Now those factors are much less restricting than before, so everyone has their own indie game. ;) But that means there are many, many more games than the maximum number that can ever achieve significant sales and attention. So the new bottleneck is public attention, and the new king gatekeepers are the gaming media (including Penny Arcade, Let's Players like Totalbiscuit and so on), who can direct the public's attention to your game. So which players are ahead in the new game? Guys with gaming-media juice, either through having gaming-industry recognition or being ex-journalists themselves. Step forward Tom Francis (PC Gamer -> Gunpoint), Jim Rossignol (Rock, Paper, Shotgun -> Sir, You Are Being Hunted) and Lucas Pope (Naughty Dog -> Papers, Please). Now that is a little too cynical, because the new game does seem to be significantly fairer to people who simply make (or would be able to make given funding etc.) a game good enough to deserve attention, and certainly Gunpoint and Papers, Please are notably good games (I haven't played Sir yet). (I should also emphasise that I'm not any kind of expert here, I'm just looking at the situation from the outside.) But I think there's likely some truth to it.