In what was likely a mistake, I read Cory Johnson’s article, “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers, Please”, prior to playing Papers, Please for the first time. The article, which specifically describes a potential moral dilemma on day 4 (I think) where a woman without proper documentation wants to enter Arstotzka to see her son, prepared me for a game that would be challenging on both an external and an internal level. I prepared myself for that moment on day 4, constantly flipping back and forth on whether or not I would let the woman enter the country, yet when the moment finally arrived I found it to be incredibly anticlimactic. I was so focused on sifting through her documents as quickly as possible that I did not even realize that this was the woman referred to in Johnson’s article until I had already stamped “Deny” on her passport. I sat for a brief moment before I returned her freshly stamped passport to consider what had just transpired. What was supposed to be a huge moral of internal conflict, according to Johnson, failed to live up to those expectations. Though this may reveal certain things about my character, I had no problem denying her and calling up the next person.
When I decided to take a break from making days and breaking hearts I again decided to reflect on my actions as an Artotzkan inspector. It was at this moment that I realized that my choice to refuse entry to the woman (probably) had nothing to do with my character—it was all (probably) a product of both the game’s design and how I was playing the game. From the outset, Papers, Please makes it clear that taking care of your family is a primary objective. To do this, one must process as many potential entrants as possible—this caused me to play fast. When playing fast, I hardly even looked at the conversations which transpired between the NPCs and me. This made it harder to empathize with any sap story I may have been given, while also making me more efficient at my job. Even if I had chosen to slow down and actually read the conversations, the game does not seem to give one much incentive to do so. Word bubbles appear and disappear quickly, the “language” is a harsh, unintelligible babble that sounds like it’s trying to imitate some Eastern European language, and the design just is not pleasant to look at. These design decisions made it difficult for me to even want to put in the effort to empathize with NPCs, and by the time I finished the game I felt a little unsatisfied. Where was the internal conflict promised? I know that my experience will not be shared by everyone, but did anyone else feel that the design of the game made it difficult to feel internally/morally challenged?
DIGITAL STORYTELLING 
In my playthroughs, I also felt like the mechanisms of the game made it difficult for me to emphasize with many entrants coming through the border, and I would rush through the entrants to try to make enough money to provide for my family. However, it is interesting that you view that taking care of your family as the primary purpose of the game. In my playthrough, I found that the moral dichotomy of the non-interactive family and the interactive entrants unnerving, and at certain points, while I do try my best to provide for my family, but their general lack of response irks me. When I cannot pay for food or heating, sometimes it bugs me on why the other family members cannot help contribute to paying the bills, and why I am forced to be the sole supporter of this unknown family. With the entrants, for most of them I felt little or no connection as I sped through their passports, but with the characters with repeated interactions, such as with Jorji Costava and Sergiu, I felt like I knew these characters better than my own family. I was willing to sacrifice some money, and possibly the day’s heating, to further Sergiu’s story with Elisa. Ultimately, I feel the internal conflict is fundamentally there and already determined – we chose to speed through the entrants in order to maximize our income and provide for our family because that is most consistent with our personal moral compass. This also led us to aid some entrants once we develop a relationship with these entrants.
I think that the game’s design does a really effective job of evoking the lack of internal feeling and empathy that accompanies actually working a real life desk job. As I’m writing this I’m sitting at my campus library job. Over the course of this four hour shift a bunch of people have come up to me in varying states of annoyance and panic, demanding/asking that I assist them in tracking down a book that they were unable to find. After several hours on the job, my attitude towards these patrons always gradually shifts from empathetically wanting to help to just trying to say the group of words that will get them out of my face in the least amount of time possible. Monotony makes it really difficult to find the strength to empathize. How this effects its status as a game that is meant to be enjoyed is up for debate, but I’ve found that Papers, Please effectively simulates this inverse relationship between boredom and empathy.
I find this monotony vs empathy dynamic to be quite revealing, although I admit it wasn’t reflective of my own experience with Papers, Please. As Gus said, anyone who has worked a desk job has experienced the drain on patience and human communication they can cause. Although this wasn’t quite my experience with Papers, Please, because it is actually kind of a fast game. In a boring desk job, there’s usually too much time to think, because the action is so repetitive. But this game was so condensed from a time perspective, there wasn’t enough time to think. Not to mention the fact that I could play it for as long or as short as I wanted. That being said, I think the effect is largely the same, in that my empathy towards the refugees did degrade as I was playing. I think this was because I was so intent on getting through them fast that I was more focused on looking for flaws in their passports or whatever than actually weighing their troubles.