Wow, cannot believe that out of my huge wall of text two people only took away that I didn't enjoy (not disliked - and actually found brilliant) Papers, Please. I don't think it's about my problems with suspension of disbelief. For the first few playthroughs I was completely into it. But then you repeat the first chapters over and over, just making different choices - how can you remain "suspended in disbelief" if you're literally doing Groundhog Day type gameplay?
Ok, first: the only reason I'm ignoring the discussion of the merits of Obra Din is because I have not played it myself yet, so I'm avoiding spoilers until then.
And my response was also not trying to tell you that you were wrong to dislike the game experience. I was trying to point out that this experience follows from one's own expectations almost as much as what a game offers to meet those expectations. Those expectations come from somewhere. They are not set in stone, to some degree one can even
choose them if one is aware of them. In academia we call them "interpretive frames" - literally the mental framework within which we interpret things.
A sentences like
"I simply dislike games with multiple endings, unexpected failure states and especially ones that require multiple replays (in single-player!) to get the full experience" misses an explanation for why those qualities are disliked. It is just assumed we all agree on what a "full experience" is and that it matters. Similarly, you state that you evaluate games on two levels: your subjective experience, and the objective experience. That's great, but you forget to define what this "objective" experience is and what makes it objective.
Basically, you seem halfway between stage two and three of Parson's Model of Aesthetic Interpretation. It only takes a little bit of effort to reach stage three/four at this point
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtp-pkkDjK6HCh1p-Up34BIdSuKe9piBM"Oh boy," some of you will think at this point,
"it's that guy again. He did this in the Papers Please topic a few years back too, you know? And in some other places." Yes I did, and I still think Papers Please is one of the best, most accessible examples for teaching people how to be more aware of their own aesthetic judgement in games.
And I
care about it because as long as one is blind to their own interpretive frames, they are bound to them. Becoming aware is
liberating. It gives the freedom to step back, evaluate and choose to change those expectations, to enjoy and appreciate games more fully than before.
I enjoyed the heck out of the Papers, Please! demo - I read quickly and never had a problem making ends meet - and bought the game pretty soon after release. However, I knew there would be difficult decisions to make and multiple endings, so I was paralyzed by the thought of having to deal with "screwing it up" and possibly missing a chunk of content if I didn't resort to a walkthrough; all this before even playing. To this day I've not been able to bring myself to play the full version.
Yeah, this "analysis paralysis" and feeling as if you're forced to play the game is what I felt too and feel in the case of similar games. I would call it "narrative grinding" - you don't have to kill dozens of goblins to level up but you need a dozen playthroughs with all kinds of tough decisions to experience the whole extent of what the game offers.
Let's take a moment to realize that a computer game
actually lets us replay the same situation over and see what changes, unlike real-life. Isn't it strange that
this of all situations gives you choice paralysis? We face countless of choices in real life that we never get to make again, because
"you cannot step twice into the same rivers". Some people get choice paralysis from that, and of course
some real-world choices are very difficult because of this, but most people get by most of the time. So what is different?
Part of what makes a game a game and not work is that we
choose to spend time on it instead of on something else. If one feels "forced to play the game" on repeated play-throughs, slogging through Groundhog Day frustrations to complete it, what does mean?
Objectively, nobody was ever forced to play Papers Please (game reviewers excepted, and former design students I taught - muhahaha).
It not be taken consciously, but it is a choice. What leads us to that choice?
One option is wanting to find out the "best" ending. Games tend to have this problem that people think there must be a better or worse way to play it, and that you will be rewarded for playing it better.
Papers Please does not escape from this: there are obviously win and lose conditions, with different "better" and "worse" endings. However, in most games moral choices often boil down to being rewarded for doing the right thing, or becoming good enough to compensate for the cost of doing so. It becomes fun again because it is
working for towards an achievement (notice a trend here?).
Did you spend time on asking people if they forgot that one form or just send them away?
Papers Please requires mastering the game part to make enough money to make ends meet, yes. But one is always just scraping by, and as soon as one is comfortable with the situation one day, the next day pulls the rug from underneath us by changing the rules. This adds a constant sense of dread of what tomorrow will bring (or relief, when a rule is dropped). Few games truly require weighing moral choices to economic ones like this.
That is why I personally consider my first playthrough is the only playthrough the only "true" experience of the game: when you do not if tomorrow will get harder to get by, when you might be fined for something unexpected with every choice you make, it becomes impossible to reason about whether you are good enough at this game to afford to do what feels like the right thing. The uncertainty about that was an essential part of the experience, greatly affecting the choices made.
Is that frustrating? Yes,
but that is life under a tyrannical regime.
Even if you become so fluent that you are economically stable, does each choice have an objectively best one? No! Pros and cons of each choice may be nontransitive.
Que? Well, if you have time you can read this:
"What’s the best option? It seems only logical: if A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is better than C. Right? Not necessarily"... but my TL;DR is that 1) there is no best choice in rock-paper-scissors, and 2) that there are moral choices are pretty much equivalent to rock-paper-scissors: there is no best option.
This too sucks,
and this too is life.
So what do we have left when there is no objectively best choice to make? No clear prediction of what will happen? When faced with uncertainty and fear of what new complications that we could not prepare for will come tomorrow? In that case, we are thrown back to
a moral decision. Which choice you make in
that situation tells you something about yourself. Which can make it really, really hard to choose anything at all!
This is a much more complex experience than most games offer. There is a reason Papers Please caught the interest of people who normally don't think of games as significant or interesting. In discussions of this game I have read stories of people just following all the rules with a "not my problem" attitude, then at the end waking up to what kind of monster they had become. Or of people who took it too far in the other direction, sacrificing the well-being of their own family for others so much that they had an extremely hard time not perishing (note: it is
not a coincidence that your family is never seen. Dukope knew what he was doing: making them faceless reduces natural feelings of allegiance to family to that of helping strangers in need, to balance the two).
So one explanation is wanting to find the best choice, the best ending. But this is a game that is all about having to reflect and decide for
oneself what the best choice is. Feeling like you made the wrong choice and going back to replay it is one thing, but replaying the game to determine the "best" choice misses the point.
Another possible explanation for why a game gives choice paralysis where normal life does not, is that a game is finite. Unlike real life we can "complete" all of it. That can make us feel like we have to, like how we feel we have to finish a meal to not waste food - especially if we're dining at an expensive restaurant. But does it really make sense to approach games the same way?
Is it really important to experience all content? Is it worth the cost? Your choice! Let's say it is. Even then: is the "right" way to do experience all that content always playing the game ourselves? We can also look them up on the internet. Doing so clearly leaves people unsatisfied, or we would not feel obliged to play the game ourselves, right? So what is different? Well, in general: the fundamental difference between games and (most) other media is that games are
interactive. It's so obvious we often take it for granted and think
we have to be the ones doing the interacting. That is just an assumption though - people watch sports too.
What might be missed by not interacting with the game yourself? A feeling of achievement, "earning" it through "work", in a way. Achieving something can feel good, that's true! But is every achievement equally important? It's not, right?
I can only speak for myself, but as explained, for me Papers Please was more about deciding what I consider the right choice. Going through "the full experience" of trying each moral choice is missing the point. Sure, I wanted to
know the rest of the content afterwards, but "knowing" and "achieving" are two different things. So I don't miss a sense of achievement by looking things up on the internet instead, because it would not feel like an achievement to do the opposite of the moral choice I made before.
In conclusion, let's go back to the expectations I am deconstructing:
1. wanting to know what the "best" choice is
2. wanting to do so through playing, giving a sense of achievement
3. wanting to experience every bit of content
My claim is that for Papers Please,
it could not be changed to meet those expectations without ceasing to be what makes it Papers Please. It is a game where choices reflect on matters most to you, where that is almost more important than the experience that follows from them. Part of that is how in this game, like in real life, the best choice can be a fuzzy balancing act.
Having objectively best choices, knowing what the consequences will be, and wanting to experience all content by trying out each possible choice, all of that would undermine this. It removes the personal reflection, and reduces the choices to knowing what will happen tomorrow if one choice is made and trying what happens if the other option is chosen. That removes aspect that feels like living with constant uncertainty under a tyrannical regime. Because the game is fully knowable, we overlook that the world, the experience it is trying to emulate, is not.
And yes, I
did just use 12000+ characters just to argue that it all boils down to letting go of your own expectations.
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