Experiencing a Life
As I settled into my seat for a nine-hour flight, I realized I hadn’t bought any books.
I had just made it through a beloved fantasy classic that had been taking up my time, and now I needed something new. With only a few minutes to spare, I purchased a few books that caught my eye, and departed. One of those books, Simon Parkin’s ‘Death By Video Game’, was incredible.
I have written about video games and my love/hate relationship with the medium time and time again. I also wrote about how ‘Extra Lives’ was one of my favorite books of the year.
I write about this topic not only because video games have a nostalgia factor for me, but because I believe that interactive mediums are our future. Parkin’s book makes this clear, and there’s a single passage that I think does this so phenomenally that I can’t help but share it in full.
Here it is:
The man approaches the booth, his face a scrawl of worry lines, his eyes determined. He slides papers across the desk.
‘What is the purpose of your trip?’ I ask.
‘Today is a beautiful day, my friend,’ he replies, ignoring the question with the amiable defiance of the octogenarian.
He and his wife have, he explains, fled the tyranny of their home country, Antegria. They have come to seek asylum, here in Arstotzka.
His story is affecting, but largely irrelevant. In Papers, Please, a video game set in a fictional (yet historically realistic) 1980s-era Eastern European communist country, would-be immigrants are assaulting the border. Many are just as deserving of refuge as this man and his bent-backed wife, who shifts her weight between her feet as she waits in line behind her husband.
My job as the immigration inspector at the Grestin Border Checkpoint is not to weigh the truth or worth of these stories. Rather, it is to check that each person’s papers are in order and, ideally, to find them lacking and deny entry. It pays to make snap decisions: the more people I process in a day, the more money I take home to my family.
But the bureaucracy is chaotic: every day a fresh set of rules and checks is sent from the capital, new knots in the red tape designed to make access that much harder for the asylum seekers at the gates.
Mistakes are costly: my pay is docked for each person I let through in error. My wages do not cover the food, heating, and medicine I need to feed, clothe, and heal my family, so the more mistakes that are made, the starker my choices become. When there’s a limited amount of money in the pot, you must decide which loved ones to care for. Who will spend today with pangs of sickness or hunger?
The man’s papers are in order.
But as I stamp them, he looks anything but relieved. ‘Please be kind to my wife,’ he says, shuffling off across no man’s land with its mad dogs and swivelling searchlights. ‘She is just after me.’
Moments later she approaches the window, slow with age and anxiety.
‘Did you see my husband?’ she asks. ‘He made it through, yes?’
Her passport seems in order, but when I ask to see her entry permit her face blanches.
‘They would not give me permit,’ she says. ‘I have no choice. I will be killed if I return to Antegria. Please, I beg you.’
The difficult decisions have come earlier than usual today. My choice is plain: save the bureaucracy or save the marriage and, possibly, the life.
Our world is built upon invisible rules and systems.
The natural laws govern when the sun rises and falls. They specify the tug of gravity, the timing of the seasons, the gestation of a pregnancy, the direction in which rivers flow, the way flowers are pollinated, the need for water and for love.
Then there are the human-made laws and systems. They govern our behaviour, determining the side of the road on which all cars must drive and the speed limit that drivers must adhere to. There are systems in place for when these rules are broken. There are rules that set the time at which street lights flicker to life and that dictate whether or not a person is allowed to pass from one country to the next. They specify who is allowed healthcare, how many items we are allowed in our basket at the supermarket checkout, and the amount of money and support that our state offers those in need.
There is a difference between reading about the way things work and experiencing them for ourselves — and this is what video games offer us. It’s an exposure to systems that need to be interacted with to be fully understood. It’s the ability to enter into the life of someone else.
Sadly, almost every experience and interaction that video games have offered us to date center around the experience of war for war’s sake. Instead of allowing us to see something which might make us better, we see violence. It’s a shame, because it doesn’t have to be this way — and indeed, it isn’t always.
Parkin uses the example of ‘Cart Life’ as a game which uses the medium to show us what it’s like to be a food vendor and immigrant in the United States. As he continues:
Just as you feel something of a chemical cocktail of fear and excitement as you breach the back door of a terrorist hideout in Call of Duty, so Cart Life elicits honest empathy with its protagonists through its systems. As you experience something of their lives, you begin to feel the pain of systemic unfairness and economic failure firsthand. The pain of inequality is theirs, but as you assume their roles, it’s also somehow yours — at least until the video game is switched off and the unreality pricked. The sense of injustice when Andrus is evicted from his motel room for keeping a cat, his only friend and companion, is devastating. So too is the elderly woman’s plain statement back at the Arstotzka checkpoint in Papers, Please as you turn her away for being unable to produce the necessary permit. ‘You have doomed me,’ she says, as she walks away, unable to join her husband.
If you find yourself looking for these experiences, or believe the future is centered around them like I do, give this book a read.
