Choice and Oppression in Papers, Please

PopMatters is still on vacation this week, so no big article from me quite yet. However, I want to give a little sneak peak of the article today anyway, mostly to cover an important issue I didn't have space for and to spend a little more time talking about film.

My next article is about Papers, Please, the much-adored indie game from Lucas Pope in which players control a border guard in the fictional autocracy of Arstotzka. Scott's already written a great article about The Banality of Evil in the game, I highly suggest you read. It captures expertly how the mundanity of the game reveals the poisonous system as its core. My article on the other hand discusses activism in the game and the terrible options the protagonist has as an individual within a massive and largely invisible system of oppression. The game makes some fascinating, albeit depressing, arguments.

My biggest concern after writing the piece is how we might interpret or judge the player character in Papers, Please. In particular, I wonder if we can judge the person within that position as someone lacking agency or whether instead we see him as someone refusing to throw himself upon the instruments of his own oppression. I know, I know, the border guard is just an excuse to play the game, but while doing so, I had to ask myself, why don't I just refuse? If I know I am complicit in serving this autocratic regime, why don't I just rebel? Indeed, in my future post, I argue Papers, Please makes a compelling argument that structure change demands a huge investment on the part of those rebelling against it.

I think the answer in Papers, Please, as in reality, is a lot more complicated. It sounds strange to say aloud, but there is a complicity in brutal survival, even while survival is itself a form of dissent. The protagonist of the game, for the most part, is barely surviving, and in that act of survival is a strange dichotomous existence.


A good comparison may actually be 12 Years a Slave, the latest and critically-praised film by Steve McQueen. The story follows Solomon Northrup, a free man who is captured and worked as a slave for the titular twelve years. Two scenes stand out as particularly significant. In the first, Solomon shares a sexual encounter with a fellow slave. It is not romantic or sexually charged. On the contrary, it is a short, desperate, and sorrowful embrace of human contact. The second scene is an extended take of Solomon in a group of gospel singers. He stands silently before joining in, lifting his voice to great heights while he wears a multifaceted look of both anger and solace.

Both of these scenes in 12 Years a Slave show Solomon's momentary acceptance of his place within an alien system. In some ways he does not identify as a slave, but in these moments he makes a decision, within a constrained environment, to both embrace and in doing so reject his position within the system of slavery. Survival comes at great cost, and at times can feel like complicity.

I mean no judgement here, good or bad, and I don't mean to equate the horrors of slavery with Cold War politics or the like. Still, the protagonist of the film, and the protagonist of Papers, Please, have meaningful albeit constrained decisions within their system of oppression. It is not impressive, it's incredibly important, that Papers, Please can evoke through the deeply mixed feelings the destitute and exploited feel towards decision making within the system that keeps them oppressed.

Asymmetry and Android Netrunner

Kate the Tinkerer

My latest PopMatters article is now live: Asymmetry and Android Netrunner.

I love asymmetric games. Natural Selection 2, Left 4 Dead, even, to some extent, the unfortunately named F.3.A.R. play around with asymmetry in rules systems in wonderful ways. Asymmetry is still a rarity, but when it does crop up, I find it endlessly fascinating. There is something wholly and wonderfully special about asymmetry in games. This week on PopMatters, I try to suss out exactly what makes these games so special.

Here's the problem: it's actually not that easy to do. See, plenty of multiplayer games, digital or analog, feature asymmetry, in a way, as a core mechanic. If you are a Pyro and I'm a Heavy in Team Fortress 2, we functionally play under a different set of rules. Hell, even chess could be considered asymmetric the moment one player loses his queen. When one player's affordances differ significantly from other, interesting dynamics emerse.

But still, games like Android Netrunner differ somehow from this casual definition of asymmetry. After thinking over a variety of asymmetric rules systems, I settle on the "safe practice of lopsided power struggles" as a defining feature in asymmetric games. There are certainly more design factors that set these games apart from their compatriots and I'll undoubtedly give the subject more thought. In fact, I would love to hear your theories. What do you think makes asymmetric games uniquely compelling?

Asymmetry aside, there are a lot of reasons to enjoy Android Netrunner. For one, the theme resonates beautifully with the game mechanics. The systems also work together so wonderfully, so tightly, that I find myself awed at new cards, my mind racing with all the ways it can be combined with others to make really cool decks. Since I rarely have the opportunity to actually play the game, I have spent more time in the deck construction process than in actual matches. I especially enjoy the limitations to corporation use that forces you to be judicious and adaptable when designing a deck. Building a customized system that suits your play style is a thrilling process in its own right.

In other words, you should seriously consider checking out Android Netrunner if you are given the chance. For admirers of well designed board game systems, Netrunner is one of the best.

Permadeath Pokémon and Flexible Systems

Pokeball Art by BionicleGahlok via Deviant Art

My latest PopMatters article is now live: Permadeath Pokémon and Flexible Systems.

You may have recently read my Nuzlocke Challenge, Day 1 experience. The death total has increased to four since I wrote that piece, and everyone was painful. I still have my most loyal group though, so I take pleasure in knowing my pokémon skills are not complete garbage. Meanwhile, I have also been re-reading Donella Meadow's book Thinking in Systems - which is always an enriching experience. The result is this article about the design of flexible systems.

What I mean by flexibility, in this case, is the way game systems can adapt to player input when input can go so far as creating their very own rules. As I see it, if a game community is able to tweak their experience freely and create their own meaning within the system without fundamentally breaking the system in some way, then that is the sign of an incredibly healthy work.

There are a lot of ways to create a non-rigid system. The two that I think are most significant for user-created experiences are readability and fungibility. Simply put, players need to be able to understand the components of a system and be able to determine their relatively value freely. The easier is to re-appropriate game components the better. I defer to the article itself for examples.

I actually want to point you to a relevant article by Jamie Cheng and Kevin Forbes of Klei that appeared on the PA Report this week: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic rewards in Klei’s latest game: Don’t Starve. Their now abandoned quest system had a negative affect on player behavior. Instead, they came to this conclusion:

"We could no longer simply tell people what to do, but instead, after dozens of playtests and many UI passes, created an interface which gently and neutrally showed them what they could do created an environment where players could enjoy the game exactly as they felt was correct."

This important point here is that creating the space for players to engage with the system in that way is a choice, and a difficult one. Even when players are enjoying a situation of their own design, they still bring their own rules into a thoroughly designed space. Designers can't please everyone, but they can work on making their game systems as flexible and habitable for the ingenuitive players as possible.