Border control simulation Papers, Please has won the fourth annual GameCity prize. Jurors from outside of the games industry, including the musician Peter Gabriel and the film director Darren Aronofsky, spent the summer playing and discussing six games from a varied shortlist, and their winner was announced on Wednesday night during the ongoing GameCity festival in Nottingham.

The game, which puts players into the role of an immigration officer in a fictitious eastern European country, beat the Nintendo 3DS life simulation Animal Crossing: New Leaf, puzzle-platformer Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, first-person story exploration game Gone Home, the infamous big-budget open-world shooter Grand Theft Auto V, and episodic point and click adventure game Kentucky Route Zero.

“Unlike previous years there wasn’t a clear critical consensus,” said the journalist Samira Ahmed, who led the jury. “Some jurors found games that felt like interactive movies or impressionistic models, while others found liberating creative worlds in which you could do anything.”

According to Ahmed, Gabriel “liked being mayor” in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, while Aronofsky “said he had never been so terrified by a video game and even admitted to screaming” while playing Gone Home. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, apparently felt “really conflicted about the amount of violence” in Grand Theft Auto V but still chose it as his favourite, which may surprise those who are familiar with GameCity’s focus on smaller indie games.

“I would have been surprised if Grand Theft Auto had won,” said Henry Smith, creator of last year’s GameCity prize winner Spaceteam, “I think everyone knows how important it is and how successful it’s been, and I think festivals like this are all about bringing exposure to people who might not otherwise have it. It was a toss-up between Papers, Please and Gone Home for me personally.”

Of Papers, Please, Ahmed said, “The jury found this an excellent example of a game with the power to affect people and the way they think about contemporary issues of identity in a subtle but powerful way, and all while effectively holding down a desk job.”

Gone Home, which has already won several awards, seems to have been a close contender for the prize. “I think there was a huge amount of admiration in the room for it as storytelling,” Ahmed said. “We all really enjoyed it. It was on everyone’s list.” In the end, however, Ahmed felt that Gone Home “lacked a compelling conclusion”, which is especially interesting given that game critics have almost universally praised the plot.

Culture v critics



One intriguing outcome of the GameCity prize is to see where the views of the jurors differ from those more familiar with games and where they converge. For example, some jurors found it difficult to control Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which assigns each analogue stick to a different brother, while experienced games critics found the mechanic novel and interesting. However, one of the jury’s criticisms of Kentucky Route Zero – that dialogue options don’t lead to different outcomes – has been similarly noted by game reviewers.

“I think it’s good that the judges are non games players,” said Ian Livingstone CBE, co-founder of Games Workshop and member of GameCity’s advisory board. “They’re putting their take on what they see as their favourite games.”

Iain Simons, director of GameCity, agreed: “For me, it’s not about which is the best game at all. It’s sort of incidental, really, that there even is a winner. It’s about the fact that you can get curious and supportive voices from different cultures who are interested and who are being invited into that conversation.”

“Who owns what we think about games?” Simons asked. Hopefully, GameCity’s recently announced cultural centre for gaming, the National Videogame Arcade, will help to demonstrate the answer: no one, and everyone.