Bureaucracy. It seems inescapable in real life, so why not make a game about it?
In these games, the player takes on the role of a bureaucrat of some stripe, who has to follow every nitpicky rule set by their superiors, deal with frustrated clients, or handle weird stuff that you'd hope isn't a regular feature of real bureaucracy.
Presumably there's some catharsis appeal.
Frequently, these games exaggerate the hurdles that bureaucrats have to jump for comedic effect. Other times they might add fantastic elements, such as featuring the protagonist as an employee of a Celestial Bureaucracy rather than a mortal one.
Examples:
- Accounting initially presents itself as one but it very quickly goes off the rails.
- Baba Files Taxes
is a spin off from Baba is You where you fill out Baba's tax paperwork.
- Booth: A Dystopian Adventure involves working as a food inspector in a dystopian society, which includes testing, sorting, weighing, sterilizing and otherwise processing an often continuous stream of food.
- Bureaucracy is a point-and-click adventure game written partially by Douglas Adams where the universe seems to be conspiring against your attempt to file a change-of-address form.
- Coldline is a game where you play as a Soviet agent who must navigate an overly-complicated phone hotline in order to prevent a nuclear war.
- Death and Taxes follows a new intern at the Department of Fate struggling to maintain the balance of the universe by deciding who lives and who dies.
- Mind Scanners draws a lot of inspiration from Papers, Please. You are employed by the authoritarian "Structure" to give door-to-door psych evaluations of residents of The Structure who are marked as being potential future risks to society. Anyone who is deemed to be a risk (and what is considered a risk can be anything from "being prone to deception" to "having a tendency to steal things"), you get the pleasure of setting them straight by erasing parts of their personality and their memories. Each day you have to meet a certain quota and the evaluation demands get increasingly more rigorous as time goes by, with the cost of you failing being that your daughter, who has a "mysterious illness", doesn't receive the treatment she needs.
- In Need to Know, the player is moving through the ranks of the Department of Liberty (or No Such Agency), with the opportunity to leak information about mass surveillance.
- Not Tonight is a dark satire of Post-Brexit Britain where the player is forced into being a bouncer who assesses paperwork before letting anyone in to maintain the government's Europhobic policies.
- Papers, Please could very well be the Trope Codifier, in which one plays as a customs official for the post-communist republic of Arstotzka, trying to clear enough entrants to the country who meet the government's requirements of the day so that your family doesn't starve.
- Return Of The Obra Dinn is a supernatural take on the concept where you play the role of an insurance company investigator cataloguing how the crew of the titular ship died with the aid of a watch that shows the final seconds of a corpse's life.
- That's Not My Neighbor involves carefully examining IDs, entry requests, and appearances of several people who live in an apartment complex waiting to enter in order to tell whether the people infront of you are legitimate or doppelgangers waiting to eat you and all your neighbors.
Parodies
- In the Corner Gas Animated episode "Anger Games", Wanda designs her own realistic city-building game where the fun is supposed to come from finding bureaucratic loopholes. Brent and Hank are unimpressed, so she tries to appease them by adding timed missions themed around delivering forms to the proper offices before they close. This still doesn't interest them, so Wanda resorts to adding superfluous fantasy and Grand Theft Auto elements.
- Parodied in Grand Theft Auto IV with in-game advertisements for Civil Service, a game which allows the player to do things like "design traffic patterns to keep undesirables in the ghetto", and "take virtual payola to seize homes under eminent domain".
Father: When does the game end?Son: Never! I'm gonna play 'till I die!''
- Parodied in xkcd, where Cueball manages to trick the local board game club into doing his tax returns for him by framing filling out forms as a novel board game.
