I think Papers Please is one of the most interesting game to watch letsplays of, because WOW the way people react to this game is telling.

like besides the pseudo-nationalism a lot of people seem to think is totally fine, every time someone shows up and is like "hey my wife is behind me, please make sure you let her in" half the time letsplayers are like "WELL SURE IF HER PAPERS ARE IN ORDER"

like they don't recognize that this is a game with "rules" and with rules.
All video games have rules: you can't fly in Super Mario Bros 1, for example. You can't scroll the screen left.

but Papers please is a game which has a lot of "rules".
They're "rules" given to the character you're playing, not rules on the player. You can break them.

like if someone is like "I have to get in or I will be killed", you can let them in. You have the ability to do that.
It's not like the game takes away your Approve stamp because they're not allowed to be let in.

It's a thing you can do. You will get a citation, and if you get enough citations you'll be fined, and that could be bad for your character and your character's family, since you may not have enough money to pay for heat and food and medicine

but you can do it. It's up to YOU, the player. The rules given to your character are not binding rules on what can and can't be done. They're rules in the same way laws are in the real world: you can break them. There may be negative consequences for you, but you CAN.

and it's very interesting to see how many players don't seem to recognize that the game is making that distinction, and how they come to realize it over time, if they do.

It's a game somewhat in the genre of games like There Is No Game and Portal and such, where part of the point is that you're given instructions and you have to disobey them to progress.

but only somewhat because there's nothing that says you have to disobey them.
You can play the game by following all the rules like a good loyal citizen of Arstotzka.

and it's interesting to see how players react to the fact that game never comes out and says like "Arstotzka is bad and you should rebel against it"

and therefore it's a choice up to players, but at the same time it's not signposted like traditional game choices so it seems some players don't even realize that's a choice the game is asking them to make.

it's also a choice that I think the game is pushing you to make but at the same time a lot of players have basically trained themselves to see differently.

like the game repeatedly does things to show you that living in Arstotzka in this situation sucks. You need to get people through quickly, they add more and more things for you to check, and penalize you when you mess up.

You only have so long to process people, and... the day gets cut short by a terrorist attack. The secret police show up and suspect you of working with the rebels, even if you don't. Your relatives need your help, adding more mouths to feed.

the rebels give you money to convince them to help you... and your neighbors report you to the police, and all your savings (even ones not from the rebels!) are confiscated.

the game keeps pushing you to make it harder and harder to be a good citizen and to make you realize that this is a bad situation...

and I think some letsplayers are too trained on dark souls and five nights at freddies that they take that as just the game having a difficulty curve and are like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

and I mean, yeah, it's a valid way to play the game, sure.
There's an ending you can get that way. I think it's missing the point and I don't think it's the right choice to make, but you can certainly choose it.

it just seems from these letsplays that sometimes they're not choosing it at all. They're going that way because they think that's how they're supposed to go, because they're blindly following the rules the game gave them.

which is very interesting and slightly terrifying when you combine it with how some players get into HOPEFULLY 100% JOKING national pride in Arstotzka.

I'm not saying letsplayers are failing a fascism test but seeing them blindly following the rules of a virtual nation that is abusing them and then turning around and going GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA! is worrying.

I was gonna make a joke about how some people wouldn't recognize fascism unless it was literally wearing nazi uniforms but then I remember Star Wars did exactly that, called their soldiers "Storm Troopers", AND visually referenced Triumph of the Will.

and STILL SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T GET IT

the next Star Wars film is going to open with a big red arrow pointing at the imperials and say THESE ARE NAZIS and people will still go "I don't know, the guys who committed genocide 30 minutes into the first movie might still have some good points actually"

correction:
The "some good points" guys in the spiffy Hugo Boss uniforms don't kill a couple billion civilians until 56 minutes and 40 seconds into the first movie.

The sequel trilogy is slightly slower, with the Space Fascists waiting until 1h11m to start killing people by the billions, but they had to have their leader give an angry speech to the stormtroopers in front a giant flag, to a one-armed salute, which took some time.

Anyone my point here wasn't that "oh no some people choose to play as The Bad Guys and I think that means they, the players, are Secret Nazis and we should shoot them in real life".

Obviously.

My point is more that it's very interesting how many players don't seem to think they're being given a choice at all, they just see the game give them rules and go "I guess I have to follow these rules to play the game."

And there's definitely reasons players would do that other than "they just follow orders given to them by authoritarian leaders"

a lot of why I think they do that is because games, in general, train you to assume that the game will be truthful about what rules you have to follow and that games will enforce these rules and not yet you break them.

Or if it does technically let you break the rules you'll be quickly punished severely, like with a game over.

And there's also a whole thing about how you approach games and how much empathy you have with the characters on screen.

And I don't mean that like "these players are lacking in empathy", but games also train you when to have empathy and when not to.

Most games, if they expect you to have empathy for the characters, clearly signpost that fact. They give those characters unique names and faces and dialogue and have importance to the narrative.

This is why there's the often-criticized game trope where the hero goes "I can't kill you, that'd make me just like you!" to the final boss, because they've been a storyline character up until now.
Meanwhile they've killed hundreds of faceless mooks in that level alone.

Papers Please is interesting because it's basically asking you to have empathy for these generic interchangeable people who come through your border checkpoint.

And I don't think it's the failing of the players that so often they completely fail to do that: the game is making a point about how utterly dehumanizing this kind of situation is for everyone involved.

Although an interesting about it is, you know how I said games signpost empathy by giving characters unique names and faces?

Papers Please technically does that, too. For EVERYONE.

Every character you meet, from pre-scripted storyline characters to procedurally generated characters who just bulk up the work for the day...
They all have individual faces and names.

Almost like the game is making some kind of point about how everyone is human and important? Maybe.

Anyway, I just want to reiterate that I'm not trying to say, like, "Jacksepticeye is a closet fascist because of how he played Papers Please"
Different people will respond to this game in different ways and I don't mean to imply that it's a way to judge people's character.

I just find it endlessly fascinating how different people respond to the choices the game is giving you, and specifically how players seem to often miss that it IS asking you to make a choice.

It's like... Hbomberguy did a video about Fallout: New Vegas and how the game has several quests where there's not a "right answer" or even a "best answer", instead the game is asking you, the player, to make a subjective moral choice.

And I think clearly Papers Please is doing the same thing. Do you follow orders because That's The Rules?
Do you bend the rules to make money, so your family has a better chance to survive?
Do you help the rebels, even knowing you and your family may suffer for it?

And I think what's far more interesting about Papers Please letsplays is how many people seem to not realize they're being given that choice.
The game doesn't clearly signpost the choices like "hey do you want to go with the authorities, cheat to survive, or rebel?"

Instead it keeps asking you to make little choices that have obviously "right" answers in that they're the answers the authorities in the game have told you to do.

And it seems that either for personal inclination reasons or just how players have been trained by other games, a lot of players miss that these little choices are part of the bigger story.

Anyway I think one way that players react to it differently comes from what kinds of games they traditionally play. Like, I've seen let'splayers who usually play narrative games immediately treat these things as moral questions, and pause to think about them

And let'splayers who more play action/puzzle games treat them less as questions of morality and more like just flavor text on the game systems.

Like, they're seeing through the characters pleading to be let in and going "hmm but this paper isn't in order, so I Have To reject them or get another citation."

And yeah, while you definitely can take away from that impressions about the empathy and/or political leanings of these players... I think that mostly comes down to how they see games and game systems.

Which is still very interesting to me.

I develop, study, hack, and occasionally even play games. So seeing how players play them is very interesting, especially when patterns emerge that you wouldn't expect.

Like, one I noticed recently and did some wider research on was a beat in Little Nightmares.
There's a point early on where you enter a room and there's a chair in the middle of the room, next to the corpse of a hanged man.

The obvious implication being that it's a suicide.
(some, however, have suggested it's a murder set up to look like a suicide)
But then the player tries to leave the room, and can't reach the doorknob.
Unless they get the chair.

So the game makes you take the chair from a dead man and open the door.
This makes total sense in how the game is setting up the atmosphere, this is a terrible place and everything sucks and you will have to do horrible things to survive.

The thing that fascinated me was that I happened to watch multiple let'splayers go through this scene and while they all had a moment of "oh God, he hung himself" and another "oh God I have to take the chair" moment... Several of them apologized. To the dead man.

He's dead, he can't hear you. He has no need for the chair anymore.

He's also not real. He's a bunch of polygons inside a scenario playing out in a box on your desk.

But they still apologized to him.

Anyway after watching a few let'splayers I follow play that game and get to that moment, I then went and just searched for a bunch of other letsplays from people I don't follow, and checked out how they reacted.

The "apologize for taking the chair" thing happened less than I expected, but it definitely did happen more than just those couple letsplays I happened to see first.

That one is also interesting because of how it fits into the empathy signposting thing I mentioned. Narrative games often make you have empathy with reoccurring characters with lots of dialogue and characterization...

But while this is a unique character who only appears once in Little Nightmares, he has no dialogue (there's no dialogue in the whole game!)

And his only characterization is "guy who committed suicide or was murdered", but that combined with the gut punch of having to take his chair to progress is just memorable enough to make players empathize with him

(Little Nightmares is a game about repeatedly gut-punching the player while making them fear how it's next going to gut-punch them)