Honesty in Papers, Please

In the first few days of Papers, Please, we are immediately faced with some moral choices – a man with the required paperwork asks to let her paperwork-less wife into the country and a woman qualified to enter the country and asks for a man, Dari Ludum, to be denied entry because he will sell her into sexual slavery. These moral choices, which impart one interactive ephemeral person significantly are often juxtaposed with getting enough money to provide life necessities for your non-interactive family. Further, the game appears to reward those that aid the entrants by giving the inspector a trophy token when they are aided.

However, since we only know the entrants for such a fleeting moment, an important question becomes how do we know if they are telling the truth or not in their situation. We see in endings 16 and 18 when the inspector escapes to Obristan, he lies to the Obristan inspector about his goal to escape Arstotzka and tells him instead that he is visiting relatives the country. For the moral choice of letting the wife enter the country without the required paperwork after her husband has passed through, how do we know if she is telling the truth that she will be killed if she goes back to Antegria? Even though we can inspect, scan, and fingerprint the entrants, we are unable to put them through a lie detector or through a similar tool in detecting whether they are lying or not, and as a result we need to convince ourselves whether the entrants are telling the truth or not, and if so what is the moral or economical choice that we should make. This choice is further complicated by the abundance of terrorist attacks and the EZIC and the old government factions clashing throughout the game as the inspector needs to consider that the impure morals of some of the entrants and that they might lie in an attempt to enter the country.

In the case of the husband and wife entering the country, we will never know if they were honest or not, but in the case of the woman asking to deny Ludum of entry into the state we are able to determine that the woman is telling the truth. If Ludum is detained, we see in the newspaper that the human trafficker has been detained, and if he is allowed or denied entry, we see a news article that some of the dancers at a club have been found dead. Here, we clearly see the direct results of our decision on the moral case. The newspapers extend the story past the ephemeral interactions with the entrants at the booth, and provide closure to the inspector.

Morality and honesty come into direct conflict in the interactions with Jorji Costava. Initially, he is seen as a comical character that persistently attempts to enter Arstotzka with his lack of proper documentation. Eventually, he acquires the correct documentation and is qualified to enter the state. Since he is one of the few reoccurring characters, we develop a relationship with him and understand his backstory. In one early encounter (day 6), if the inspector denies him, he even tells the inspector that denying him “is good. [You] do job right”. Once he achieves the correct documentation and is let into the country, he is revealed as a drug smuggler through subsequent interrogations, but he embraces the role and even states “Is ok, I understand. Drugs are bad. Not good for kids. You do great work here still”. Through these repeated interactions, we get to know Costava better, and during my playthoughs I eventually gave him a break once I realized that he would always repeatedly come back. Eventually, he offers up his Obristan passport to the inspector and provides a way for the inspector to leave the country and escape to Obristan. Throughout all the interactions with Costava, we see that he is generally very kind and honest to the inspector despite the inspector’s actions against him. However, what causes him to be so honest to the inspector? Perhaps it is a luxury that he has because he can easily escape the troubles of the common entrant by easily coming back to the booth and escaping detainment multiple times through bribery. Or perhaps it is he just wants to help the inspector because he sees the inspector as a friend. Regardless, his unconditional honesty affected my treatment of him eventually as I would relax some rules for him despite the immorality of allowing a drug smuggler through the border.

Lastly, it is of interest to note that Costava’s honesty makes the inspector seriously consider that perhaps Arstotzka is too getting out of hand, and that an escape was possible. If any other ephemeral entrant told me that an escape was available, I would be skeptical in believing him or her due to entrant’s lack of backstory and questions of the entrant’s credibility. I would believe that if I followed the ephemeral entrant’s instructions I might be set up and caught by the government and then punished. Ultimately, the concept of the honesty of the entrants and the characters in the game affects the player’s moral judgement and awareness of the player’s job and environment.