The Game of Politics

Introduction

Released in 2013 to near-unanimous critical praise, Papers, Please is an anomaly in many regards. It challenges conventional notions of what constitutes gameplay, seeing as the player acts as a lowly immigration officer tasked with processing the travel documents of prospective immigrants into a fictional country all while getting caught up in a plot that includes rebel groups, assassinations, and wading through the moral gray area created by bureaucratic systems. It also transcends easy distinctions between serious and commercial games, becoming financially successful—selling well over half a million copies since its debut—despite its deliberately restrictive gameplay and weighty themes (Lee, 2014). Perhaps most importantly, it is one of the few games to spur critical discussion in mainstream news outlets without being subjected to traditional concerns (such as the representation of violence) that have typically been directed at video games. Amid the media attention paid toward Papers, Please, Lucas Pope (the game’s sole designer) has dismissed easy connections between his game and real-world events. Despite the fact that Papers, Please takes place in a fictional communist country during the 1980s and contains an ending wherein a foreboding wall separating the cities of East Grestin and West Grestin is destroyed, Pope has stated that he did not design the game as a critique, or even reenactment, of the Soviet Union’s collapse (Costantini, 2013). He even avoided using the Soviet-associated designation of “comrade” in the game and asked translators to avoid the term or its equivalent when localizing Papers, Please in different regions (Cullen, 2014). Pope has also dismissed theories that his game criticizes immigration policies, a logical association seeing as Arizona’s controversial immigration bill, SB 1070, is colloquially referred to as the “Papers, Please Law” (Costantini, 2013). Pope admits that there are social critiques within his game, but these are deliberately general in nature. He clarifies that he wanted to use Papers, Please to demonstrate how, in any real-world conflict, “all sides of any kind of issue have some justification. There’s not just the good guys and bad guys—even the bad guys have some justification for why they want to do something” (Cullen, 2014). According to the creator himself, Papers, Please is not political in the traditional sense of opposing institutionalized policies and providing an agenda for real-world social reform.

Papers, Please is so novel in terms of its design and narrative structure that it defies many traditional assumptions regarding what can be considered a “game” (the player is basically tasked with moving documents around) and challenges the political discourse we often use to examine the interaction between games, their players, and the larger societal context in which this transaction happens. Yet, it is hard to accept the idea that Papers, Please, which has been so influential in terms of its status within the games industry and so impactful in terms of the impressions it has left upon me as a player, is simply trying to show how there are multiple sides to every story. If we are to take video games seriously as cultural artifacts, we should avoid the temptation of having authorial intent dictate the terms of our critical investigations. Consequently, I want to push back on Pope’s assertion that his game is as apolitical as he insists by asking: Can we use conversations surrounding Papers, Please to rethink how a discourse of politics is used within game studies? What do scholars gain in using politics to discuss the cultural or critical value of video games? Furthermore, what can we learn by applying a political discourse to a game that has already been recognized for its innovative mechanics and narrative structure?

To begin answering these questions, I want to focus on this game’s most unique feature: that is, the ability to take the mundane and even boring duties of bureaucratic labor as the basis of gameplay. In other words, I want to analyze how the ingenious work-as-play design of Papers, Please is precisely what opens up new opportunities for rethinking the politics of games and gameplay experiences. To achieve this goal, I plan to historicize video games amid technological and cultural developments that fostered the rapid expansion of knowledge-based economies from the mid-20th century onward. More specifically, I will examine how knowledge-based economies which rely on user-generated content as the primary means of capital accumulation challenges traditional divisions between work versus play, which, in turn, reinforces the importance of individualized subjectivity for both employees and consumers of digital information platforms. I will then demonstrate how video games embody this reconfigured work/play/subjectivity interrelation via the psychological and physical self-modifying practices that players must undertake during gameplay. Finally, I will conclude this examination by analyzing my first-hand experiences playing Papers, Please to illustrate how this game’s mechanics both exemplifies and critiques the ideology of work-as-play by making the player participate in a form of economic pragmatism which can be used to regulate, exclude, and exploit individuals. My primary argument throughout this examination is that video games not only operate upon the same material technologies that drive networked economies in global capitalist paradigms, they also inhabit the same ideology that complicates the work/play division and positions subjectivity as an integral component in socioeconomic production. The ultimate aim of this analysis is to derive an interpretive framework—one which understands the “politics of games” in direct relation to the role of work, play, and subjectivity formation in gameplay—that allows us to better understand how games inhabit, influence, and are influenced by the dominant cultural logics of networked societies. In doing so, I hope to illustrate how examining the political dimensions of video games can grant better insight into how abstract cultural logics govern our daily interactions with the world.

The Politics of/in Video Games

The second half of the 20th century saw an exponential rise in the development and deployment of new digital technologies across the globe, stemming primarily, but not solely, from military research during the Cold War era (Abbate, 2000). Many of these information- and communication-based technologies would eventually be co-opted into commercial sectors, allowing for the rapid acceleration of traditional economies (such as the intensification of finance banking from the 1960s onward due in part to advances in telecommunication technologies) while also providing the foundation for brand new industries (such as information technology [IT] development, maintenance, and production becoming major economic forces throughout the Global South). A new medium that emerged from this intersection of military and commercial forces was video games. Spacewar!, one of the earliest video games and the first to be widely circulated since its introduction in 1962, was created using computer technologies designated for military research and development (R&D) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter use these unique historical circumstances to characterize video games as the offspring of a digitally fueled marriage between military and economic power:

To a greater degree than perhaps any previous media other than the book, virtual games are a direct offshoot of their society’s main technology of production. From their origins in nuclear-age simulations, video games have sprung from the machine system central to postwar capital’s power and profit—the computer. (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009, p. xviii-xix)

To return to Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s argument about the relationship between video games and “the machine system central to postwar capital’s power and profit,” the very form of video games can be seen as embodying the political arrangements of power that characterize the synthesis of economic and military forces; the same algorithmic architecture that created nuclear war simulations in addition to fueling the massive expansion of capitalist systems during the second half of the 20th century provided the foundation for video games to emerge as a distinct medium. From a techno-materialist standpoint, video games lie at the intersection of digital technology and systems of power that were used to regulate capital and shore up influence in a small collection of Western nations over the past 60 years. However, video games also embody the rebellious spirit of the young hackers who helped create them, insofar as the students at MIT used their privilege—the access to rare and expensive technologies along with educational know-how acquired from elite institutions—to develop games in their leisure time (see also Söderberg, 2012; Williams, 2002). ¹ Hence, the political arrangements of power inherent to video games are not just material, they are also ideological; video games exist as a manifestation of the tension between technological apparatuses of Western authority and a playful rebellion against hegemonic, elitist, or oppressive systems. These tensions continue to reverberate today within the video game industry: Despite the fact that the game industry characterizes itself as building inclusive communities, a majority of video game development is consolidated within a handful of territories (the United States, European Union, and Japan) that wield a disproportionate amount of influence over global gaming trends and greatly benefit from labor distributed throughout the Global South (Kerr, 2013; Nichols, 2013). As an expressive medium that holds the potential to explore unique capacities for identity representation, movements such as the #INeedDiverseGames campaign demonstrates how the industry has generally lagged behind when it comes to fostering diversity within games and the companies that create them (see Sarkeesian, 2012; Shaw, 2014). ²

Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter do an excellent job positioning video games in relation to globalist systems of power and detailing the ideological tensions that lurk within the structural form of games themselves. For the purposes of this examination, though, I want to take a more nuanced approach to the political dimensions of video games and this medium’s relationship to contemporary globalist paradigms. I agree that video games are, and will most likely always be, in a privileged—yet—conflicted relationship with larger systems of power, be they economic, cultural, militaristic, or otherwise. However, we must not forget that the connection between politics and technology is not a top-down hierarchy, wherein the first term completely dictates the latter (Grimes & Feenberg, 2009). While new technologies can proliferate preexistent structures of authority, emergent technologies can also challenge and rewire dominant systems in unexpected—yet—impactful ways. When it comes to politics and technology, it is always a two-way street. With this in mind, I want to situate video games within a larger historical trajectory that identifies how advancements in digital technologies throughout the late 20th century dramatically reconfigures the nature of knowledge-based labor, individual expression, and subjectivity in economies that encourage user-generated content.

Work Versus Play in Knowledge Economies

While I might disagree with the militaristic telos guiding Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s materialist approach, they correctly identify how the emergence of video games stemmed from a hacker ethic that conflated work with play insofar as the people who helped create the earliest video games used their professional instruments and institutional resources to make games that served no utilitarian purpose. Furthermore, the earliest video games took a large amount effort to build seeing as there were no developer resources to help with game programming. In this sense, the first video game developers combined work with play (they undertook the complicated process of creating superfluous games from scratch) and play with work (they co-opted machines dedicated to military research for fun). However, the work/play conflation that was happening throughout university basements and laboratories was not a random outlier. The increasingly blurry lines between work and play among the earliest video game developers is symptomatic of a much larger cultural trend that would come to characterize many contemporary knowledge-based industries. Hence, the story of video games’ creation is representative of a new relationship between work and play within networked societies. To begin unpacking this relationship, I want to discuss the unique features of knowledge-based labor before examining how said features fundamentally shape the role of personalized identity in economic systems.

ITs created during the mid-20 century led to exponential growth of knowledge-based economies such as IT development and computer programming. Such economies are unique in that they do not rely on the traditional production of self-contained goods which are then sold to consumers. Instead, many knowledge-based corporations manufacture services that facilitate the process of information exchange. This shift toward information-based services reconfigures the type of labor undertaken by knowledge workers. As Maurizio Lazzarato argues, knowledge work functions as “immaterial labor” in a twofold sense. On a literal level, information-based services are “immaterial” in comparison to the production of concrete consumable commodities. On an theoretical level, knowledge-based work entails “the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” among those who create and use ITs (Lazzarato, 1996, p. 132). Service-based industries not only create platforms for information dissemination, they are also tasked with cultivating the ideological conditions, cultural practices, and social relations that are conducive to individuals using specific platforms in intended ways. While Lazzarato implies that these ideological implications are present in most, if not all, forms of knowledge-based work, we can see his theory of immaterial labor most explicitly in the creation of Internet-based technologies that thrive off of user-generated content. In the case of social media, for example, companies create the potential for social relations to emerge by creating platforms that structure the interactions between individuals. ³ Furthermore, these platforms are ideologically charged because their terms and conditions dictate what social relations are permitted. In short, knowledge-based companies that rely on user-generated content formulate the tastes, standards, and general rules of engagement while leaving much of the information generation or dissemination to the users themselves.

The ideological stakes of immaterial labor put new demands on employees. Now, the ideal knowledge worker is someone who is dynamic enough to manage an ever-changing constellation of social relations. Consequently, knowledge-based economies reframe personality traits associated to artistic expression—collaboration, innovation, and adaptation—as central tenets to economic success. As Graeme Kirkpatrick argues, knowledge-based economies create a situation where a knowledge employee

has to be adaptable, flexible and resilient to cope with the succession of changes they will encounter by always seeing in them opportunities and openings to extend their networks. Such a person resembles the artist intellectual much more than a traditional, suit-wearing business manager. (2013, p. 28)

The synthesis of work with play does not only affect workers, though, as consumers find themselves in a similar situation. Many knowledge-based economies thrive by offering services that are actively utilized, not passively consumed, by customers. This logic of what Henry Jenkins deems “participatory culture”—that is, a cultural epoch in which the primary means of individual expression and/or community association is through the active production, aggregation, and distribution of information—can be seen through the growing prominence of social media, crowd sourcing, and other platforms for user-generated content, all of which depend on consumers using their creative faculties to deploy their own personal style within virtual settings (Jenkins, 2008). In this sense, the playful enterprise of personal expression is also an industrious undertaking because individuals create digital objects that are simultaneously distillations of their personal identity and operate as exchangeable commodities whose circulation helps accumulate capital value (insofar as many knowledge-based companies make money by aggregating personal information which can then be used for targeted marketing). Now, a technology user’s playful creativity is embedded within a work-like discourse of production and exchange.

For both workers and commercial technology users, knowledge economies that produce the conditions for social relations to emerge complicate the work/play binary, which, in turn, repositions subjectivity as a fundamental component in economic production. ⁵ On the one hand, knowledge-based work privileges a playful approach to collaboration and innovation, thereby reframing a worker’s productive potential as contingent upon the creative impulses that stem from one’s intellectual existence as a quasi-artistic individual. Hence, one’s economic potential is tethered to a worker’s capacity to “be” a certain type of person, rather than strictly possessing a set of technical skills (Kirkpatrick, 2013). On the other hand, many service-based companies flourish when users express their individuality through the production of unique digital objects. By acting as creators and not simply consumers, users of digital technologies channel their playful tendencies into a form of cultural participation that operates upon economic principles of production and exchange (not to mention the fact that these users are supporting the accumulation of capital in a service-based economy whenever they exert these creative energies). To partake in any form of participatory culture necessarily requires the same personality traits that are valued in knowledge-based employees; to engage in and derive satisfaction from digital technologies is to possess and utilize the same creative ingenuity and intellectual flexibility that characterize the contemporary knowledge worker. Thus, the desire to express oneself becomes the raw material that sustains the creation of digital objects (Nealon, 2012). In both situations, socioeconomic activity—meaning the accumulation of capital that is generated directly or indirectly through user-generated content via the social relations created by information services—thrives when the subjectivity of workers and technology users is individualized, commodified, and integrated into larger capitalist networks. Everything from outsourcing R&D to individual employees via 20% time, to needing to be a unique person in order to undertake knowledge work, and to capitalizing on people’s imperative to express themselves in virtual arenas is symptomatic of a cultural ideology, wherein the subjectivity of individuals is characterized as a hyperindividualized and economically productive force which helps knowledge-based industries operate at their peak efficiency (see also Foucault, 2008; Nealon, 2007). ⁶ Put differently, knowledge-based industries that produce social relations, rather than concrete products, function best when the entirety of the social body is permeated with potential outlets for socioeconomic activity. Collapsing the work/play division and emphasizing individualized subjectivity are highly effective catalyst for saturating the social body with said outlets, which, in turn, continue to support information services.

Identifying the interrelation between socioeconomic practices and subjectivity is important insofar as it helps us theorize new outlets for social organization. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005) note, the globalist paradigm upheld by knowledge-based economies should not be viewed as a monolithic, hegemonic, and inherently oppressive force. Instead, the same technologies and infrastructures that sustain globalist systems also offer the conditions for novel forms of social activism:

Indeed, when the products of labor are not material goods but social relationships, networks of communication, and forms of life, then it becomes clear that economic production immediately implies a kind of political production, or the production of society itself. We are thus no longer bound by the old blackmail; the choice is not between sovereignty or anarchy. The power of the multitude to create social relationships in common stands between sovereignty and anarchy, and it thus presents a new possibility for politics. (Hardt & Negri, 2005, p. 336)

Given this brief historical overview, we can see how digital technologies birthed from very particular historical circumstances in the mid-20th century helped create massive paradigm shifts in both professional and cultural spheres. Knowledge-based economies provide the necessary conditions that conflate work with play and allow subjectivity itself to operate as a key component within socioeconomic developments, which, in turn, influence new advancements in digital technologies. In the following section, I would like to illustrate how video games—as aesthetic objects and not simply the commodified products of a globalized industry—resonate with this new emphasis on subjectivity and the blurring of work versus play. In doing so, I plan to demonstrate how video games rely on the same process of subjectivity formation that drives many service-based industries. Characterizing video games as operating upon subjectivity formation will shed light upon the unique political dimensions housed within games and, more importantly, illustrate how game criticism can help us achieve the critical project put forth by Hardt and Negri. To begin, I want to focus on how, exactly, subjectivity operates within first-hand experiences of video game players.

Video Games as Subjectivity Machines

Many authors have examined the ways in which the video game industry exemplifies the complication of work versus play and, moreover, how the complication of this relationship provides the territory for new subjectivities to emerge (Castronova, 2003; Ito, 2012; Postigo, 2010). For the purposes of this examination, though, I want to stray from an anthropological or sociological handling of subjectivity in video games and gaming communities. Instead, I want to turn toward a particular sect of scholarship that focuses on the psychological impact that video games can have on their users. Graeme Kirkpatrick investigates how the aesthetic experience of playing video games parallels the same type of psychological self-reflection and self-modification found in art:

The kind of learning that is essential to art does not concern its messages but rather alterations we perpetrate upon ourselves through our engagement with it, changes that result in a new sense of what is possible. In so far as they require us to perform non-habituated actions to secure unexpected and unanticipated effects, games too can be part of an aesthetic adventure. (2013, p. 186)

To clarify, Kirkpatrick is not necessarily discounting the work done by those interested in utilizing the role of subjectivity in video games for educational ends nor is he claiming that the identities/subject positions which emerge out of gameplay are wholly unimportant (see Gee, 2007). ⁸ Instead, he is primarily interested in how we psychologically adapt to the subversion, challenging, or rewiring of unconscious habits while playing a game. Taking this approach can help me position games in relation to the work/play interrelation that I discussed in the previous section. To play a game takes work insofar as games demand active participation on the part of players and requires a conscious adaptation to constantly evolving goals or obstacles; games (unlike other media such as film) simply will not function if a player cannot successfully adapt to the structural mechanics that govern a virtual gamespace (Aarseth, 1997). Hence, the “work” of playing a game is the intellectual investment of continual self-reflection and self-modification of one’s actions or thoughts within a virtual space. ⁹ In relying on subjectivity formation to facilitate gameplay experiences, video games operate on the same foundation of knowledge-based economies because both games and socioeconomic activity within networked societies use the work/play synthesis to establish subjectivity as a fundamental component in their respective functioning.

To return to Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s claim regarding the politics housed within video games, the arrangements of power inherent to games extends beyond a simple material association with apparatuses of Western domination or rebellion against these technologies. Remember, the term politics simply denotes the ways in which systems—be they technological, ideological, or otherwise—both permit and prohibit agency on the part of individuals. When viewed through this lens, the political arrangements of power found in video games operate as such: Every game is tasked with getting its user to do the necessary work of self-modification in order to successfully play the game. Thus, the political dimension within games is the arrangement of gameplay elements that create new possibilities for action which entice a player into participating in a work/play synthesis, undergoing subjectivity formation via psychological and physical self-modification, and establishing subjectivity as the mediating principle within gameplay experiences. Consequently, the phrase “the politics of games” denotes the ways in which games inhabit the same ideological framework of knowledge economies by embracing a work-as-play ideal and coax players into using their own subjectivity modification as the interface for actions or events in a virtual gamespace. Arguing that the political dimensions of video games exist as a distillation of the ideology that pervades globalist paradigms is not to say that everything in contemporary networked societies functions “like a game” or that games should be seen as the most productive method of interacting with the world (to do so would only proliferate the corrosive trend of gamification, which tries to strip games down to their most base elements). ¹⁰ Instead, rethinking what constitutes the political dimensions of games is meant to offer an interpretive framework that allows scholars to use the work/play/subjectivity triangulation as a way to better understand how games inhabit, and even challenge, the cultural logics surrounding their development.

By taking a more nuanced approach to the politics of video games and aligning this medium with prevalent cultural ideologies created in part by the expansion of ITs, we can come to a new characterization that understands video games as something more than just a collection of rule-based systems which grew out of Western military/commercial domination; they are machines that presuppose and incorporate a player’s subjective experiences into their very form and structure. In this sense, video games exist as subjectivity machines because they necessarily require a preexistent subjectivity (they assume the player is of a mind-set that is willing to play a game’s politics) and operate through subjectivity formation (the continual self-modification of the player is what drives her actions in a virtual gamespace and these actions allow the algorithmic sequences that make up a game’s code to enact themselves).

At the onset of this article, I used Pope’s rejection of oversimplified, remedial notions of politics—that is, seeing Papers, Please as an overt critique of historical events or immigration policies—as a way to begin reconceptualizing the political dimensions of video games. My revised understanding of the politics of games and subsequent characterization of video games as subjectivity machines does not contradict Pope’s self-proclaimed intentions to complicate good/bad binary systems by showing how “all sides of any kind of issue have some justification.” Denying oversimplified good/bad distinctions and forcing the player to rationalize her decisions without these mutually exclusive categories is a testament to video games’ ability to suspend, challenge, and rewire our internal presuppositions (be they about the conventions of specific mechanics or general concepts that inform the structure and narration of gameplay). For the final section of this examination, I want to play the game of politics, and play the politics of games, by analyzing my own experiences of Papers, Please in order to demonstrate how the triangulation of work/play/subjectivity enacts itself first hand. I hope to illustrate how this game takes the socioeconomic logic of work-as-play to its illogical extreme and, in doing so, challenges the discourses we often use to characterize contemporary ITs.

The Ruthless Pragmatism of Papers, Please

Papers, Please takes place in the fictional communist country Arstotzka (which is a generalized parody of former Eastern Bloc countries) during the winter of 1982. The player takes on the role of an immigration officer who has “won” a state-run labor lottery and been assigned to a border checkpoint that separates the cities of East Grestin from West Grestin, with the former being located in Arstotzka and the latter being located in neighboring Kolechia. The basic premise of the game is that the player must review the travel documents of those trying to immigrate into the country and either accept or deny them based on the legitimacy of their papers. At the end of the workday, the player receives money for each traveler successfully processed—meaning either admitted or denied entry to the country on justified grounds—which is then used to feed and house the player’s family (who will eventually perish if not enough utilities are paid for). Whenever the player admits someone who is not authorized to enter the country or denies a valid person from immigrating, they are penalized and multiple penalties results in a wage deduction. The game can end if the all family member’s perish, the player is unable to pay their bills, the player gets caught dealing with people deemed a threat to Arstotzka, or if the player is attacked at certain key plot points. Papers, Please has a story mode that is broken up into 31 days, which function as traditional game levels in the sense that each day often adds new variables to account for. As the story progresses, events happen beyond the player’s control, such as a terrorist bombing of the immigration checkpoint, and these events add new complications to the documents the player must review (i.e., immigrants from a particular country require a valid work visa to enter, etc.). Over the course of the game’s campaign, the player gets caught up in a rebel group trying to overthrow Arstotzka’s corrupt government and the player’s actions have a direct impact on the success or failure of this rebellion.

All player actions are confined to the window and desk space of the immigration booth, and most of the player’s experiences involve using the mouse to retrieve, examine, notarize, and return documents to hopeful travelers. While there are other actions available—such as a body scanner to detect illegal contraband and a very limited use of weapons in the game’s final days—the game functions primarily by forcing the player into a monotonous routine of cross-checking information via highly restrictive controls within a claustrophobic amount of desk space. In this sense, Papers, Please literalizes the synthesis of work and play. As Daniel Johnson argues, the aesthetic experience of making bureaucratic work the primary focus of gameplay “mechanizes the act of play through repetitive acts” and creates a situation where the “act of play becomes an act of administration, of laboring” (Johnson, 2015, p. 14). The work of playing the game is the work of psychologically adapting oneself to the tedious minutia of bureaucratic logistics as well as the self-mechanization of physical action. Consequently, the game operates through a process of subjectivity formation because it demands that the player inhabits a mechanized mind-set which fosters “a transference of agency away from the individual and toward the institutionalized structure of command and routinized actions” (p. 15). However, it is precisely this subjectivity formation—the deliberate cultivation of a mind-set that feeds into the “act of administration” and mechanizes the player’s body/mind—that provides an incisive critique of socioeconomic systems which thrive off of the work/play/subjectivity interrelation.

Papers, Please denies a humanizing counterpoint to the monotonous labor in the immigration booth. At the end of each day, you do not get to interact with your family directly. Instead, you are treated to a black screen with stark, piercing text that reminds you which relatives are dying, which bills are not paid, and how much harder you will need to work tomorrow in order to keep your loved ones alive. The player’s life beyond the immigration booth—beyond the epicenter where the player is mechanized and virtual immigrants are objectified in hauntingly efficient—yet—unremarkable ways via document processing—is just another wall of information that is meant to represent familial subjects in this virtual world. And yet, this wall simultaneously reminds us that we can only interact with these subjects through more quantifiable information, through more numbers (in this case, the cold, hard cash that is earned one passport approval or rejection at a time). Ironically, moments of intimate human connection with other people in this virtual world often come in the form of micronarratives that occur within the player’s place of occupation. At one point in the game, a man immigrating from neighboring Antegria will inform the player that his wife is next in line. When the wife enters the booth, she claims that she quickly fled Antegria to avoid being killed and, consequently, does not have the proper documents to enter the country. The player can decide whether to let the wife follow the husband into Arstotzka, which would incur a penalty and risk the health of the player’s family, or deny entry and split up the couple. There are no additional rewards for either decision, meaning the player must create their own rationale for choosing to protect their family or help a couple that, to be honest, is far more tangible and present than the abstract household the player returns to every evening (seeing as the family is all but invisible in comparison to the randomly generated immigrants whose weathered faces relentlessly stare at the player while awaiting their processing). Regardless of what conclusion the player comes to, this decision must be made in accordance with a discourse of quantifiable economic cost (i.e., can the player bear the economic risks of letting this couple into the country?). Even the humanizing micronarratives the player shares with travelers are not immune from the objectifying process of contorting complex human relations into issues of exchange value.

As I discussed earlier, when work becomes play, one’s subjectivity and the social relations that stem from it becomes a central tenet to socioeconomic production and capital accumulation. Papers, Please exploits this coupling of subjectivity with economics by turning the player’s relationship to both their family and the travelers they process into tight, suffocating financial exchanges; the player’s familial connections are represented by an always-unnerving balance sheet while the rationale for choosing to support any ethical obligations to the immigrants one processes must be weighed against potential monetary consequences. Hence, in willingly taking up the mind-set that locates agency within an “institutionalized structure of command and routinized actions,” the player is forced to inhabit a ruthless form of economic pragmatism that objectifies oneself, the characters one interacts with and the social relations that exist between them. By making repetitive bureaucratic work, the central premise of gameplay, Papers, Please takes the procapitalist mantra of “do what you love for a living and you’ll never work again” and turns it on its head; work is literally play within the game but what emerges is not a feel-good embrace of Silicon Valley-esque idealism. Quite the opposite, as the game exposes how the work/play synthesis can lead to an unsettling, dehumanizing objectification and quantification of social relations. Through inverting the logic of do-what-you-love capitalism, the game leaves us with a new, darker motif: When subjectivity becomes an outlet for socioeconomic production, the only way to connect to subjects is through a discourse of economic cost. Or, more bluntly: When you do what you love for a living, you never really stop working.

The callous economic pragmatism of Papers, Please betrays the liberation discourse which is often directed toward user-focused ITs that privilege personal expression and collective organization. A popular notion touted by tech enthusiasts is that individuals can use social media platforms, such as Twitter or similar services, to express their ideals in virtual spaces, which will then lead to real-world mobilization against oppressive regimes (Morozov, 2012). However, arguing that corporate-owned services can guide us toward a better world underhandedly “allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom” (Morozov, 2012, p. 304). The labor done by the player in the immigration booth holds up a rather disturbing mirror to this liberation discourse by demonstrating how commercial and ideological influences can channel knowledge-based work toward exclusive, not inclusive, ends. In an odd way, the player functions as a modern-day knowledge worker when completing occupational duties within the game. Much like how knowledge-based industries create services for information dissemination as opposed to self-contained goods, the player does not produce any tangible in-game objects but, instead, regulates the proper dissemination of information via cross-checking travel documents; looking for information discrepancies in traveling papers manifests itself as literally moving information from one place to another (i.e., shuffling documents around before notarizing and returning them). By undertaking the knowledge work of document processing, the player inadvertently enacts many of the same features of immaterial labor. When accepting or denying prospective immigrants, the player is managing social relations and cultural standards by regulating which people are incorporated into the social body of Arstotzka. The game gestures toward the ideological work being undertaken by the player by having the faceless avatar make nationalist declarations such as “Glory to Arstotzka” or “Do no harm” whenever a traveler is allowed in to the country. These mantras become more haunting as the player realizes how this language of glory is nothing more than a placeholder for national agendas that are willing to partake in fascist practices which exploit and even punish individuals who do not possess the characteristics—individuals who cannot be a certain type of person—that Arstotzka deems economically valuable. Consequently, the mantras echoed by the player’s avatar reflect how external economic and cultural forces can channel the immaterial labor of managing social relations toward oppressive ends.

Although the game puts the player in the role of an immigration officer that undertakes a particular form of knowledge work, Papers, Please does not refute Kirkpatrick’s aversion to criticism that views gameplay as an opportunity to inhabit fully formed subject positions. This game does not instruct us how to act like a real-life immigration officer nor does it try to teach us the particularities of immigration policies. Rather, this game demonstrates how the ideological nature of immaterial labor can be channeled by commercial incentives, resulting in a situation where knowledge-based work actively cultivates a corrosive form of economic pragmatism which denies individuals access to resources due to their inability to offer explicit, and often significant, compensation. Hence, Papers, Please teaches us about ourselves insofar as it reveals the presumptions we harbor when agreeing to participate in the work/play synthesis or using a discourse of liberation when characterizing commercial ITs. This is not to say that Papers, Please demonizes user-centric services or the ideological nature of immaterial labor writ large. If it did, the game would be cutting off the branch it sits upon, seeing as it too is a product of the very technologies and mind-sets that synthesize work, play, and subjectivity. Instead, the politics of Papers, Please short circuits the dominant ideology of networked societies in order to demonstrate the unintentional human consequences of taking this logic too its illogical extremes.

Conclusion

I began this examination by asking what we gain in remaining loyal to a discourse of politics when critiquing video games. I chose to focus on the most unique feature of Papers, Please—the coupling of work and play in its mechanics—as a way to begin answering this question. By taking the connection between work and play as my primary focal point, I was able to offer a revised historical narration that places video games within a larger ideological paradigm which reconfigures the work/play/subjectivity interrelation within contemporary networked societies. From this, I derived an interpretive framework that views video games as not simply commodities forged from transnational networks of commercial production but, instead, as distillations of the same ideology that governs the capitalist systems from which these aesthetic objects emerge. Therefore, examining the complex constellation of work, play, and subjectivity provides the territory for connecting the internal logic of specific video games to the external logic that surrounds their development and contextualizes their cultural significance. Focusing on the politics of games—that is, the ways in which games teach us to work-as-play and coax us into using our own self-modifying practices as a way to mediate gameplay experiences—allows us to better understand how games inhabit and even subvert the cultural logic of their particular historical moment, an argument that I demonstrated in my analysis of Papers, Please. To conclude, I sincerely hope that this examination and the interpretive framework offered therein can add another layer of depth to an already fascinating game in addition to providing the resources for further investigating the critical value of video games and the experiences they elicit in their players.