Beating the Backlog: Papers, Please

Papers, Please pulls off a neat little trick: Sympathy for the bureaucrat. Why is your desk always slightly too small? Why is your boss being such a dick about the photos on your wall? Why do these stupid, stupid, people in line keep flinging these useless bits of paper onto your tiny desk? Why are their excuses when they can't follow the Rules precisely so weak and lame?

Reject. Accept. Reject. Reject.

The game crunches you hard enough that the cruel dictates of your higher-ups begin to feel like a lifeline. Oh, everyone from this country is to be rejected today for... reasons? Great! Each person you move through the line gets you a much needed $5, and it's much faster to send them packing for the front of their passport than it is to meticulously play 'spot the difference' on their forms and documents.

The pressures of your family, including Niece, Uncle, and Mother-In-Law are such that it slightly undercuts the messaging of the game. You get two free passes per day that you can use to wave through a particularly sympathetic visitor or reject a probable scumbag who has nonetheless crossed all his t's and dotted his i's. But you really can't afford to take leeway once the penalties start rolling in or your family start dropping like flies. "Look what the game has turned you into," it seems to want to ask, without really giving you another option at least not at the rates I was putting visitors through my checkpoint. It was a struggle some days to just to keep the rent paid, much less do a stranger a kindness.

But then, life sometimes doesn't give you another option either. As I slipped from town, sans family, ahead of an audit from a security official sure to discover my dealings with the local revolutionary terrorist outfit, I arrived at another border checkpoint. Hoping the agent reading my documents was more lenient than I was, that all my documents were in order on his tiny desk, that his boss hadn't inadvertently given him cause to reject me that morning. He let me through.