By: Christine Choi
When trying to make sense of the oppressive systems and structures in place, video games may not be the first to come to mind when it comes to examining the system in place. Yet, the video game Papers, Please, provides an interesting insight and commentary on what it means to put in a position of performing that status quo. The concepts in Grant Bollmer’s book Materialist Media Theory provided foundational groundwork with relevant ideas in this game. As a result, it brought attention to the following: what kind of context do video games provide for us when it comes to understanding the representation of bodies as well as the inscription of such bodies? As much as Papers, Please exaggerates and parodizes the border control and immigration systems, it simultaneously reveals the biases of the immigration system as well as the player themselves.
Papers, Please, is an indie game where you play as an immigration inspector for the fictional country “Arstotzka.” Throughout the game, you make decisions to let them cross the border based on people’s “validity” of their documentation, which determines whether they are permitted to enter the country. The laws that determine what counts as a valid document continue to grow more and more convoluted as the game progresses, which makes detecting discrepancies even more difficult. Depending on if their documentations are all correct, their passports get stamped with “approved” or “denied” accordingly. The premise itself already highlights how we, as bodies living under the legal institutions that define us, have forced us into the inscription of legal documents that indicate our right to exist as well as our subscription to performing such practices.
Inscription Using Documents
As the immigration inspector, you are already assigned to the act of inscribing into each entrant’s document via stamping in their passports. However, each body and the inscriptions that represent said body (i.e. the passports, entry permits, etc.) have much more than what is inscribed (or is not inscribed) in their documents. For whatever reason each entrant was unable to provide the correct details in their documents, they each had their own lives that brought them to the border—details which cannot be inscribed within their very legal documents. It makes Bollmer’s argument about analyzing the “margins,” a space in which we can find “traces of a history that this barbarism worked to exclude from existence,” all the more relevant in contextualizing their presence at the border (54). You, the player, can make the decision on whether you do perform that very duty that this authoritarian institution has tasked you with through the institutional practices of inscribing. Doing so, however, means that you have made the inherent decision to push these people into the “margins.”
Performativity in Papers, Please
The game’s mechanic of finding “discrepancies” in the information in the documentation also happens to be one of the ways that illustrates how “legible bodies”—bodies that are “produced by legal, medical, and psychological practices of writing and documentation”—are rendered illegible by the immigration system (Bollmer, 67). The game appears to task the player with a relatively simple task: to carry out, or rather, “perform,” the laws that govern our bodies. As a result, the bodies perform the act of being a legal entrant to Arstotzka by carrying and presenting with valid documentation—or at least attempt to. Failing to find the discrepancy results in citations for violating protocol—get three of these, and it will be deducted from your salary. Even with the presence of the repressive state apparatus—the agreement to obey the laws due to the “threat of police violence, or in this case, the government representatives—the game incites as well as punishes the player for acting against them (Bollmer, 27). Throughout the gameplay, there will be several characters that ask you to approve the entry of those who do not carry valid documents and deny the entry of those who do, citing reasons such as wanting to stay with their family or the fear for their safety if certain individuals are let in. This is how the game presents the player with the agency of whether they want to perform within the legal and governmental practices or perform outside of them, even if that results in a protocol violation.
Game-sensing Systemic Marginalization of Bodies
But why analyze the legibility of bodies and the inscription of documentation through a video game? When trying to understand the systemic challenges that arise from the documentation of our very being, one helpful framework to understand it is through the perspective of “game-sensing.” “Game-sensing” refers to how gamers “attune to a game system” which often takes form in navigating through the game’s mechanics and environments (Guillermo 156-157). Kawika Guillermo, in their book Of Floating Isles, described how video games are able to show the ways in which we game-sense the racialized systems that we co-exist in (157). The game-sensing of Papers, Please, as stated by Guillermo, “attunes us to the violences of nationalist othering by revealing the overlapping practices of border security with state-enforced racism” (162). Despite the seemingly immateriality of the bodies in digital video games, Papers, Please exemplified how studying these media objects through the media theoretical lens.
The notion that video games, as media that are viewed as inherently self-serving and pleasure-seeking, are unable to delve deeper into the real-world oppression that are inscribed within society, has been frequently countered with the recent emergence of indie games such as Papers, Please. It shows us how games can in fact materialize the immateriality of systemic marginalization of immigrants. In the game, the laws behind who gets to enter Arstotzka quickly change following a terrorist attack at the border. We see this parallel real-life events, such as the formation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a response to the terrorist attack that occurred on September 11th, 2001 throughout the United States (“TSA History”). Games such as these can illuminate on how the TSA operates has been racialized by using the actions of extremist groups as reason to further marginalize racial groups. By contextualizing these games to the media theories that we continue to study, we can do more than just game-sense the systemic racialized injustices: we can challenge the existing hegemony in place and maybe eventually, see it lead to political change (Bollmer, 32).
Works Cited
Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction Grant Bollmer. Zed Books, 2021.
Guillermo, Kawika. Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025.
Papers, Please. Directed by Lucas Pope, 3909, 2013.
“TSA History | Transportation Security Administration.” Transportation Security Administration, www.tsa.gov/history. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025.
I love this analysis, Christine! As someone who has watched various playthroughs of Papers, Please, I was also intrigued by the political and social statements that could be decoded from this game while it still remained an incredibly popular and enjoyable piece of media. I particularly appreciated your point about analyzing the “margins,” a space in which we can find “traces of a history that this barbarism worked to exclude from existence”. This was a major and inherent mechanic to the game that separated it from other, shallower works. With the inclusion of opportunities like bribes, extra character dialogue, or connotations of violence, the game gives you the intimidating agency of following the instructions you were given or following your own opinions and decisions — and there are relevant consequences for both these choices. This reminds me of concepts we discussed in our CRWR312 Interactive Storytelling class, where we discussed why people play games. The reason here that may relate to this point is to simulate an interesting environment without the attached real-life consequences. While this gives players the fun opportunity to practice their deduction and observation skills, it also very clearly draws attention to the realistic situations that this game is based on, and all the people who perform the tasks as their daily job. This is a very intentional move on the part of the game developers, and definitely exemplify Bollmer’s point of media materializing real change.
Hi Christine!! I haven’t played Papers, Please before, but your blog post made it surprisingly easy to understand why it’s such a powerful example for thinking about inscription and the legibility of bodies. The way you describe the player having to navigate constantly shifting rules really connects to Bollmer’s idea of being pushed into the margins, even when you don’t intend to. I also found your point about game-sensing super compelling. It’s interesting how a game can train players to internalize the logic of a system, even one they might disagree with. It made me wonder how someone unfamiliar with real-world immigration processes might come away understanding them after playing a game like this. How do you think a player’s own background or assumptions might shape the way they interpret the game’s portrayal of border control?
Hi Christine! I really appreciate how you bring Bollmer into conversation with Papers, Please to show how games don’t just represent systems of control but actually train us to feel their logics. Your point about inscription really stood out to me. The way the game reduces people to documents, nd forces the player into the role of enforcing that reduction, made me think about Achille Mbembe’s idea of “bureaucratic violence,” where power works through paperwork, classification, and the quiet sorting of bodies into categories of legitimacy.
I also love how you tie in Guillermo’s idea of game-sensing. It highlights something important: that the discomfort we feel while playing isn’t incidental, it’s part of how the game exposes the racialized, administrative violence behind border-making. The fact that the player’s “errors” become punishable feels like such a sharp metaphor for how institutions produce obedience through fear and scarcity.
I love it so much when people write posts that decode my brain. Thank you, Christine, for putting these concepts into words and backing them up by media theory: videogames are such a rich area for media analysis and practice, I hope to see more people take a critical look at what games teach us about the world and each other.
Your post is very well put together, great job! I especially enjoyed your analysis of performativity of the legal system in Papers, Please – anyone who had to fight the bureaucracy would know how real it is.
This made me think of the concept of prosthetic memory described by Alison Landesberg: Papers, Please, makes us empathize with border control workers (which I assume most people don’t), putting us in this rather complicated position. While I don’t think it creates as vivid of a memory as movies do in Landesberg’s argument, Papers, Please seems to be rather successful in making us walk in others’ shoes and gain new perspectives.