How Teenagers Are Rediscovering An Old Game About Authoritarianism

‘Papers, Please’ came out in 2013, but middle-schoolers are still stumbling upon its grim, fascinating lessons

I remember back in the ’80s, when a high-school friend suggested I read George Orwell’s 1984.

“It’s really wild,” he told me. “It makes you feel like crap.”

The book wasn’t on our school’s reading list. It had been written four decades earlier, just after World War II. But once I read it, it permanently altered my understanding of politics, particularly the way people responded to despotism — and decades later, at 50, it still shapes the way I read the news.

I thought about this last month, when my 13-year-old son Zev told me — on the advice of a friend from middle school — he’d started playing the video game Papers, Please.

“This game,” he said, grimly amazed. “It makes you do terrible things.” He was having a similar reaction — and coming to similar moral conclusions — as I did back years ago with 1984.

If you haven’t played Papers, Please, you really should. It’s a fascinating, low-fi indie game released in 2013 by Lucas Pope. In the game, you play as a border inspector in the fictional country Arstotzka, where civil…