Papers, Please? Border Control and Immigration Attitudes After
Playing an “Empathy Game”
Name: Sebastian Koskinen Student ID: 10832785
Master’s Thesis: Graduate School of Communication
Master’s Degree: Erasmus Mundus Journalism, Globalization and Media Supervisor: Sanne Kruikemeier
University: University of Amsterdam Date: 26.6.2015
Abstract
“Empathy games” are a relatively new genre of video games that address themes of agency, empathy and social change while being simultaneously entertaining, thus differing from educational games. This study investigated one such game called Papers, Please, in which the player assumes the role of a border control officer who has to find a balance between efficiency and humane behavior in dealing with immigrants and refugees. A one-factor, between-subjects experimental design (N = 48) where presentation modes (predictor) were a digital game and a text substantively similar to the game, was conducted to see if playing the video game would create more favorable attitudes towards immigrants and more critical attitudes towards border control (outcome) through identification (mediator) with the immigrant characters. Results showed that, contrary to what was hypothesized, participants in the reading condition experienced stronger identification and had more positive views about immigrants. Despite the results being contrary to the expectations, they resulted in interesting interpretations in the light of theories about identification, immersion and negative immigrant stereotypes. Short playing time and the player’s partly antagonistic role towards non-playable characters are discussed as potential factors affecting the results.
Introduction
Video games as a medium are immensely popular around the world, and according to Global Games Market Report (2013) there are approximately 1.2 billion people playing them. The business itself is expected to generate over $113 billion in revenues in 2018 (Newzoo, 2015). Previously a niche form of entertainment, since the 1970s the industry has grown and now has broad reach and influence. A recent example of this is the game Grand Theft Auto V, which became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million on its launch day and $1 billion during its first three days on the market (Goldfarb, 2015). This growth in popularity is underscored by the fact that in the year 2000 gaming was considered the most popular media activity in the US, causing watching television to fall to second place (Interactive Digital Software Association, 2000).
A sub-category of video games consists of the “serious games” that are created and used for educational and persuasive purposes (Ritterfeld, Vorderer, & Cody, 2009; Bogost, 2007), whether to raise awareness of the effects of the fast-food industry, as in the
McDonald’s Videogame (Molleindustria, 2006), to convey an experience of living in a
refugee camp as in Darfur is Dying (TAKE ACTION games, 2006) or to teach mediation and negotiation by simulating the situation faced by Israeli and Palestinian authorities as in
PeaceMaker (ImpactGames, 2007).
Though serious games have been available since the advent of modern gaming in the 1980s, their effects on players, like those of more commercial games, have not often been studied (Peng, Lee & Heeter, 2010, p. 723-4). Much of what has been studied has focused on the connection between gaming and violent behavior, a connection that has been contested (Kutner & Olson, 2008), as there is evidence that both supports (Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Funk, Hagan, Schimming, Bullock. Buchman & Myers, 2002) and rejects it (Kutner & Olson, 2008; Bensley & Van Eenwyk, 2001). Furthermore, much of the research on video
games’ effects has utilized surveys (Granic, Lobel, & Rutger, 2014), where differentiating the causal direction has not been possible. To properly understand how video games can
persuade, it would be necessary to resort to experiments and longitudinal studies.
On a more positive note, games have been shown to strengthen prosocial behavior (Gentile et al., 2009). In one study (Lenhart, Kahne, Middaugh, Macgill, Evans, & Vitak, 2008) civic gaming experiences, that is, playing that involves working together to create a virtual nation, was connected to more interest in doing online research about politics, volunteering and raising money for charity. Greitemeyer, Osswald, and Brauer (2010) demonstrated that playing prosocial video games, in contrast to playing neutral games, increased empathy and decreased schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure from other’s misfortune). Another study (Peng et al., 2010) found that playing a serious game called Darfur Is Dying resulted in greater role-taking and willingness to help Darfurians than watching a video of the same game or reading a text detailing scenarios similar to those that were found in the game.
Games such as Darfur Is Dying differ from more mainstream games because they are intentionally created to bring about changes in attitudes about social issues. Therefore the audience for these games (as well as the marketing, distribution and financial goals) differs significantly from those of commercial games, which are mostly played for fun. Though studying serious games can further our understanding of video games’ persuasive effects, moving towards more commercial games would be the logical next step in studying games. This gap—or lack of research—is the motivation behind this paper.
The purpose of this study is to empirically test how playing a video game, Papers,
Please (Pope 2013), affects participants’ opinions on immigrants, migration, and border
control. Papers, Please, is an ideal game to study because it is a hybrid between a serious and a mainstream game, being both entertaining and political and having a wide and varied audience. An indicator of the game’s popularity is that in just seven months the game sold
500,000 copies (Lee, 2014), and won several awards, among them the BAFTA award in the category of “Best Simulation Game”. Moreover, Papers, Please represents a relatively new and unstudied category of games that have been called “empathy games” (D’Anastasio, 2015). As Lellock (2015) writes:
…empathy games force players to navigate the fraught existences of others by challenging players to contend with precarious physical, economic, and social circumstances. By requiring such a gaming experience, empathy games, such as Papers, Please, create a unique platform where important humanist questions of agency, empathy, and social change may be expressed (p. 122)
The study at hand presents an uncommon look at how a video game, a format that is quite different from newspapers or TV, can act as a channel for attitude change. In light of the statistics referenced above about video games’ reach and popularity, communication will increasingly happen through interactivity, the very feature which defines video games. Seeing how previous research has mostly involved serious games, it is therefore important to study whether similar findings can be discovered using a non-educational game as stimulus material.
Theoretical background Interactivity
What differentiates video games from other forms of entertainment and media is the level of interactivity inherent in them (Dill & Dill, 1998; Dominick, 1984; Lin, 2013b; Bogost, 2007), which makes them unique among other forms of entertainment such as cinema, TV and radio. In video games, interactivity is a product instead of a process, the difference being that the term product refers to interaction that occurs between people and computers and the term process to social interaction (Stromer-Galley, 2004). Therefore,
interactivity in this context does not imply a continuum where the highest degree of interaction is face-to-face communication and the lowest user-to-system interactivity (Stromer-Galley, 2004), but refers to what Lin (2013b, p. 684) has defined as software programs (which represent the source) responding to player’s (receiver’s) decisions and commands (real-time feedback). An example of this would be the player lock-picking a door in a game, which would then result in alarming guards and commencing an escape sequence. In this way, video games continually modify the experience by reacting to the player’s actions.
An important aspect of interaction versus non-interaction is self-efficacy, which is a key variable in Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy means one’s ability to exercise control over oneself and events that affect one’s life (Bandura, 2004). According to SCT, this can happen through enactive experiences (situations where one actually participates in an activity) and observational experiences (situations that are vicarious by nature).
Through enactive experiences people develop self-efficacy by examining the results of their own actions, in contrast to observational experiences, where people learn from the actions and experiences of others. According to Bandura (1997) enactive experiences are more powerful in increasing self-efficacy than observational ones. Video games represent an opportunity to participate in enactive experiences in mediated environments, avoiding the limitations presented by non-mediated, physical environments (Peng, 2008).
Despite interactivity’s central role in the effects of video games, it has been studied little and the studies that have been done mostly concerned the relationship between interactivity/non-interactivity and violence (Gentile & Anderson, 2003). Earlier studies (Favaro, 1983; Meyers, 2002; Silvern & Williamson, 1987), where playing and watching conditions were compared to determine changes in aggression, did not find differences
in a playing condition displayed more aggressive tendencies than those in a watching condition. More evidence for interactivity’s role in exacerbating effects (aggression) was found in a study (Lin, 2013b) that looked at the difference between game players (mediated enactive experience) and those who watched recorded game play or comparable movie scenes (mediated observational experience). Differences in aggression were only found between the enactive and observational groups, indicating that it was indeed interactivity, not other attributes, such as image or audio, which caused greater aggression.
Though interactivity is a defining feature of video games, it is not a constant, and the level of interactivity can vary greatly. For example, interactivity in video games can consist of character creation, graphics, audio adjustment, the degree of freedom in exploration (linear versus non-linear), and the form of player control (digital or analogue controller, mouse or a joystick) (Raney, Smith, & Baker, 2006). In games such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
(Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) the world and the characters are almost fully customizable in terms of controls and graphical presentation, whereas games like Super Mario Bros.
(Nintendo, 1985) are considerably less interactive.
Interactivity scales such as Steuer’s (1992), which consists of three factors: speed (rate of input), range (number of possible actions), and mapping (the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment), can be useful when comparing different media such as books and video games, but is too general when comparing different types of the same media (Weber, Behr, & DeMartino, 2014). Another problem with many interactivity scales is that they are not specifically designed to analyze video games and therefore only partly measure interactivity. Among the various scales, the one by Weber et al. (2014) probably captures video game interactivity (VGI) most precisely. Their scale has six dimensions: (1) controller responsiveness, (2) feature-based interactivity, (3)
persuasiveness, which were all found to be reliable and valid in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (Weber et al., 2014). In light of what was discussed above, it is not, then, self-evident that video games are de facto more interactive than other forms of media; some games score high in all of these categories, whereas others have varying scores that indicate only limited interactivity.
Though interactivity’s most obvious benefit is that it creates enjoyment and feelings of control during playing, its importance here rests on its ability to enhance identification (McDonald & Kim, 2001; Gibson, 1979) and moderate video games’ positive and negative effects (Weber et al., 2014). Because of its essential role in video games and its
aforementioned potential, interactivity was chosen as the predictor of attitude change in this study.
Identification, transportation, and immersion
Common to all forms of entertainment is the attribute of to what degree, and how, audiences respond to the characters, which are usually at the center of both fictional and non-fictional media products, such as movies, talk-shows and video games. Interest in non-fictional characters’ affective capabilities can be traced back to Cooley (1918) and Mead (1934) and other social psychologists who were interested in how we become conscious of others. For Mead (1934), this required the very same process through which we become aware of ourselves—communication. He argued that we could identify the self with the other through role-taking, hence developing important skills such as empathy. Since the advent of modern technology, role-taking is no longer limited to physical interaction but could also happen through communication media.
The idea of taking on the role of others via media was later developed by Horton and Wohl (1956), who argued that parasocial interaction could develop to a point where one
could feel that the mediated other was actually talking with him (Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985). Caughey (1986) extended this idea and suggested that the process started with liking a character, after which it might develop to identification, and perhaps even imitation. Strong feelings, such as love or hate, could be associated with the process, and in extreme cases a person could even come to believe that he was the character (Caughey, 1986).
Video games certainly share many characteristics with other entertainment media, but because they require one to take an active role, the relationship between the consumer and characters works differently. Part of this is the way video games let people construct their characters (fully or partly), unlike in non-interactive media where characters come predefined (Klimmt, Hefne, & Vorderer, 2009, p. 362). Klimmt et al. (2009) contrasted parasocial interaction with role-taking in video games via the concept of monadic identification, which they described as “a temporal shift of players’ self-perception through adoption of valued properties of the game character”, which is different from a dyadic user–character
relationship (Klimmt et al., 2009, p. 351). The difference between identifying with a character (and experiencing a virtual world through it) and merely watching gameplay footage is that in the former situation the player has a “monadic” relationship with the character, not “dyadic” as in the latter case. As Klimmt et al. (2009) describe it:
“Video games thus seem to facilitate a nondyadic or monadic user–character relationship in the sense that players do not perceive the game (main) character as a social entity distinct from themselves, but experience a merging of their own self and the game protagonist” (p. 354).
Depending on the genre, identification in video games can range from weak (simple platformer games) to strong (role-playing games).
Importantly, identification happens on three levels: affective, cognitive, and physiological (Lin, 2013a). In Papers, Please these levels would correspond to the player perceiving himself as one of the characters (affect), planning his actions carefully in order to achieve his goals (cognition), and using mouse and keyboard to control the game
(physiology). Whereas a non-interactive media such as a movie would also afford an affective experience, it would lack the cognitive and physiological aspects, therefore involving a person less in the process. Moreover, identification should be stronger when it happens in conjunction with interactivity, as interactivity moderates the process of
identification and role-taking by involving the player in the experience through demanding his attention and his role in determining what happens in the game (McDonald & Kim, 2001).
Though identification plays a major role in video games, it cannot explain the whole experience, as it is limited to characters, which, in many games, are little-developed or do not exist at all in the sense of being human or even animate. Another way of theorizing about how consuming fiction might bring about attitudinal change is through transportation (Green & Brock, 2002), which is a mental process during which attention, imagery and feelings are integrated and transport a person into a story. Three relevant features of transportation are: (1) it requires that people process stories by receiving and interpreting them, (2)
transportation happens through empathy and mental imagery meaning that a receiver tries to understand what a character goes through and feel the world like it does, and also that the receiver generates vivid images of the story, and (3) when transported, the receiver loses track of reality in a physiological sense (Van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2014). Such experiences can have long-lasting effects, such as affective and cognitive responses, beliefs, and changes in attitudes (Van Laer et al., 2014).
Van Laer et al., (2014) highlight three critical storyteller antecedents in their extended transportation-imagery model (ETIM), which are (1) identifiable characters, (2) a plot that
story receivers can imagine and (3) verisimilitude, or lifelikeness. In their meta-analysis, each of these antecedents was found to exert small effects on narrative transportation, with
imaginable plot having the biggest effect. What ETIM theory can add to the identification discussed above are these last two antecedents, which are crucial in creating video game immersion.
Immersion is a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. Björk
and Holopainen (2004) divide immersion into four categories, which they call sensory-motoric, cognitive, emotional and spatial. The last three of these are responsible for creating presence and a sufficient belief that the fictive world is real in the form of realistic graphics and well-developed characters and plot. Sensory-motoric immersion, on the other hand, refers to how the player interacts with the world. Various methods of playing include using a mouse and keyboard, a controller, motion tracking devices and gestural controls. Maximum immersion in all categories could be achieved using virtual reality glasses such as Oculus Rift in conjunction with either motion tracking devices or gestural controls. In a setting like this, the player would be isolated from the environment by using headphones and virtual reality glasses that limit his vision to a small screen with a field of vision of 80 degrees or more. Such setting would be as close to reality as is possible using modern, widely accessible technology.
In conclusion, it can be argued that identification, transportation and immersion each play an important role in gaming. The lack of believable and well-developed characters does not necessarily mean that a game cannot affect its audience’s thoughts; this can happen as long as its world or story has capacity to transport the player. Immersion, in the form of realistic graphics and lifelike controls, can further enhance the experience and strengthen both identification and transportation. Accordingly, low performance in all of these categories probably leaves the player detached and little involved in the game.
Identification, transportation and immersion are expected to mediate attitude change. Accordingly, the amount of identification with the characters of Papers, Please is measured by Cohen’s (2001) role-taking scale.
Immigration attitudes and portrayal of immigrants in media
The number of immigrants in developed democracies has increased rapidly, which has brought in its wake less sympathetic attitudes towards immigrants from the populations of receiving countries. In research, public attitudes towards immigrants have been
approached from two different theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014). In the political economy tradition immigration attitudes are explained by referring to citizens’ individual self-interest regarding distributional consequences and competition for resources. The political
psychology perspective emphasizes social and symbolic factors in shaping immigration attitudes, which can include race, religion and culture. According to Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014), there has been little evidence that people form their attitudes towards immigration based on their personal economic situation. Rather, these attitudes are mostly fueled by symbolic concerns about the nation as whole – whether in regards to culture or economy.
More generally speaking, immigrants are often viewed as an outgroup, as opposed to ingroups formed by natives. Mutz and Goldman (2011) have stated that mass media are the primary indirect source of information about outgroups such as immigrants. This implies that media play an important role in changing our attitudes towards outgroups. Empirical support for this was found in a study in which indirect contact was shown to produce more positive attitudes and behavioral intentions towards an outgroup (Chinese) in those Germans who watched video clips of Germans and Chinese interacting versus those who were shown video
clips of two Germans interacting (Mazziotta, Mummendey, & Wright, 2011). Many other studies (Paluck, 2009, 2010; Schiappa, Gregg & Hewes, 2005; Bogatz & Ball, 1971) have produced similar results.
The effect works in the other direction as well, of course, and research has shown that stereotypes can cause prejudice towards outgroups (Eagly & Mladinic, 1989; Stangor,
Sullivan, & Ford, 1991; Stephan, Ageyev, Coates-Schrider, Stephan, & Abalakina, 1994). Racial minorities are poorly represented in video games, and often occupy the same roles as their TV counterparts, either as secondary characters (Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009) or as thugs who are overtly physical at the expense of higher mental capabilities (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011). Depictions such as these result in less favorable perceptions of players about foreigners—immigrants or not—and make identifying and empathizing with the characters less probable and weaker when it does occur.
Under-representation and misrepresentation of immigrants can have a strong impact on people. According to Price and Tewksbury (1997), when we consume media, objects are created in our “knowledge store”, which contains constructs, such as information about social objects and their attributes. Depending on how often we recall and use these objects, they will become more readily accessible. If we hardly ever view or play immigrant characters, they will retain their secondary role and remain distant, or in the case of having stereotypic immigrant characters, we will recall immigrants through rather negative and simplistic constructs.
Closely linked to immigration is border control, which is an essential part of
immigration, but remains mostly unknown to those who do not experience it because of their nationality. This is the case for EU citizens who are only required to go through a minimum check when crossing borders in the Schengen Area. Third country nationals, on the other hand, have to go through a thorough check on entry and/or exit, which includes procedures
such as stamping travelling documents, checking visas and residence permits, and verifying the traveler’s purpose of stay (OJ L 105, 2006, p. 1-32). Border control as a part of
immigration is at the core of Papers, Please, and therefore looking at whether there are differences in attitudes between conditions regarding it is of interest to this study. The expectation is that exposure to desperate characters who try to cross borders would produce empathy towards them and involve the participants in critically thinking about the hardships many people have to go through just because of their nationality and passport status.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find any studies on the depiction of border control in fiction and its effects on attitudes, meaning the assumptions above do not rest on academic research. One study (Mau, Mewes, & Zimmerman, 2008) conducted on a German population, did however, find a connection between border-crossing experiences and cosmopolitan attitudes with respect to foreigners and global governance. This relation was found to be stable even after controlling for socio-economic variables. Though the experiences in this study were not vicarious in nature, the finding suggests that border-crossing experiences can decrease the gap between “us” and “them” and increase empathy towards foreigners. It would not be a surprise, then, if an enactive mediated experience had a similar, yet weaker effect on people.
The findings presented in this chapter are important considering the setting in Papers,
Please, in which the player, as a border control officer, has simultaneously an antagonistic
and sympathetic relationship with the non-playable character. On one hand, the player may want to maximize efficiency to get a higher score; but on the other hand, there is an incentive to play empathically by relating to the would-be-immigrants.
Hypotheses
In light of the theory and previous research given above, an experimental design was selected for this study to see how playing Papers, Please, affects attitudes towards
immigration, immigrants and border control. As explained above, interactivity and
identification are central to video games, but to see to what extent they contribute to attitude formation, a second mediated environment—text reading—will be used for comparison. This text follows the first two days of the game as precisely as possible in order to make the comparison fair on a substantial level.
The following hypotheses are therefore proposed:
H1: Playing the video game will lead to more positive immigration attitudes than reading a text about immigration.
H1b: Playing the video game will result in more critical attitudes towards border control than reading a text about immigration.
The assumptions in H1 and H1b are based on previous research (Peng et al., 2010; Lin, 2013a) where games as a presentation mode were found to have stronger effects than other presentation modes, whether negative or positive. The hypotheses are directed because in
Papers, Please the player does not see his own character and mainly decides the fates of
non-playable characters, whose paperwork and background he has to check and then decide whether to let these people in the country or not. Thus the subject of empathy is not the playable character but rather the non-playable characters who are shown on the screen, and
the assumption is that empathy will make the player more understanding and supporting of the non-playable characters’ fates, leading to the following hypothesis:
H2: Those who play the game experience stronger identification with the immigrant characters than those reading a text about immigration.
Whereas playing a game is an enactive mediated experience, reading is an
observational mediated experience. Both enaction and interactivity should, according to the theories presented above, enhance identification with fictional characters and empathy towards them. Further, though the player does not control the immigrant characters, it is nevertheless more appropriate to refer to identification than parasocial interaction, since, as was explained in conjunction with H1a and H1b, the focus in the game is mostly on the non-playable immigrant characters.
H3: Identification mediates the effects of both gaming and reading in influencing attitudes (see Figure 1).
Interactivity Identification Immigration and border control attitudes H1a-‐b H2 H3
Role-taking, or identification, as it is called in relation to fictional characters (Klimmt, Hefne & Vorderer, 2009), is important in understanding other people or fictional characters and imagining what they feel in a given situation. Attitudinal change can occur without identification, such as when one reads news, but identification enhances empathic reactions (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013).
Methods Participants
Forty-eight people (32 male) were asked to participate in the experiment, and this sample was collected from among students at University of Amsterdam and other locations as well as online on Facebook. The average age was 25.73 (SD = 3.07). Participants were told that they would have to do computer-related tasks for 25 minutes, and would be rewarded with €4 each for participating. Each condition—reading a text and playing the game—had 24 participants, and in both conditions there were 16 males and 8 females.
Stimuli
Those in the gaming group played Papers, Please, an independent game that was released to universal acclaim and had sold over 500,000 copies as of March 2014 (Lee, 2014). In the game the player takes the position of an immigration inspector whose task is to carefully analyze and either accept or refuse immigrants and refugees for entry into a
fictitious country, Arstotzka. Failure to recognize unwanted immigrants and stop them leads to decreased pay and will harm the health and wellbeing of the protagonist’s family members. Participants in the gaming condition played Papers, Please for the first two in-game days, which took 13 minutes on average. Those in the reading condition read a narrative text that simulates Papers, Please. The text was written to follow as closely as possible the first two
in-game days of Papers, Please to make sure that multimodality and interactivity would be the only factors differentiating the two conditions. Reading the text took 7 minutes on average. The text is included in Appendix A.
Design and procedure
The hypotheses were tested using a one-factor, between-subjects experimental design, where presentation modes were a digital game and a text imitating the gaming experience.
Participants were approached through social media (Facebook), handing out flyers, and direct approach. Those who participated were then asked to first complete a questionnaire (the pre-test) that measured empathy, fantasizing, and perspective-taking tendency, as well as issue involvement. After completing the pre-test, the participants proceeded to complete either the gaming or the text reading condition. The participants were randomly assigned to one of the conditions using a randomizer (GraphPad Software, 2015).
In the gaming condition, participants were asked to play the first two in-game days and then stop. They were asked to follow the in-game instructions. Participants in the text-reading condition read the text after completing the pre-test. Both groups were then asked to complete a post-questionnaire, which measured identification, immigration and border control attitudes, and lastly demographic information, and political affiliation, and trust in political institutions.
Measures
In the pre-test identification with fictional characters and empathy tendency were measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983), which was modified to include one of its subscales, fantasizing (α = .70). As previous knowledge about immigration issues (α = .89) could be a significant covariate, it was measured in the pre-test via four statements on a
7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree): (a) “I am fairly interested in immigration issues”, (b) “I am fairly interested in issues concerning Schengen Area and internal border control in the EU”, (c) “I pay attention to news about immigration” and (d) “I pay attention to news about immigration issues in the EU”.
After completing their task, participants were first asked to describe how they felt about playing the game or reading the text and to what extent they experienced identification. Identification with the non-playable characters was measured using a modified version of Cohen’s (2001) identification scale measured on a 7-point Likert scale (gaming, α = .82, reading, α = .83). Examples of the nine statements measuring identification include: (a) “While playing the game Papers, Please, I felt as if I was part of the action”, (b) “While playing the game Papers, Please, I forgot myself and was fully absorbed”, (c) “While playing the game Papers, Please, I was able to understand the events in the game in a manner similar to that in which the non-playable characters understood them”. For the text condition, the wording in the statements was changed to refer not to Papers, Please and gaming, but to the
text and reading.
Attitudes towards border control were measured using a five-item Likert scale in which the participants were asked to rate the statements about Schengen Area border control on a 7-point Likert scale (α = .89). The statements were: “How important do you think it is that the traveler's purpose of stay is checked upon entry to the Schengen Area?”, “How important do you think it is to verify that the traveler has sufficient funds for his/her stay and onward/return journey (or that he/she is in a position to acquire such means lawfully) upon entering the Schengen Area?”, “How important do you think it is to verify the traveler's point of departure and destination upon entering the Schengen Area?”, “How important do you think it is to check the authenticity of the traveler's short-stay visa (if required) and the
identity of its holder by consulting the Visa Information System upon entry to the Schengen Area?”, “How important do you think it is to examine entry and exit stamps in the travel document upon entry to the Schengen Area to ensure that the traveler has not exceeded the maximum duration of authorized stay?”
Immigration attitudes were measured using three sets of questions and four individual questions taken from the ESS Round 7 Source Questionnaire (European Social Survey, 2014). First, participants’ attitudes towards different groups that might immigrate to the Netherlands was measured using three questions (α = .86) on a 4-point Likert scale (Allow
many to come and live here, Allow some, Allow few, Allow none). The immigrant groups in
these questions referred to Jews, Muslims and Gypsies. Second, attitudes towards the importance of various qualifications or attributes (such as educational level, being able to speak Dutch and being white) were measured using a six-item, 7-point Likert scale (α = .82). Third, attitudes towards migrants, both professional and unskilled workers from and outside Europe, were measured using a four-item (α = .83), 4-point Likert scale (Allow many to come
and live here, Allow some, Allow few, Allow none). Fourth, four individual questions on a
10-point Likert scale were used to measure immigration-related attitudes.
The last section of the questionnaire contained demographic questions such as age, sex, religiosity, and income, but more importantly asked about participants’ political leaning, trust in political institutions, and interest in international politics, all factors that can be important covariates.
Results Data analysis
sample size (n < 50) (Elliot, 2007). Significant results (< .05) were found for all outcome variables, indicating a non-normal distribution. The Shapiro-Wilk test was followed with inspection of the skewness and kurtosis of the variables. According to West, Finch, and Curran (1995), substantial departures from normality for skewness and kurtosis are > 2 and > 7, respectively. Absolute z-scores showed skewness and kurtosis, but these were on an acceptable level for those predictor and outcome variables that were found to have statistically significant differences between conditions.
An independent-samples t test was then conducted to compare the means between conditions in each of the variables. A 90% confidence level was chosen because of the small sample size. As the hypotheses were directed based on previous similar research, one-tailed tests were used. Statistically significant differences were found in attitudes towards Jews, Muslims and Gypsies (gaming: M = 1.77, SD = .67, reading: M = 1.26, SD = .39; t(37) = 3.24, p = .0015, 90% CI [0.25, 0.78]). Levene’s test indicated unequal variances (F = 5.40, p = .025), so degrees of freedom were adjusted from 46 to 37. Other significant differences were identification (gaming: M = 4.10, SD = .92, reading: M = 4.97, SD = .86; t(46) = -3.40,
p = .0005, 90% CI [-1.30, -0.44]), how immigrants are treated in comparison to Dutch natives
(gaming: M = 5.17, SD = 1.88, reading: M = 4.17, SD = 1.52; t(46) = 2.03, p = .025, 90% CI [0.17, 1.82]) and whether governments should be more generous in judging people’s
applications for refugee status, (gaming: M = 7.33, SD = 1.83, reading: M = 8.21, SD = 1.72;
t(46) = -1.71, p = .048, 90% CI [-1.74, -.014]). Overall, the results show us that those in the
gaming condition were less positive about Jews, Muslims and Gypsies, had weaker
identification, thought immigrants were treated better than by those in the reading condition, and were less agreeable to the idea that the Netherlands should be more generous in judging people’s applications for refugee status.
There were no significant differences in the other variables between conditions. H1a and H1b posited that those in the gaming condition would have more positive attitudes towards immigration and be more critical towards border control. Support for this was not found, as those in the gaming condition showed attitudes contrary to the hypotheses. In addition, no evidence was found for H2, as, contrary to expectation, those in the reading condition had greater identification than those in the gaming condition. Thus H1a, H1B and H2 were not supported.
To test H3 a mediation analysis was conducted using PROCESS, a plugin macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013), to see if mediation occurred through identification between the
predictor (condition) and the outcome (attitudes). This analysis was run using PROCESS’ model 4 using 10,000 bootstraps with a binary coded predictor. A significant indirect effect was found on whether governments should be more generous in judging people’s
applications for refugee status through identification (b = -.46, BCa 90% CI [-1.14, -0.53]). This represents a small-sized effect (K2 = .12, 90% BCa 90% CI [0.02, 0.28]). The negative b
tells us that the predictor (presentation mode) and the outcome (attitude) are inversely related: as the predictor nears zero (which corresponds to the reading condition), the outcome
(attitude) moves towards the positive side of the Likert scale. This mediation is presented in Figure 2.
Next, another analysis was run to see if there was an indirect effect on attitudes towards Jews, Muslims and Gypsies through identification, but the results indicated that no mediation occurred. A third analysis looked at a possible indirect effect, through
identification, on the participant’s opinion as to whether immigrants are treated better or worse than the Dutch, but again, no mediation occurred. Thus, modest support was found for H3, which posited that identification would mediate the effects of gaming and reading.
Covariates (political leaning, trust in political institutions, previous knowledge about immigration issues, and interest in international politics) were eventually left out of the mediation. The reason for doing this was that in conjunction with a small sample size, adding covariates used degrees of freedom, thus making the regression equation less stable.
Moreover, differences between groups regarding these covariates were found to be nonsignificant, meaning that assignment randomization worked correctly.
Discussion and limitations
This study was conducted to see whether Papers, Please, a game about immigration and border control, would create stronger pro-immigration and anti-border control attitudes in participants than would reading a substantively similar text. To measure this, an experiment was carried out to test a mediation model, which had its foundation in theories of
identification, transportation, and immersion, as well as interactivity. Interactivity
Identification
Refugee status attitude Direct effect, b = .42, p = .46
Indirect effect, b = -.46, 90% CI [-1.14, -0.53].
b = -.87, p = .001 b = .53, p = .071
Figure 2. The unstandardized regression coefficients for the relationship between
interactivity and attitude towards whether governments should be generous in judging people’s applications for refugee status as mediated by identification.
The study was motivated by previous research on the effect of video games on social and political attitudes (Peng et al., 2010; Lin 2013a; Kampf, 2013) and the growing
popularity of video games as communication media and entertainment products. Video games, which are played by over one billion people globally, have a great potential in persuasive and political communication because of their interactivity and immersive nature. More recently a new genre of games, dubbed “empathy games”, have entered the market and influenced more commercial games. Examples include I Get This Call Everyday (Gallant, 2012), where a player takes the role of a call-center operator; Cart Life (Hofmeier, 2011), which puts one in the shoes of a street-food vendor who must work to pay child support; or
Coming Out Simulator 2014 (Case, 2014), a game that simulates the experience of opening
up about one’s homosexuality. In this genre, Papers, Please, has probably been the most successful and influential game.
Apart from academic research, motivation for the study came from anecdotal
evidence of how Papers, Please had affected players’ views on immigration (Nemati, 2013; Machkovech, 2013), which were summed up in Simon Parkin’s (2013) comment about the game in his blog post for The New Yorker:
Will you deny a mother from seeing her son simply because her entry
document expired a few days ago? Allow her through, and the newspapers will report that immigrants are beginning to take local jobs. Grim yet affecting, it’s a game that may change your attitude the next time you’re in line at the airport.
It was hypothesized that playing would, because of interactivity, enhance identification (H2) with the characters (Bandura, 1997; Peng et al., 2008; McDonald & Kim, 2001; Gibson, 1979), which would then mediate (H3) the effects of more empathy towards immigrants and more critical attitudes towards border control (H1a, H1b). The results, however, only partly supported the hypotheses.
Starting with H2, surprisingly those who read the text were more captivated by the experience and felt more identification with the characters. Various theories in the literature can offer some explanation for this, most importantly frustration and depth of identification. Though frustration was not measured in the post-test, many participants reported problems in understanding the game in such a short time of playing it. Learning to play a game, even if it is simple like Papers, Please, can take some time, and failure to do so may lead to frustration. In their study about video games and aggression, Anderson and Dill (2000) have found frustration to lead to anger, a finding which is consistent with previous research (Berkowitz, 1989). Whereas those in the playing condition might have had anything from minor to major frustration, those in the reading condition could fully concentrate on the plot and the
characters. Frustration, then, may have influenced the participants’ enjoyment and identification with the characters.
Likewise, a short playing time by itself might have affected the depth of
identification. Considering that Papers, Please requires the player to efficiently stamp as many passports as possible, the characters on screen become barely familiar to him. Though the game includes reoccurring characters with emotional story arcs, experiencing these requires hours of playing. Indeed, it has been established that as in real life, also in fiction the duration of familiarity is important in being able to identify with a character (Rubin &
McHugh, 1987).
As identification was hypothesized to mediate attitudes (H3), it can therefore be argued that the limitations concerning identification had direct effect on H1a and H1b, which posited that those in the playing condition would be more supportive of immigration and be more critical about border control, respectively. Other factors, apart from those mentioned above, that must be considered are perceived realism and similarity of audience to the characters. According to Cohen (2001), similarity (for example age, gender and race),
increases the likelihood of identification. Papers, Please is rendered in crude graphics resembling those of two decades ago, and the characters are visually quite unattractive, sometimes even off-putting, with their gray faces and cold demeanor. In a way, they
represent stereotypical immigrants and refugees, and as was discussed above, portrayals like this can cause prejudice (Eagly & Mladinic, 1989; Stangor et al., 1991; Stephan et al., 1994), and resonate strongly with our ‘knowledge store’ (Price & Tewksbury 1997) of refugees and immigrants. These effects might have been further strengthened by the fact that the player has a partly antagonistic relation to the non-playable characters as he needs to find a balance between doing border checks efficiently and being empathic towards the immigrant characters. In contrast, those in the reading condition were able to imagine the immigrants themselves and had a less antagonistic relation to them as observers rather than players.
In the end, mediation by identification (H3) only got support in one instance, namely in how the participants felt about whether governments should be more generous in judging people’s applications for refugee status. Importantly, this variable had a strong and direct connection to the player’s role as a border control officer, which was reflected in how the participants in the playing condition showed less enthusiasm for generosity. Similarly, players’ less favorable attitudes towards immigration of Jews, Muslims and Gypsies, though not mediated, could possibly be explained through stereotyping and negative immigrant connotations. Visually, many of the game’s characters look like what could be considered an immigrant to a European person, so perhaps these attitudes were at least partly influenced by the game.
Taken together, the findings, though mostly contradicting the hypotheses, are still quite interesting in the light of the discussion above. Leaning on the theories that
identification would create empathy towards fictional characters and then affect attitude formation, it was hypothesized that participants in playing condition would be more empathic
towards immigrants. Though this line of thinking was justified theoretically, it was the opposite that actually received some support. Given the short playing time, the player’s role and the general atmosphere of the game, the results are not that surprising in retrospect. It would be interesting to see if longer playing time would produce different results through stronger identification and immersion in the game’s world and its characters fates.
General limitations of this study included a relatively small, non-random sample and uncontrolled settings. The sample consisted of 48 people, aged on average 25.73 years, who were mostly university students, meaning the findings cannot be generalized to the total population. Regarding settings, for practical and monetary reasons the author of this paper did not have access to facilities where background variables could be controlled for. Each participant had to be separately recruited in various locations, both in online and offline environments. Because of this, factors such as whether the participants were fully committed to the experiment, if they were tired, or busy attending to something else, varied between subjects.
Conclusion and implications
The study at hand concerned a video game that belongs to a relatively new genre called “empathy games”. These games could be said to fall between serious games and commercial games: They cause the player to understand the existence of other lives by expressing
questions of agency, empathy and social change, yet they also strive to be entertaining in a traditional sense of playing, in which achieving a high score and overcoming obstacles are the ultimate goals.
Academic implications of this study concern the importance of playtime and
frustration stemming from an inability to play correctly. Though conducting experiments can reveal more about correlations between playing and attitude formation than cross-sectional
studies (Granic, Lobel & Rutger, 2014), they are limited by short playing times. When a participant only has a little time to become immersed in a game—and much of this time goes into processing how to actually play—chances are that identification and immersion will stay at low levels. If inability to play leads to frustration and anger, identification and immersion can decrease even more. This can, in particular, affect results of those experiments in which games are cartoony or unrealistic and thus quite unbelievable in comparison to other
generally used experiment conditions, such as movies or written stories, of which the latter are illustrated mentally by participants themselves.
In little more than two decades video games have evolved from simple two-dimensional arcade games to photorealistic and immersive narrative experiences. As a growing number of people spend their leisure time playing them, it follows that video games must be better understood as important symbolic systems, which can have broad socio-political impact. Further, virtual reality systems such as Oculus Rift, which will soon become available to consumers, have the potential to take playing to a level where one actually feels as if one is in a different place, as a different person. Decision-makers and scholars could possibly learn much from this rather young form of entertainment, which has become activity enjoyed by the population at large—and a possible channel for attitude change.
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Appendix A: Text condition
Imagine you are a customs officer in an unnamed country in Europe. Your task is to review
paperwork of people intending to enter the country, and only allow those who have their paperwork in order to enter. Every day a long queue of restless people – people wanting to join their families, seek opportunities in your country or escape violence – forms in front of the Customs office booth. The swirling queue is tightly monitored by armed guards on both sides of the fence that runs directly from your booth to the building across you. All attempts of illegally crossing the border are futile, and those trying it risk their lives as the guards will open fire after giving initial warnings.
It’s a new day, and you arrive at your booth, ready as ever to serve the country that brings the bread to your, and your family’s, table. You sit down and quickly scan the table in front of you. On it you find your trustworthy rule book, which contains the most important tools of your trade: rules concerning admitting and rejecting entrants and the regional map of the seven neighbouring countries where entrants may be from.
“Next!”, shout the speakers attached to your booth as you call the first person in from the queue. You raise the shutters in the booth and see a man in red jumper in front of you. “Papers, please”, you demand, upon which he gives you his passport. “Eso Jung, male, born in March 23, 1944”, you read
“I can finally return home”, he tells you relieved.
He is a citizen of the country with a valid passport so you let him in. “Next!”
The person standing in front of you seems exhausted and angry.
“I have waited in this damn line for five hours. I really hope it was worth it.”, he remarks as you inspect his passport. His name is Karl Frentz, a man in his 40s.
Unfortunately for him, he has to walk away from the booth empty-handed; for the time being only nationals of the country are allowed in, and he is from a neighboring country.
“Unbelievable! Go to hell!”, he exclaims as you give him his passport with a red stamp on it. Rules are rules, you tell yourself while feeling a little bit bad for the man. Some of the people you send back on their ways because you detect some discrepancies between their habitus and their passport. Or maybe you just don’t like their looks: too dark skinned, too androgynous, his face doesn’t please you.
Sometimes their passport isn’t valid anymore, which you rightly point out to them.
Mothers, fathers, uncles, brothers, blue- and white-collar workers, old and young. In your job you see all kinds of people.
These thoughts linger in your mind for the rest of the day as you efficiently stamp your way through peoples’ dreams and fears and watch the border in front of you separate human lives.
The next morning you walk again to your booth under a grey sky, through a grey area of asphalt and concrete buildings. There’s already a long queue in front of your booth.
After months of strict border control and only letting nationals in the country, you are informed that from today onwards also non-nationals with an entry ticket can migrate – as long as the ticket is still valid. You encounter various people before you: A woman in her 50s; an older man, citizen of your country, who tells you to hurry up as his bus is leaving soon; a young woman who claims that her passport isn’t expired unlike you tell her.
Working as a border officer is strenuous work, and sometimes you do mistakes, of which you learn about afterwards when you receive a citation stating that you have violated the protocol. Get enough of these and it will show on your modest salary.
During the last hour of the day you see a man running past the border with something in his hands. You hear sirens go off, and immediately the people queuing are instructed to run away. The guards ask the man to stop, but he just pushes forward, and in the blink of an eye throws something next to a guard. It’s a bomb, but before it explodes, the guard shoots his rifle and hits fatally the bomber. You hear people screaming, and see the other guards rushing in to see if there’s anything they could still do. There isn’t.
You are told to go home. As you walk away you see two bodies behind you. In these times your country’s nationalistic policies have created strong feelings, even hatred, in many of those who think they are entitled to migrate but fail to do so because of strict border control. Most of these people express their contempt in media, and of course in your work you will get your share of criticism on a daily basis. Resorting to violence, however, is rare despite the suffering these would-be-immigrants go through.
Maybe this bomber had had his share of all this, and like some others around the world, resorted to taking his life to make a statement.
But his deed, and the growing queues around the world, will do little to bring about change. As for you, you will wake up in twelve hours and resume your work, in which you will momentarily get a peek at the life of others, and then send them on their way either in tears of sadness or joy.
