This week is the year’s biggest for video games. With two new gaming consoles—the Xbox One and the PlayStation Four—released for the first time in nearly a decade, and with a slew of new titles appearing to support them, committed gamers could be excused for calling in sick and settling in on the couch with their controllers in hand. Some will play the new installment in the wildly popular Call of Duty franchise, which begins with a pulse-pounding shootout in space. Others will gravitate to Battlefield 4 and its symphonies of assault rifles, or to the joyously rowdy Grand Theft Auto V, where violence against pixilated prostitutes has become just as much a staple of the series as gunplay and destruction of property.
Forget all these titles. For a truly nerve-racking experience in electronic gaming, head to your PC and download a little game called Papers, Please. It’s cheap, and it offers none of the animated splendors of the bigger-budget titles. There are no guns here, no car chases or explosions. Instead, what’s on parade are empathy and obedience, fear and loathing, and all the other human emotions that are too often drowned out by the din of mindless action in the medium’s biggest blockbusters.
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