... so many people are blindly following the rules. I never thought it would be like that, but it seems the majority of players follow the rulebook strictly, responding in "I'm just doing my job" and other terrible things. Like "I didn't kill that woman, she didn't have a seal, it's not my fault, it's hers!"

Reminds me very much how people working for SS or Stasi or KGB were saying on their trials.

This game is not just a game, it's a social experiment proving that many people are incapable of rebelling the oppresive govt. even in a slightest way.

I hope that's not how you would act in real life, I really do. Because if you were that strict officers in real life... We're screwed.


(Im moving my discussion from steam to here, because you can't have a civilised discussion on steam forums)

Well obviously this is the strongest point of the game. It is a commentary and it places you in tough spots all the time - because yes, some people just follow the rules because they are rules. This is rooted deeply in our psychology and culture.

But not only does the game give you a set of rules and watch whether you'll break them or not - it also enables you to look through the eyes of a cog in a bureaucratic machine. You did not choose to work as a bureaucrat, you were randomly selected. This seems the only way to get a job. There are people who depend on you, your family which will be left with nothing if you quit, and die if you underperform. It's a much more complex issue than black/white morality.

It's really fascinating and I applaud the courageous and non-compromising approach. This really is what indie games are good at, it's not imitating or improving upon the concepts of the mainstream, it's doing what the mainstream is afraid to do.

Also, as a sidenote, not everybody gets as much "into" a game and many people will play a game emotionally detached from the story. They play it as they would play Angry Birds or Painkiller, trying to get a high score and all objectives. And that's fine in my opinion, it's a valid form of entertainment and an approach to games. Not one that I share, but not hurting anybody as well, so I think it's a bit unfair to call out everyone who doesn't think in terms of moral choices as a potential sociopath. Some people will not consider virtual choices concerning virtual, fictional characters moral choices at all.

As far as being actually put in an extreme situation yourself, I am of an opinion that you cannot foresee your reaction. You might think you know yourself well enough, and you might be right - but until you are in that spot in life you will never know for certain. Until life tests us, we do not know ourselves, so judging anyone who has been tested should never be done lightheartedly. This is, after al, what an extreme situation is.

The game is not a social experiment. It would be if the people playing it would think that what they do has real life consequences.

The game is "just" a game with political commentary and the possibility to roleplay (in a sense that you decide how to act and react, ot in a sense that you have a character sheet with numbers).

First of all, it has to be understood that the duty of a passport control officer is different from those of the consul or migrations control officer.

The passport control officer has no capacity to decide on applications for entry, especially on a moment's notice.

Even in our computerized age it usually takes up to a week to review a visa application.
What makes you think that you can better assess someone in a minute than a whole intelligence service in a week?

Once you wrap your mind around that fact, you will come to understand that most of the acts of "kindness" the protagonist may perform in the game are simply crimes against his country and his fellow citizens.

EDIT: Now, you may be aiming to sabotage the state in the first place, but you should not be lying to yourself about your own motivation.

There are plenty of moments I had while playing this where I had to weigh up my empathy for others with the potential for them to be terrorists, and looking after my family.

It also didn't take long after I was offered bribes for detaining people that I started doing it as often as possible!

This really proves how brilliant this simple game is. It looks like a fun game at start, but then it starts asking questions, providing you with difficult dilemmas.

SPOILERS




one of the endings is when you escape with forged documents from Arstotzka to avoid execution. The person reviewing your forged documents pauses for a second but lets you in. Just think what would happen if he detained you, just how you detained many others.

There are no simple answers for moral dilemmas this game presents. I was just frightened how many people just respond "I was just doing my job, rules are rules" and all that.

I actually believe that it is a healthy state of mind to begin with.

Generally, it is far better to follow the rules and do your job, than not.
Thing is, the rules are usually there for a reason, and you may notice that not a single time in this game is any rule introduced without some fairly reasonable explanation.

/Spoiler

Apart from confiscating valid internal passports. The rationale behind that rule I didn't get at all.

There is no rationalisations for most rules at all. They are vastly over the top. Because there was some polio breakout in one country now we are inspecting everyone?

Those rules were made up only to limit the amount of people who would enter Arstotzka. Most of them are totally made up.

And condemning a woman to die, or to break up families because someone has some small problem with documents? Most of the people at the border were political refugees, only few of them had valid asylum forms though.

Of course some of them were liers, smugglers and criminals. That's the dilemma - to believe their stories or not.

Polio is a pretty effing serious disease... In the 1952 Polio epedimic in the US 58,000 were infected, 3145 died, and 21,269 were left permanently disabled. Keeping in mind these were all kids...

No. If you paid attention to the game, you would realise that most eastern countries are even worse than Arstotzka, this is why so many people are coming to you.

And many of them, if not most of them, have not legit papers, because they are escaping their country and couldn't get legit papers because the regime simply denied them.

It's obvious when you get the ending when it's YOU who tried to escape from being EXECUTED to another country, and you have forged papers, just like many of the people you didn't let through. Every time you are turning somebody around, you may be sending people to their horrible fates, not necesaarily death, but nothing pleasant nonetheless.

If you wouldn't have any dilemmas, if that wasn't a game but real life (with the same political reality), you're not human, you're a machine.

The moral dilemmas this game is presenting are very unnerving and mind twisting. I was thinking many times, that probably many of those people who I denied had just as horrible situation as border inspector's but they were too shy to tell me that, and I denied them. Also I couldn't let EVERYONE through, because I would loose my job and my family would die. This game is brilliant by provoking such thoughts, well, at least in some of us.

But if you think that strip-searching every Kolechian because one of the terrorists was Kolechian is a reasonable and not over the top excuse, I don't have any further questions.

Thank you for presuming that I am unable to read. I will, in turn, presume that you are either too young or too idealistic to understand how migration politics work.

First of all, people escaping from the hardships of their country is NEVER a sufficient reason to blindly let them in your country. This process has to be diligently measured and controlled, so that you don't get a spike of criminal activity and don't make the border areas extremely uncomfortable for native population.

I will reiterate that the passport control officer has no means to evaluate the effect his criminal decision will have in future. He is apriori unable to discern spies, terrorists, insane applicants in remission and, generally, almost any other condition which would preclude the entry of such applicant.

I will also point out that the only document that is issued natively is the passport. Every other paper you require is issued by your native consulate. So it is not the regime they are fleeing from that denied them the papers, it is your own compatriots after careful scrutiny of the request for admission.

So now you are appealing to some sort of criminal brotherhood I must be feeling towards the other criminals?
You do understand, that your argument is based on an assumption that everyone is breaking law and that it's ok to break law, don't you?
Do I have to explain, why this assumption is wrong on every level?

And if you would have any dilemmas, you would be a criminal and an incompetent employee.

At least, you understand the hypocrisy of letting through a couple of vocal entrants, while denying everyone else.

Concerning searches, may I remind you that it is about a country that was recently at war and that there were threats of further bombings. It is not as simple as you try to make it look.

I stoped that when he couldn't pay me the whole amount and as I detained people and I haven't got the money the day later. I'm not that fast (in average 10, sometimes one or two more or less) so I need every dollar for my family. As the bribes fail to appear I stoped detaining people not until the guard came back and gave me the rest of the money.

It started as an simple and addictive game but now grows to something in which your part is not that small. I support the Ezic where I can and if my penalties alows it I let through specific individuals. If I got my last warning I stop doing that because my family is priority one.

Great game!

Must say I have to agree with Murfallo on this one. Frankly I'm actually really surprised that so many people are really surprised that a lot of people play this game without thinking about the repercussions. In a real-life situation, it is not the job of the inspector at the border to allow or deny people based on his/her own assumptions. This person is in no position to make that call, and as such should simply follow the paperwork.

Imagine what would happen if every single border guard, police officer, etc. in the world thought they knew better about the laws that they're paid to uphold and enforce? It's not their job to decide which ones to obey and which ones to break.

As for the people trying to get in in the game, the person/people they should be whinging to is the person/people who can authorise the documents, or get better underworld contacts to get better forgeries!

Having said that though, if they do try to scheme in anyway, they could at the very least offer a bribe or some other incentive - don't they realise how little they get paid in Arstotzka? That's actually something else this game highlights quite well - if you don't pay your border guards well enough (at least enough that they can support themselves and their family), then you have to expect corruption - the most oppressive regime won't be enough to stop that, as people will always find a way around it, and has happened (and continues to happen).

Personally I think there's a huge difference between someone taking bribes to make ends meet, and someone taking bribes because of pure greed. Since it's a game, I would have favoured the greed option anyway, but given the bad pay and the fact that terrorist attacks reduce it even further, why should my family go hungry just so other people can miss out on their drugs? :) Or maybe I'm just a bastard, but seriously why get a citation with no benefit?

Take the husband and wife duo - they knew the wife's paperwork was missing, so you'd think they'd at least try to shove some cash my way. Also, why did the husband go first? Surely he would have checked to make sure the wife got in first - unless maybe ditching her was his plan all along, and he's actually total prick who has a secret girlfriend in Arstotzka...

I was actually disappointed more people didn't offer me a bribe after the scans showed something dodgy - everyone except two (scripted) people tried to deny it. Then all were always so surprised when they were arrested - what did they think was going to happen after getting caught out, and then STILL lying about it?

Yes, that's an example of profiling. You'll notice that their respective Government complained about this and the practice was stopped the very next day (fast, this Arstotzkan bureaucracy!). Given the circumstances (terrorist attacks), and lack of better detection mechanisms at the time (which they introduced later), one can't totally blame them. Also not unexpected from a country that has "job lotteries" and has everyone say "Glory to Arstotzka!" a lot - it's much worse when Western democracies do this (as some have done in the not so recent past). Also you're not denying them entry, you're just assuming they're probably dodgy based on their country of origin - bad, but not as bad as locking someone up because their forms have wrong serial numbers (I'd guess that's due to some public servant stuffing up somewhere - but surely that'll get cleared up after their arrest)...

Well polio is pretty serious - did you see what countries did when the Swine Flu was around? Now that was over the top, and it wasn't anywhere near as bad a disease (as it turned out). And that was Western democratic nations doing the "over the top" thing - it happens. To their credit, it only takes them one day to come up with a proper solution (vac certificate) - again, fast this Arstotzkan bureaucracy! So the "deny everyone" was just a knee-jerk stop-gap until something more permanent could be implemented.

I guess they didn't want these people to leave, so they could watch and/or interrogate them, and in the meantime they wouldn't be able to escape and/or get in touch with others out-of-country to do more (potential) damage. Again it's a very broad rule, which gets broader - that's oppressive regimes for you, especially those with ineffective internal security mechanisms (they obviously couldn't infiltrate the group or discover the information some other way). Of course the "order" could just be quite clever...

The thing that doesn't make sense though is that you confiscate passports even from those who you deny entry - unless this is to ensure that they don't come back in. Still, I would have thought that they would have a rule change that states that anyone whose passport you confiscate who doesn't make it in gets arrested immediately.
SPOILER ALERT

Did you actually get the guard to give you ALL that he owes? I remember having detained something like 8-9 people each of the first two times he paid me, and each time I think I only got 5 bucks out of him. The third time he gave me 15, but I think at least 5 was for the bomb he sold, so he was still short a fair bit. I started getting cash at my apartment, but I'm pretty sure that was for new detainees, and not for the others. He did say he'd pay 5 for every 2, right?

I actually didn't notice this the first game I played, but then I didn't detain more than 5 each time in that one.

MORE SPOILER ALERT

The EDIC guys tend to pay you around 20 bucks each time you do something for them, at least after the first two. Not actually sure if they can ever properly pay for that since the first time I didn't burn the cash (so they just "helped me out" when I got into trouble for it - never got it back though), and the second play-through I semi-ignored them (so had to flee to Orbistan, as opposed to hanging around for the "better" ending).

I won't mention specifics (and you've likely found these anyway), but there are a couple of other good cash injections (better than the 20 bucks edict deals by a fair bit). One took me a few tries to get though...

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

I don't know for sure, he stoped coming to the booth for 2 days or somewhat, then coming and telling me he will check by at my aparment at the end of the day. Yes, he said 5 for every 2 detains. I've got somethin for the bomb parts, too. Don't know how much exactly.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

Yeah, didn't burn the cash, either. I've had a bad feeling about this, I thought "I'm not getting around easily and now I got 1000 bucks? This seems to be way too easy for such game"

But I'm excited how the story develops. 20 different endings... phew.