Digital Texts and Moral Questions About Immigration: Papers, Please and the Capacity for a Video Game to Stimulate Sociopolitical Discussion

• Published in: Games and culture 2021-06, Vol.16 (4), p.383-406
• Main Author: McKernan, Brian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1555-4120; 1555-4139
• DOI: 10.1177/1555412019893882

Scholars and critics have praised the video game, Papers, Please (PP), for raising critical awareness of sociopolitical issues, including immigration. To begin to determine whether PP stimulated public discussions of pertinent social issues, I adopt insights and techniques from cultural sociology to study how posters in an online forum engage with PP. I use computational topic modeling to reveal the topics forum members discuss and qualitative content analysis to gain a deeper sense of how posters explore these issues. I find the forum does discuss social issues, including immigration. Sociopolitical topics, however, are far from the forum’s primary focus. Moreover, posts primarily rely on the same limited set of immigration frames that major U.S. media outlets use. These findings demonstrate how a game’s social meanings will be shaped not only by the game’s design but also by social factors internal to the public under analysis and broader social dynamics.