Also, the game is stacked in favor of not earning enough early on as you are still getting the hang of things. Additionally, expenses pile up as their needs become greater. Satisfying the needs of your family becomes more difficult should you fail to make enough one day, leaving someone you love hungry or sick. Now you are working towards a goal and one that the game effectively resets each day. That money is then used at the end of each day to pay the living expenses for your family - rent, food, heat and medicine. The player receives money at the end of the day for each successfully processed individual and gets docked pay for each mistake made past the first two. How fast and thorough can you be? Left to just this, the game becomes a high score chaser, but then Papers, Please complicates the situation. At this level, there is no moral or ethical dilemmas to be explored. And there is also a timer that represents the work day. The people wishing to pass through, give you their papers, and the player matches the relevant information to what your little book says is permissible. What the gameplay amounts to is essentially an information matching game.
Here we have a game whose entire mechanical concern is giving a pass or fail to the people coming through a border checkpoint. One game that was mentioned in response to the original post, in what has now become a series, that has created a real sense of emotional consequence to the player’s action was Papers, Please. The player’s emotional state is a continuous thing that is affected by the moment to moment play of the game. Yet, such an attempt would have to be outside of those special moments. Last week, I left off by asking if the player’s own emotional state should be the measure by which we understand a game’s consequences. But within the safe boundaries of a video game, creating a consequence by external means is an ineffective measure of making them matter, as the rewards in terms of the game itself often end up being considered more than the moral or narrative implications of the choice. Still, though, the event is highlighted as a choice.įor choices to matter, they need consequences. Some, like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, up the pressure to choose by adding a timer. Most games effectively pause during these moments to give the player the chance to consider the scenario. The game slows down, highlighting that what is being presented to us right now is a choice. Choices in video games are often given to us in a moment.