The idea of video games making you work to accomplish something is not a new one by any stretch. From RPGs forcing you to level grind, to platform or racing games making you replay an entire level due to one mistake, games have always put us to work to at least some extent. Lately though, things have changed.
The cult hit Papers, Please is an especially prevalent example of this. Released in 2013, Papers, Please casts the player as a border guard for the fictional country of Arztozka, a thinly veiled reference to the 80’s Communist regime. You spend each of your 1-32 in-game days doing the unpleasant work of examining passports, poring over documents, and generally harassing your fellow countrymen and the various immigrants seeking a better life in your homeland.
What makes this experience especially subversive is how the honest and expert portrayal of this particular occupation are carefully examined and dissected. Will you let in an attractive woman who offers herself to you? What about a sad old man with a sob story? A friendly and charismatic loafer? What about someone with proper documentation who makes a jab at your family or your person?
In Papers, Please you are meant to be a worker, and only a worker. Showing emotion, making judgments of the heart, or even lacking a certain attention to detail can literally have drastic consequences, up to and including your own imprisonment or the death of your family. By paying you only for successful, and accurate work and running a clock in the background, Papers, Please makes you choose between your conscience and your own best interests, a theme that most of us with a few years in the work force are well familiar with.
In fact, if you play well, then the game goes further still. By the end of your month in the bloc, the rules have changed so many times and so dramatically that even you, the player, have a hard time keeping up with them. Conversely, to do your job properly you must turn away anyone with erroneous or improper documents–the subversiveness of which is undeniably effective. After all, if you, the worker, can’t even keep track of the rules, how can an ordinary citizen, or an immigrant for that matter, possibly make sense of this system.
Five Nights at Freddy’s takes a different approach. By employing you as the night watchmen at a Chuck E. Cheese like establishment, Five Nights at Freddy’s puts you in the unfavorable position of accepting a job that is a lot more responsibility (and a lot less pay) than you ever bargained for. When the animatronic creations of the restaurant/arcade begin to come to life, it’s up to you to hold the fort for the night.
It’s a thankless and dangerous job but the only alternative (for the player as well as the protagonist) is to quit. As a parallel for our own employment this is truly a masterstroke of genius. Would you rather quit and see what else you could do instead, or would you prefer to persevere through the stress and see what the future holds? Who among us has never been faced with a similar dilemma at our own place of employment?
To say that this concept is old hat is obvious, but rarely have games captured the struggle and hopelessness of adult employment so accurately as these titles have. Examples from the past like the Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Sim City series’ have been putting us to work for years but in those games it was always “just for fun”. Certainly you never felt guilty for doing your job, and you were never conflicted by the choice to quit or stay on another night.
In an interesting and surprising reversal of the status quo, many games are now growing further successful by making gamers pay for the privilege of doing tedious, dangerous, or deliberately unpleasant jobs. For example, the fact that I’ve spent many years working in various levels of the construction industry will not allow me to halt even one inch of the growing population currently playing the best-selling Construction Simulator on Steam. Ironically, one of the reasons I play games in the first place is to escape from the stress and physical exertion of my own daily “construction simulator”.
Live and let live though, or work and let work as the case may be. It’s just too bad–I for one would gladly let someone pay me for the simple joy of doing my job.