Posted: December 12th, 2023

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NYU Press

Chapter Title: Papers, Please: Ethics Chapter Author(s): MIGUEL SICART

Book Title: How to Play Video Games Book Editor(s): MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE, NINA B. HUNTEMANN Published by: NYU Press. (2019) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv12fw8tn.22

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Papers, Please Ethics

M i g u e l S i c a rt

Abstract: Can a video game make a moral argument? In this chapter, Miguel Sicart examines how Papers, Please illustrates the expressive capacities of video games to explore complex moral topics, playfully engaging players not just as consumers but also, and more critically, as reflective ethical beings.

Ever since Ultima IV (Origin Systems, 1985) proposed a morality system to evalu- ate players’ actions, game critics have examined the relationship between game- play and morals, and designers have utilized game structures and mechanics to explore ethical topics. From Fable (Lionhead Studios, 2004) to Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015), numerous titles offer players moral choices. But what do we mean by moral choices? Do these choices engage players in ethical thinking? And how might games be designed to encourage thoughtful reflection? I engage these concerns by examining the independent game Papers, Please (3909 LLC, 2013) in light of the following three key questions: First, what do we mean by ethics and morality? Second, how do video games engage ethical thinking? And, finally, what role do games play in our moral life?

It may be a commonsense notion to dismiss morality when we play video games—the “it’s just a game” argument. Classic theories of play, such as Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle” (see the chapter by Steven Conway in this collection), present play as spatially and temporality demarcated from regular life during which society’s rules are briefly suspended. As such, it is thought, we need not apply the ethical rules by which we live to our actions undertaken during play. Yet we make many difficult choices when we play games— quickly evaluating situ- ations, calculating potential gains and consequences. Narrative game worlds fre- quently present us with ethical dilemmas that we don’t encounter in our everyday

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lives: to kill or not kill an enemy, to horde personal resources, or to share them with someone. However, although our gameplay choices may not have immediate or direct consequences on our nongaming lives (although this point is debatable), video games nevertheless inform our morality while we are playing and poten- tially affect our moral fiber once we’re done. Papers, Please offers a great example of how video games can have those ethical effects.

Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please turns players into border bureaucrats in the fictional Eastern- bloc country of Astorzska, which has just established a fragile truce after many years of warring with neighboring countries. Players are tasked with con- trolling the flow of people into the country, meeting quotas that influence the amount of money they earn (see figure 18.1). Players decide whether migrants are permitted entry into the country based on a migrant’s documentation and other information via computer news. Papers, Please is a bleak simulation of border con- trol protocols, the rhetoric of isolationism, and the fear of terrorism.

Figure 18.1 The user interface of Papers, Please.

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Before evaluating Papers, Please, we need to define a few basic terms. Ethics is the analytical examination of the principles from which we derive and evaluate moral rules. For example, ethics can propose a system that states that to make de- cisions, we should look at the consequences of our actions. If the consequences of our actions harm somebody, then that action is immoral. We call that system con- sequentialism. A similar system looks at who would benefit from a particular de- cision and the utility of that decision. If our choices have a positive effect on many, these choices are deemed to be morally good. We call that system utilitarianism.

Morality is a system of rules for guiding and evaluating individual and collec- tive conduct. In simpler terms, morality is ethics in practice. Any time we make a decision or ponder a difficult situation, we are performing moral work; we are assessing how best to solve a moral conflict. Furthermore, moral systems have two main purposes: they exist to prevent harm and they exist to encourage the ethical development of individuals and collectives. Moral systems have four defining char- acteristics: they are public, rational, impartial, and informal. We can understand these elements in the world of games as follows. First, to play a game, every- body needs to know the rules of the game. For example, to play a pickup game of basketball you need to know the rules of basketball, plus the social rules of the neighborhood court where the game takes place. Everybody should know those rules, and everybody should agree on what constitutes breaking the rules. These shared rules governing this activity makes it a public system. Morality systems are public so that cultures can share agreed- upon notions of what is right and wrong— actions that both prevent harm and those that encourage human flourishing. A public system is any system in which everybody that is affected by the workings of the system has an understanding of the basic guidelines behind that system. Law, for example, should be a public system to ensure that everybody knows what is legal and illegal in a particular society.

One of the great design insights of Papers, Please is that it makes players feel as if they are living in an unjust society by keeping the operating morality sys- tem hidden from view. Players never know whether an action is “good” or “evil” or what long- term consequences their choices might have. A player might com- miserate with an innocent- looking man who begs to enter the country to visit a dying mother, only to learn afterward that the man was a murderer. Or worse, sometimes players will let through a person they have suspicions about but will never learn whether their decision was right or wrong. It is through these choices that Papers, Please is an exploration of totalitarian bureaucratic systems and the banality of evil. Totalitarian bureaucracies can be designed to alienate decision makers from the consequences of their choices and, in doing so, allow partici- pants to feel ethically detached from their decisions. The dull routine of these choices, such as the daily work of a border control guard, is bound up in rules

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and procedures, which can further remove the participant from feeling culpable. The emotional impact of Papers, Please is largely a result of this design.

In addition to being public, moral systems are rational— in that their prin- ciples can be argued using reason rather than emotion or faith— and they are impartial— seeking to treat people evenhandedly. (There are moral systems de- rived from faith, but these are developed under the domain of religious belief and structures and are outside of the scope of this chapter.) If we create a moral system in which some parts of the population are evaluated more harshly than others, then we are creating a biased system that will engender an inequitable and irrational society. For a moral system to work, everybody should be treated both fairly and consistently.

Returning to our analog and video game examples, ideally all players on both teams are treated equally by the rules and by the referees so as to create equity among players. We celebrate sporting competitions, in part, because we appreci- ate how athletes overcome the challenges of the game and their opponents on an even playing field. When a basketball referee applies game rules unevenly, favor- ing foul calls against one team more than the other, players, coaches, and fans may decry the game as unfair and protest the outcome. In contrast, Papers, Please explores what it feels like to live and work in a biased morality system. Some of the choices players need to take are clearly biased, harming people just because of their origin or because of biased suspicion. Papers, Please is also an exploration of what it takes to be a moral citizen in a morally failing state. In the game, players are told what to do, but the reasons behind the laws, the border rules they have to apply to let people in or out, are left in the dark. There are rules and laws in the state, but those are of obscure origins, brutally enforced, and subject to random changes. This is how authoritarian power operates.

Finally, moral systems are informal. This means that actions are open to inter- pretation and adaptation as the situational context demands. By having informal systems, we can negotiate the ways rules are evaluated on a case- by- case basis. Consider the informal aspects of pickup basketball games: there are rules to gov- ern action, but there are typically no referees in attendance. Thus, players must police themselves and engage in ongoing negotiations to ensure everybody is playing under the same rules.

This is another aspect that Papers, Please engages creatively: players are not permitted to negotiate the moral impact of their actions. The game system re- wards morally wrong choices and players cannot refuse to make a decision. The ethical system in Papers, Please is private, partial, and rigid, presenting a simula- tion of moral life under a totalitarian regime (see figure 18.2).

As the examples from basketball and Papers, Please demonstrate, games and ethics share some common traits. Games are informal public systems with rules

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that indicate how to behave. In games, those rules of play tell us what to do in or- der to succeed. Similarly, morality uses rules as heuristics for leading a good life, avoiding harm, and developing our potential as human beings. There are games where the rules of play and its morality system are profoundly intertwined— games such as Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015), The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012–2018), or the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007– 2017). However, Papers, Please offers a different take on how video games can design ethical experiences.

Let’s look more closely at Papers, Please to assess its novelty. This game engages players in a number of ethical dilemmas in the face of imperfect and incomplete information. How does one balance the risk of barring innocent migrants against the threat of terrorism? Do players place their personal, financial well- being above that of their fellow citizens, their state, or those seeking asylum? Most of the time, players are given insufficient information, contradictory goals, and little power beyond fulfilling their bureaucratic role as a border agent. Unlike other

Figure 18.2 Choices and conse- quences in Papers, Please.

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choice- based games, Papers, Please does not quantify the player’s actions accord- ing to predetermined values; rather, it is the task of the player to assign values to the exploration of the choices that are presented. In other words, the only moral guide one has in Papers, Please is the player’s personal code. For example, players could evaluate the game’s challenges by looking at the potential outcome of their decisions, therefore embracing a consequentialist ethics. Meanwhile, a utilitarian would weigh the pros and cons of a particular decision looking at both individual and collective outcomes, deciding whether to sacrifice one’s self for the sake of the fictional country or to act selfishly to protect only those they care about.

The game does have up to 20 endings that conclude the scripted narrative arc. However, this large number of endings makes it very difficult for (casual) play- ers to “play for the plot,” that is, to try to achieve results by deliberately mak- ing choices based on their intention to complete a narrative. Most casual Papers, Please players will not know about the multiple endings or how to reach them, and thus, they are encouraged to make choices by following their moral com- pass. Dedicated players who want to see the different endings are playing “for the plot,” but given how they must carefully make choices to reach a different end for each playthrough, it is likely that they have reflected about the meaning of those choices, resulting in a process of moral reflection.

Papers, Please is a brilliant example of ethical gameplay design because it al- lows for the application of different ethical theories to how it is played. This is precisely what computer and video games can do: create safe spaces for the explo- ration of different ethical choices and their resulting consequences. In fact, player agency is a key characteristic that makes games useful for posing ethical ques- tions and for testing possible outcomes. In their influential Rules of Play,1 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe games as systems that create a possibility space for players to explore. In games, this space of possibility determines the choices available to players who, in turn, develop strategies and tactics for negoti- ating and traversing that space.

The idea of gaming offering a “possibility space” is what allows us to think about them as potential vehicles for moral experiences that allow for the explo- ration of different ethical theories. In many cases, gamers traverse these game spaces simply by trying to optimize their chances of winning. However, games such as Papers, Please illustrate how games can model a ludic possibility space as an invitation for exploring personal and social values. In this way, gameplay is not necessarily about fulfilling a win condition, but the actions are directed back at players as a form of moral reflection. Papers, Please encourages players to in- terrogate the values and the logic behind their choices, as well as the philosophi- cal systems that support those rules and behaviors.

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Papers, Please demonstrates how ethical dilemmas in games should compli- cate players’ choices, encouraging them to use their own inner moral compass as an instrument for decision making. In particular, the game deploys incom- plete information and insufficient time as complementary gameplay mechanics. In contrast, many games present complete worlds where everything is clear to users, giving them enough information to act with confidence. But if the goal is to have players explore their unquestioned or underexamined values, there must be gaps in information and time constraints that generate difficult decisions, like the timed decision- making sequences in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, that force players to take grave choices without having time to ponder about the na- ture and consequences of their actions. In that way, gameplay becomes an ethical practice as the possibility space becomes one of moral possibility. Ethical game- play is not the act of choosing between options but of traversing the possibility space of a game with moral thinking.

Playing games is an act of leisure, a pleasurable activity pursued for escaping daily routines. Is it fair, then, to expect games to have ethical content? Should they encourage us to engage ethical thinking? Are these fair questions? Escapism from the burden of being a moral creature is a perfectly valid design and cultural goal for games. The moral role games play in society might be that of letting us be more relaxed moral animals. Games therefore needn’t be under any imperative to morally engage us with ethically provocative content.

However, if Papers, Please teaches us anything, it is that the rhetoric of games and game design can create engaging moral experiences. Why not, then, use this medium to explore different ethical theories: different ways of acting, dif- ferent ways of understanding why something might be a moral dilemma, and what makes a decision a moral or an immoral one? Also, we should forge beyond single- player narrative games to consider how ethical multiplayer games might be designed. What would the moral possibility space of an abstract or experimental game look like?2 Such games might be difficult or impossible to bring to fruition. Yet that very impossibility would tell us something about games as a medium— about their limits and their affordances.

Games are exercises in ethical thinking, play instruments to train and sharpen our moral instincts. Like literature and the movies, games can help us formulate, explore, understand or reject ethical rules. The uniqueness of games is that this process takes place in a computational space of possibility that each player tra- verses in a particular way— players get to practice ethical theories and see their effects, both in the game and in their reflection on their gaming experiences.

Aristotle understood ethics as a practical science. Homework help – Discussing the rules of mo- rality was interesting if and only if we also lived morally and engaged practically

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with the complications of making choices. Games offer us the possibility of engag- ing directly with that practical science. This is not to say that because we have Papers, Please, the medium of the video game is mature. Rather, it is to say that playing can be a moral act, one that can help us better understand what we value personally, as well as what we value for the societies in which we live. If ethics is a practical science, then video games can be an ideal laboratory for moral research.

N o t e s

1 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play. Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

2 See, for example, Joseph DeLappe and Biome Collective, Killbox, https://www.killbox.info.

F u r t h e r R e a d i n g

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. Values at Play in Digital Games. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2014. Sicart, Miguel. The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Zagal, Jose. The Videogame Ethics Reader. San Diego, CA: Cognella, 2012.

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