Power is usually the subject fiction handles with the least subtlety. Novels give it to kings and villains. Films hand it to whoever holds the gun in the final act. But video games do something most other mediums can’t: they hand power directly to the audience, moment by moment, and then quietly watch what the audience decides to do with it.
That difference changes everything. When you read about a character abusing their power, you judge them from a comfortable distance. When a game hands you the power — the trigger, the vote, the knife, the choice to walk away — the judgment stops being about a character and starts being about you. Few art forms put the audience in that position, which is exactly why the philosophy of video games keeps returning to power as one of its richest, most uncomfortable subjects.
This essay looks at three very different games — BioShock, Papers, Please, and Undertale — not as reviews, but as three distinct philosophical positions on power, disguised as game design. None of these games agree with each other. Read together, they form something close to a real philosophical argument about what power actually is, and what it does to the person holding it.
Table of Contents
Power as a Mechanic, Not Just a Story Beat
Before getting into specific games, it’s worth pausing on something we rarely examine closely: in most video games, power isn’t just something a character has. It’s something the player does. You level up, unlock abilities, gain currency, gather followers, or simply learn where the game’s boundaries are and how far you can push them. Power, in games, is usually measurable, visible, and yours to spend.
This is fundamentally different from how power tends to work in literature or film, where it’s mostly something observed from the outside — a king’s decree, a general’s order, a villain’s monologue. In games, power is functional. It’s a resource you manage, a system you learn, a lever you pull, and — crucially — a decision you keep making, over and over, usually without a game ever stopping to ask if you’re comfortable with what you just did.
Why This Matters Philosophically
Treating power as an ongoing mechanic rather than a single dramatic event echoes an old philosophical concern, one that shows up across very different thinkers: that power reveals character not through the big, obvious decisions, but through the accumulation of small, repeatable ones. Hannah Arendt’s writing on authority and obedience suggested that the most unsettling abuses of power often come not from monstrous individuals but from ordinary people simply doing what the system in front of them made easy to do. Games are unusually well-suited to dramatizing this, because they don’t just tell you a character had power. They make you exercise it, repeatedly, until a pattern of choices becomes visible — to the game, and to yourself.
This is the foundation that BioShock, Papers, Please, and Undertale each build on — but they take that foundation in three completely different directions.
BioShock: Power as the Illusion of Choice
In BioShock, developed by Irrational Games, you play a plane crash survivor who descends into Rapture, an underwater city built on a philosophy of total individual freedom, now collapsed into ruin. You gain power quickly and viscerally: genetic modifications called Plasmids let you set enemies on fire, summon swarms of bees from your hand, or freeze the water around you solid. Rapture is, on paper, a playground for anyone who wants to feel powerful.
What makes BioShock philosophically interesting is the twist that arrives roughly two-thirds through the game, which this essay won’t spoil in detail, except to say that it recontextualizes every choice the player believed they were making up to that point. The power you thought you were exercising freely turns out to have been shaped, at every step, by forces outside your awareness. The game doesn’t just tell you this happened to your character. It makes you feel, retroactively, how little “choice” meant in a system designed to make obedience feel like free will.
Practical Example: “Would You Kindly”
Without spoiling the specific mechanism, a recurring phrase threads through BioShock‘s dialogue, attached to almost every major task the player is asked to perform. It sounds like a polite suggestion. It functions like something closer to a command. By the time the game reveals what that phrase actually is, most players realize they’ve spent hours following instructions structured to feel voluntary, simply because nothing about the framing invited suspicion.
This lands harder than a simple twist because it targets something specific to games as a medium: the assumption that if the player is the one pressing the button, the player must be the one deciding. BioShock argues, through its own core mechanic, that this assumption can be manufactured. Power can be handed to you in a form carefully designed to feel like agency while actually being obedience — a distinction that matters just as much outside Rapture as inside it, in workplaces, institutions, and relationships built to make compliance feel like a personal choice.
Papers, Please: Power as Complicity Within a System
If BioShock treats power as something that can be manufactured and mistaken for freedom, Papers, Please, developed by Lucas Pope, treats it as something smaller, duller, and in some ways more disturbing: the accumulated weight of hundreds of tiny bureaucratic decisions, each one individually defensible, that add up to real harm.
You play an immigration inspector at the border checkpoint of the fictional, authoritarian state of Arstotzka, stamping passports, checking documents, and deciding who gets to enter and who gets turned away. Your power here isn’t a Plasmid or a special ability. It’s a rubber stamp, a rulebook that changes daily, and a family at home whose rent depends on how many travelers you process correctly, and how quickly.
Why Bureaucracy Is the Perfect Setting for This Question
Bureaucracy is often treated in fiction as background texture — the tedious machinery a hero has to cut through on the way to a real conflict. Papers, Please does something braver: it makes the bureaucracy itself the entire conflict, and puts the player squarely inside it, not as a rebel fighting the system, but as one of its smallest, most replaceable gears.
This matters philosophically because most real abuses of institutional power don’t look like villainy from the inside. They look like a stack of paperwork, a quota, a shift that’s already running long. Papers, Please refuses to let the player feel heroic while making these decisions. Denying an entry that turns out to separate a family, or approving a document that turns out to be forged, doesn’t arrive with dramatic music. It arrives with a stamp sound effect and the next traveler already waiting in line.
A Real-World Parallel: The Banality of Small Decisions
This directly echoes a concept popularized by Arendt after observing the trial of a Nazi bureaucrat: that great harm is very often committed not by fanatics or sadists, but by unremarkable people following procedures, meeting quotas, and rarely pausing to examine the cumulative weight of what they’re actually doing. Papers, Please doesn’t reference this idea explicitly, but it recreates the emotional texture of it almost perfectly. The game’s genius is in how mundane each individual decision feels, and how uncomfortable the totals look when a player finally stops to add them up.
Few games manage to make administrative tedium feel morally significant. Papers, Please does it by refusing to separate the power you hold from the paycheck you need to survive, which is precisely how institutional complicity tends to work outside the game as well.
Undertale: Power as the Restraint Not to Use It
The third game in this essay takes the sharpest turn. Undertale, developed by Toby Fox, gives the player enormous, almost cartoonish power — the ability, in nearly every encounter, to kill anything in your path, including characters the game has spent real effort making you love. And then it spends its entire runtime quietly asking whether you’re going to use that power at all.
Combat in Undertale offers a genuine alternative to violence: you can spare almost every enemy you encounter, defusing the fight through patience, empathy, or simply refusing to strike back, rather than through force. The game never requires this. Killing everything is fully possible, mechanically supported, and — notoriously — remembered by the game long after the fact.
Practical Example: The Weight of a Single Spared Enemy
There’s a moment, common to most first playthroughs, where a clearly hostile-looking enemy attacks relentlessly, and the obvious, instinctive response is to fight back. Choosing instead to spare them — to keep enduring their attacks without retaliating until they exhaust themselves and offer peace — feels, in the moment, almost irrational. Nothing in years of game conditioning prepares a player to not use the power a fight clearly invites.
That discomfort is the entire point. Undertale treats restraint not as the absence of power but as its most difficult expression — harder, in many cases, than simply winning. The game later confronts players who chose violence with the specific, remembered cost of each choice, refusing the usual reset-and-forget logic of video game death. Power, here, isn’t measured by what you’re capable of doing. It’s measured by what you choose not to do when nothing forces your hand either way.
Three Games, Three Philosophies
Put side by side, these three titles form something close to a spectrum:
- BioShock treats power as manufactured obedience disguised as freedom — closer to a system that hands you a leash shaped like a set of car keys.
- Papers, Please treats power as complicity accumulated in small doses — closer to a job that never asks you to do anything monstrous, only something small, repeatedly, until the total is monstrous.
- Undertale treats power as a temptation measured by the restraint it takes to refuse it — closer to a test that only reveals its real stakes to the people who choose not to take the easy option.
None of these approaches is “correct” in some objective sense. What’s interesting is that all three are legitimate, well-supported responses to the same basic human question: what does it actually mean to hold power over someone or something else? The philosophy of games doesn’t need to give a single answer here, and arguably shouldn’t. Its strength lies in offering multiple, playable perspectives on a question philosophy has argued over for centuries without ever fully resolving.
Why Multiple Perspectives Matter More Than One “Right” Answer
This is worth sitting with for a moment. If only one of these games existed, players might mistake its particular stance on power for the definitive gaming take on the subject. But because BioShock, Papers, Please, and Undertale coexist, each with dedicated communities still debating their endings years later, they demonstrate something valuable: video games, as a medium, are mature enough to hold contradictory truths about power simultaneously. That’s not a weakness. It’s closer to how power actually functions in real life — sometimes manufactured, sometimes accumulated in small doses, sometimes simply a temptation waiting to see whether you’ll reach for it.
The Role of Player Agency in How These Lessons Land
There’s a detail that’s easy to overlook when comparing these three games: in every case, the player isn’t just watching a philosophy of power unfold on a screen — they’re the one whose hand is on the controller when the decision actually gets made. This distinction matters more than it might seem.
In BioShock, you’re the one who has already followed dozens of instructions before the game reveals what following them meant. In Papers, Please, you’re the one stamping the passport, watching your own family’s rent numbers tick alongside a stranger’s fate. In Undertale, you’re the one deciding, attack by attack, whether an enemy lives or dies, with no narrator to make that decision easier or harder than it actually feels.
This is a structural difference between games and other storytelling mediums that’s easy to underestimate. A novel can describe a character discovering they were complicit in something they didn’t fully understand. A film can show an inspector growing numb to the human cost of a stamp. A game can put you in the position of making the actual decisions that constitute that process — and because you can’t fully blame a character for choices you made yourself, the discomfort tends to feel earned rather than delivered. This is arguably the single strongest argument for taking video game philosophy seriously as its own category of thought, rather than treating it as a secondhand version of ideas explored more “properly” in other mediums.
A Small But Telling Detail: Achievements That Punish “Winning”
It’s worth noting that both BioShock and Undertale include content specifically designed to make a maximally “powerful” playthrough feel hollow rather than triumphant — endings, encounters, or entire modes that treat total dominance as the worst possible outcome available, not the best. Whatever a given player’s approach, this design choice highlights something philosophically pointed: these developers built systems where using all the power available to you isn’t the win condition. Sometimes it’s explicitly framed as the loss condition, dressed up to look like victory until the credits reveal otherwise.
This is a stronger, more literal echo of the ethical argument that unrestrained power tends to corrode whoever wields it, a position philosophers have debated in abstract terms for centuries, here made concrete through a save file that remembers exactly how many enemies you chose not to spare.
What This Means Outside the Game
It’s tempting to treat these observations as interesting trivia about game design and stop there. But the reason this topic belongs in a broader conversation about gaming and philosophy is that these three approaches map fairly directly onto how power actually operates in real institutions, workplaces, and relationships.
Some situations resemble BioShock‘s model most closely — systems, workplaces, or relationships structured so that compliance is dressed up convincingly enough to feel like a personal choice, right up until someone points out the phrase that was doing the actual work the whole time. Others resemble Papers, Please — jobs and bureaucracies where no single decision feels like an abuse of power, yet the totals, examined honestly, tell a harder story than any individual choice would suggest. And some moments call for the restraint Undertale insists on: having real leverage over someone, in an argument, a negotiation, a position of authority, and choosing, deliberately, not to use all of it just because you can.
None of these approaches is universally correct, and few people or institutions fit neatly into just one. Most of us move between all three, depending on the system we’re standing inside at a given moment. What video games offer, uniquely among storytelling mediums, is the chance to rehearse each of these positions safely, one controller in hand, before the stakes are real and the reset button no longer exists.
Conclusion: Why Games Are an Underrated Space for Thinking About Power
Power is one of the few subjects almost everyone will eventually hold some version of, however small — over a decision, a conversation, a person who trusts them more than they realize. And yet it remains one of the hardest topics to examine honestly, because admitting you have power over someone else usually means admitting you could misuse it. Video games, strangely, have become one of the more honest spaces for approaching this — not through lectures or grand statements, but through systems that let players practice different relationships with power before life demands an answer for real.
BioShock teaches that power can be manufactured to feel like freedom, and that recognizing the difference is its own kind of vigilance. Papers, Please teaches that institutional harm rarely announces itself, arriving instead as an accumulation of small, defensible choices. Undertale teaches that the hardest exercise of power is often the choice not to use it at all. None of these lessons arrive as dialogue or exposition. They arrive through play — through the actual, repeated act of holding real leverage over something and choosing, each time, what to do with it.
That might be the quiet, underappreciated gift of gaming and philosophy as a genre: it doesn’t ask you to agree with a single conclusion about power. It hands you the controller, and lets you find out, one decision at a time, what kind of person you actually are when nothing but your own judgment is standing between you and the person on the other side of the screen.
None of these games will tell you exactly how much power is too much in the specific situation you’re facing, and that’s probably the point. The value isn’t in the answer — it’s in having rehearsed the question, safely, before real life asked it of you without warning.
This essay is part of an ongoing series on the philosophy of video games — exploring power, identity, sacrifice, and the choices that define us, one title at a time.