As any thinking person knows, capitalism is a deeply fraught economic doctrine. The teachings of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are littered with false promises and built on a foundation twisted premises. Simply put, capitalism has let down a great many.

Despite these flaws, victims and broken dreams, this system of economic governance (if you will) has wrought upon mankind one great gift.

That gift is called Papers Please.

To talk about Papers Please, we must first talk about its creator, Lucas Pope. Like many game developers of his era, Lucas began his career as a contributor to the Quake modding community. Unlike other developers, however, Pope demonstrated his genius auteurism from the very beginning. Allow me to demonstrate this point by alluding to an early pet project of Pope's named Re-mission. In a word, Re-mission is a shooter that makes children with cancer to take their chemotherapy medication. Yes, Lucas Pope literally cured cancer with his first game out of school. This hopefully give you some small insight into what this man is capable of.

While his obvious talents were courted by major players of the adolescent video games industry, none were able to hold the interests of this auteur genius for any length of time throughout the noughties. Having emancipated himself from the bindings of this constrictive industry by the turn of the decade, Lucas and set himself about the work of his magnum opus - Papers Please.

The game is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Only those with courage and imagination to cast aside the commonly held 'truths' of our paradigm dare relish the exquisite fruits born by Papers Please. The genius of Papers Please is that it at once depends on and stimulates the imagination of the player. This contradiction if the first of many that render Papers Please the most immersive video game ever made.

On the theme of contradiction, the story seamlessly vacillates between timeless allegory and critique of contemporary structural and post-structural political philosophies (think Bismarck's realpolitik, Durkheim's cult of the individual and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥'s end of history). Similarly, the gameplay encourages the player to engage with these constructs through challenge or vindication, and commonly both.

In terms of gameplay, the player uses work to navigate the political machinations of the setting - much like the RTS player deftly handles his Terran harvesters to acquire more minerals. In many ways the player's service to the state (and powers beyond) are inseparable from the service he provides to his family.

It is without hyperbole that I say: Papers Please is our generation's fall of the Berlin Wall. Not before or since has humankind (an individual in this instance) so clearly and succinctly expressed of the interface between what is private and what is political. These constructs are torn asunder and remodelled an infinite number of times during the course of a single playthrough.

A great man once said it was that Doom (1993) convinced him that video games were the future of entertainment, and Super Mario 64 (1996) that games were art.

Papers Please (2013) then demonstrates that video games are the future of art.

Godspeed Lucas Pope.

- Mac Tonight (formerly Tony Abbot MP)