This dedication to inoffensive, subdued, and largely static visuals reflects the mess of bureaucratic exactitude seen in the player-character’s instructions: at the beginning of each in-game day, stricter regulations are imposed on the paperwork. The color palette of the game is pale and warm, saturated with greys and browns, and non-player characters are muddy, impressionistic figures built of splotchy pixel art (fig.
The atmosphere of Papers, Please, as established through its minimalistic visuals, presents a bleak picture which is belied by sudden tonal changes. 1: A typical Papers, Please screen, as it appears on the game-world’s second day, after the player has highlighted an incongruous relationship between the expiration date on a passport and the game-world’s date The Visuals of Papers, Please: Papers, Please is an expression, through both typical literary elements and unique ‘gamely’ elements, of the paradoxical situation of human agency within mechanical, menial work-and of power, even political power, within the disenfranchised individual.įig. This deceptively simple game centers on a middle-aged, male player-character who lives and supports his impoverished family in the dystopian country of Arstotska in 1982 he is an unwilling government employee staffing a border checkpoint, tasked with sifting the paperwork of would-be emigrants for discrepancies (as seen in fig. The 2013 indie game Papers, Please, created by Lucas Pope, is perfectly amenable to analysis in this mode.
Indeed, the practice of ‘close reading’ the relative coherence and ironic interplay of a work’s constituent elements can be as demonstrably successful in parsing a video game as it has been in parsing other contemporary subjects, such as film, painting, and photography. The self-sufficiency attributed to literature by both the New Critics and the Russian Formalists is indicative of an approach to art which renders legible, through close study, work in many fields aside from literature.
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