Checkpoints & Choices: Bureaucracy, Borders, and Playing Through Deportation Machines

As immigrations tensions escalate and policy grows ever more dehumanizing, what can indie games teach us about the systems behind the suffering? In this episode, we examine how Papers, Please, North, and Borders use gameplay—not just storylines—to simulate the moral deadlocks and mechanical cruelty of U.S. deportation politics. Drawing from academic critiques that invoke Max Weber’s “iron cage of bureaucracy,” we explore how these games reflect the cold logic of enforcement agencies like ICE, trapping players in procedural loops that echo real-world immigration enforcement. Can feeling stuck in a game make us see the injustice of those stuck in the system? Tune in to explore how indie developers are turning gameplay into powerful protest.

Cosner, J. (2024). Engaging Action: Procedural Rhetoric and Agentive Arguments in US-Mexico Border Video Games. In Digital Culture and the US-Mexico Border (pp. 211-222). Routledge.

Grace, L. D. (2023, October). Gaming the system: case study in investigative journalism and playful interactive narrative design to explain systemic bias in immigration policy. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 38-49). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Morrissette, J. (2017). Glory to Arstotzka: Morality, rationality, and the iron cage of bureaucracy in Papers, Please. Game Studies, 17(1).