
Papers, Please: The 'boring' game that became a smash hit - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26527109
======
NamTaf
As the article is more about the developer and his story rather than the game
itself, the premise of the game isn't quite captured in the article.

Specifically, the tension comes from the fact that you are in some fictional
former soviet state, which just opened up a border security crossing again.
You've been posted to man it, and now live with your family in a government
housing estate. You have a finite amount of time to process people through the
security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get
through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and
more convoluted as the game goes on).

At the end of each day, your income and expenses (for rent, food, electricity,
medicine for your son/wife/elderly parents as needed) are shown. The tension
comes from rushing to process enough people to ensure you don't have to go
without food, or turn off electricity, or not medicate your family. However,
if you make too many mistakes by rushing, you get fined too much and you don't
get to care for your family.

It's really far more gripping than you'd expect because the whole art style,
audio and interactions (both between days via a daily newspaper, and with the
people as they enter through your booth/events that unfold during that) really
help paint a picture of a desolate former soviet wasteland of poverty and
misery. Couple that with the distilled essence of 'putting food on the table
for your family so they don't starve' being the motivating factor, and it can
be quite high-tension to try to not have your family inevitably starve and
freeze to death with crippling illness.

For $5 (if you grab it during a steam sale), it's worth the experience for
sure. I'd have been happy paying the standard $10 for the unique experience it
offers.

~~~
thaumasiotes
When I heard the premise, I was kind of disoriented, and the way you've
described it maintains that feeling. If you're border control for a
desperately impoverished former soviet state, who are all these people who
want to _immigrate_?

~~~
sesqu
The game explains that the other bordering country is even more impoverished.
There are also transit passengers, returning citizens, and temporary workers.

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dangero
It seems likely that a lot of people bought it, like I did, for a novel
experience regardless of whether or not the experience is actually fun.

We're living in quite the renaissance of game exploration. I wonder if the
indie game genre will continue to flourish or if this is a temporary moment of
history. Regardless it is probably as strong as it has ever been right now.

Gone Home is another recent and interesting "game" to check out:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/)

~~~
pekk
Since you just linked an indie game on Steam, you probably have to acknowledge
that Greenlight is a significant contribution to this renaissance.

Some people might not like to hear this, because Steam is a DRM platform. But
if the Pirate Bay had a similar ability to promote the development and sale of
indie games, it would have happened already.

~~~
dangero
I'm not sure I would refer to Steam as a DRM platform. Steam application
deployment does have apis built in for DRM, but they are not required for
release by Valve. It's up to the developer to decide if they want to DRM lock
their game using the provided tools.

~~~
malka
steam by itself is a DRM. It controls that you are authorized to launch the
game, etc. However, I find this kind of DRM acceptable, since it does get in
the way of the legit buyer extremely rarely.

~~~
aninhumer
>It controls that you are authorized to launch the game

Steam provides an infrastructure and API to perform this check, but the
developers decide whether to use it. There are many games on Steam which don't
use this DRM, and can be launched directly from their install directories even
if Steam isn't running.

~~~
StavrosK
I was about to agree that Steam is DRM, but your comment reminded me of the
time I bought a game (Dungeons of Dredmor?) that had a Linux port but which
wasn't on Steam. I contacted the developers about getting the Linux port and
they said "oh, it's in your Windows Steam game directory, just launch the
executable for Linux", and it did, indeed, work fine.

That said, Steam is still not as un-DRMed as GOG, which provides a pretty
installer you can copy and back up and do whatever you want with, but it's
pretty good.

------
danso
I love this game, though I haven't completed it for all of the endings. I love
the idea and the design, that is...first of all, Lucas Pope is the developer I
aspire to be...able to singlehandedly dream up a concept and execute it, _and_
be totally personable on Twitter to the mass of fans he deservedly generated.

I fell in love with the game ever since I saw the YouTube trailer and read
some of his game dev diaries...It's hard to think of a modern game that has
such limitations -- the color palette, the clunkiness of the interface, the
unforgivingness of the scoring system -- for such artistic intent.

But what I think is particularly noteworthy and inspiring was how Pope didn't
make the game as a political statement. He (from what I remember in his early
podcasts) thought about the idea while waiting in customs, and wondered if a
game could be made of the drudgery of this work. His commitment to making a
game that excelled _as a game_ resulted in a game that was actually _fun_ ,
while being an artistic achievement and politically engaging, for sympathizers
of both the state and the refugee.

(As counter-examples, I think "Cart Life" is also an amazing achievement in
art, but not a very good game because of unintentional bugs. Also, most
artistic games in which you mostly just walk around until the game ends).

David Simon, who created "The Wire", complains quite bitterly that his intent
was to make a show that raged against institution and bureaucracies, and yet
people only talked about Omar and all of his other characters...Simon did such
a great job of plot and characterization that it overshadowed his political
aims. I kind of see "Papers, Please" as the opposite of that...Pope just
wanted to make a great game, and he did such a great job of it that it turned
out to have a compelling political message.

Anyway, it has my vote for being included in the MoMA's video game collection.
And it's inspired me to go back into games programming, at least as a hobby.

~~~
kderbe
Lucas Pope kept a Papers, Please development journal from start-to-finish:
[http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.0](http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.0)
It was fascinating for me to read because:

1\. The art and design are almost unchanged from the original Photoshop mock.

2\. Pope is wonderfully gracious to the other indie developers who give
initial feedback.

3\. He engages really well with the influx of new people that appear whenever
his (at the time) beta game gets featured on a gaming news site. He has a
knack for knowing which suggestions to consider, and explains to fans why the
others won't work with the game. It demonstrates a level of maturity, both in
personality and in craft, that few other game developers seem to have.

4\. In the post-release update, he details the internal tools he built to
manage the game's development, especially its day-to-day plot.

~~~
nekopa
Hey, I want the last three hours of my life back, and that's from just reading
the dev journal!

You are correct in his way of dealing with people, really suggests a level of
maturity, confidence and open mindedness about him. I like the way that he
seems to seriously consider people's ideas, and is not afraid to incorporate
me wines into his game. The fingerprinting for example.

------
hibikir
The indie market is quite open to games that really come out of left field,
instead of following the same 5 genres indies always go back to, if just
because they are easy and well understood.

Lucas had made a couple of nice mini-games before that showing how relatively
unconventional gameplay can be quite fun if attached to a good premise. The
Republia Times is pretty much the same emotional concept but with different
gameplay.

A big part of the game being a hit IMO was the beta was just out there for
download, and it was a very polished first third of the game. A few large
blogs picked it up, and at that point, if the game is any good, it'll just
sell a whole lot. The demand was so big that Steam approved it for Greenlight
out of schedule: It was greenlit after just a week or two on the process.

Either way, It's a game that is very easy to recommend.

------
Quaro
>You know when you play a first-person shooter that claims to be about “how
far you’re willing to go to protect the ones you love,” or “the true cost of a
life,” or “moral ambiguity,” but the gameplay actually consists of shooting
hundreds of dudes in the face? And you know how in the back of your mind, you
wonder, “I wonder what it’d be like if a game actually designed its gameplay
around those concepts rather than just duct-taping them on through
noninteractive story?”

>Papers, Please is that game. It manages to ask (and importantly, not answer)
questions of duty, safety, privacy, family, self-interest, and morality
through an incredibly simple, focused set of mechanics based around checking
transit papers and stamping passports.

[http://www.heyash.com/why-i-like-papers-please/](http://www.heyash.com/why-i-
like-papers-please/)

------
corin_
Since the article mentions the BAFTA Games Awards a few times: Papers, Please
didn't win best game, which was to be expected (though his former employer's
_The Last Of Us_ did win that and 4 other awards), however it did win for best
strategy/simulation, which was a surprise win (not easy for an indie game to
take a bafta). It seemed quite popular at the event, had a few people cheering
every time it was mentioned.

------
rumcajz
Bureaucracy by Douglas Adams deserves to be mentioned in this context:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_\(video_game\))

------
_pmf_
I bought it because I thought there's no way this could be fun, but it turned
out not only to be fun (in a depressing way), but also to feature a really
great emergent story line, which immediately puts it above 80% of other games.

------
hwang89
Papers' site: [http://papersplea.se/](http://papersplea.se/)

------
mercurial
Now we just need a game simulating an analyst in a large SIGINT agency of a
fictional superpower. Can you gather enough metadata in a day to feed your
family?

~~~
Cthulhu_
I would not be surprised at all if this was already in the making. With that
in mind, I'm surprised there hasn't been a ton of clones for Papers, Please
yet - like how Minecraft and Terraria clones are all over nowadays.

Also, instead of feeding your family, the object of the game should be to keep
your EFF-friendly colleague from going rogue, :p

------
pgl
And they won! Best Strategy and Simulation in 2014.

------
b0b0b0b
The article doesn't offer much on _how_ it became a hit.

I learned about Papers Please from nerdcubed on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV-6YSye2Vo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV-6YSye2Vo)

I bet he hasn't spent anything on, say, a google ad campaign.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I think it became a hit as a natural consequence of being so good. He had to
do almost no work on promotion, iirc. But I think he was a fairly popular
gamedev (or at least not-unknown) before he made Papers, Please.

One thing to realize is that game reviewers like Yahtzee and especially
TotalBiscuit always have their eyes open for new games that have new gameplay.
That is, games with game mechanics that have never been thought of before. So
if anyone here happens to make one, and it's fun, then you'll probably be able
to get picked up by TB. And since he has >1M YouTube subscribers, that's quite
a lot of publicity.

(Papers, Please was picked up by TB. It's how I heard of it.)

~~~
leoc
> I think it became a hit as a natural consequence of being so good. He had to
> do almost no work on promotion, iirc. But I think he was a fairly popular
> gamedev (or at least not-unknown) before he made Papers, Please.

Looking at it a little cynically for the moment ... in the old days, the main
bottleneck that prevented everyone from having their own commercial computer
game was money and juice with publishers, while the second-place bottleneck
was juice with console manufacturers. Now those factors are much less
restricting than before, so everyone has their own indie game. ;) But that
means there are many, many more games than the maximum number that can ever
achieve significant sales and attention. So the new bottleneck is public
attention, and the new king gatekeepers are the gaming media (including Penny
Arcade, Let's Players like Totalbiscuit and so on), who can direct the
public's attention to your game. So which players are ahead in the new game?
Guys with gaming-media juice, either through having gaming-industry
recognition or being ex-journalists themselves. Step forward Tom Francis (PC
Gamer -> Gunpoint), Jim Rossignol (Rock, Paper, Shotgun -> Sir, You Are Being
Hunted) and Lucas Pope (Naughty Dog -> Papers, Please). Now that _is_ a little
too cynical, because the new game does seem to be significantly fairer to
people who simply make (or would be able to make given funding etc.) a game
good enough to deserve attention, and certainly Gunpoint and Papers, Please
are notably good games (I haven't played Sir yet). (I should also emphasise
that I'm not any kind of expert here, I'm just looking at the situation from
the outside.) But I think there's likely some truth to it.

------
xg15
A good review of the game from a few months ago:
[http://scientificgamer.com/thoughts-papers-
please/](http://scientificgamer.com/thoughts-papers-please/)

------
psionski
The guy in the second screenshot does not correspond to his picture in the
passport... in fact, I think that's a spy.

