Astonishing to consider that a year ago Papers, Please was barely on the game industry's hype radar.

This small game, in which the player takes on the role of a border-guard working for a violent and oppressive regime, is a long way from the mainstream view of games, so often assumed to be frivolities and dumb escapism.

As the player, you represent the full and awesome power of bureaucracy, with power over the lives of others. You are also tasked with preserving the future of an evil regime. You can do things that make you feel like a better person, like reuniting families who lack the correct papers, but you are putting the lives and safety of your own family at grave risk.

It's a situation that isn't "fun" in the traditional sense, but gaming allows the player to feel like they control the lives of others, for good or ill. It's one thing to talk about the banality of evil when it comes to faceless bureaucracy, but it's quite another when the player is asked to becomes a cog in that machine.

When it arrived last summer, commentators, bloggers and critics began to take notice. Positive reactions brought this striking and upsetting game to the attention of many players

Last night, Papers, Please picked up three independent Game Festival Awards including the grand prize as well as Game Developers Choice Awards for Innovation and Best Downloadable.

It was a remarkable haul for a game that takes a spot-the-difference mechanic and elevates it to searing political commentary, urging the player to reconsider uncomfortable self-delusions about the nature of good and evil.

Papers, Please managed to capture indie gaming's newfound confidence not merely to create fun diversions, but to say something meaningful, in ways that no other medium can emulate.

"Games are in a unique position to address ideas and change opinions over books and movies and television," said creator Lucas Pope in a backstage interview with Polygon after the awards ceremony. "I think it's a great thing."

Papers, Please has helped mainstream media to finally understand that games have moved on, significantly, since the days of Pac-Man. It has been cited by numerous outlets, from NBC to The New Yorker, as an example of gaming's potential to test story-telling boundaries.

It is also significant that, according to Pope, the game has thus far sold an impressive 500,000 copies. Judging by the cheers and applause that greeted every award, most of the press and industry presence at the awards show had played it as well. This wasn't a niche title, it had broken through to a fairly wide audience.

"People come up to me and say how much the game means to them," said Pope, as he accepted his first award of the night. "That means a whole lot to me."

"More and more different kinds of games are being made," said Steve Gaynor, one of the developers behind Gone Home, which picked up a GDCA for Best Debut. "I think [tonight's awards] show the breadth of stuff that is coming out, and giving us more topics to talk about."

Picking up an honor for her outstanding work on documentary series Tropes vs Women in Games, Anita Sarkeesian talked about how games are being taken seriously, as an agency of social commentary and as a catalyst for social change. Her work, she said, was an attempt to understand games in the context of their larger role in our culture.

Pope said that he hopes his success will inspire fellow developers. "I had some idea that people would enjoy the game but I didn't think it would have this sort of impact. Some people at GDC have come up to me and said that it was an inspiration to them which is really the highest form of praise."

At the annual GDC "rant session" today, veteran game developer Brenda Romero talked about her anger towards inane responses to the sexual harassment many women experience in the game business.

She said that comments from men who offer robust suggestions on how to handle harassment are almost always unhelpful. Romero referenced an ugly incident earlier this year, in which a male reporter made vulgar comments to a woman in the game industry during an online conversation.

In the aftermath of the event, many commentators felt able to offer suggestions on how the victim ought to have handled the situation, even though few of them had been through a similar experience.

The GDC rant sessions allow a panel of speakers to address issues that make them angry, sometimes in a humorous way, and sometimes not.

Romero recalled a personal incident from around 2005, when she was sitting in a fancy hotel bar at GDC, chatting with a well known male game developer. She said she was happy to be talking shop with this man, who she did not name.

"He moved his coat from his lap and there it was," she said. "Even though I had been excited to talk with his guy I didn't know what to do or what to say." He was showing her the outline of an erection, under his trousers.

"I awkwardly ignored it and I tried to back away," she said. "I knew I wasn't going to get attacked so I walked back into the conference with this piece of shit and I felt shame and I felt like a piece of garbage because I didn't say anything. I felt like a deer in the headlights. The was a profound power differential, and it was not OK."

"Stop blaming the victim"

Romero noted that she is not regarded as a reticent or timid person, but that she simply did not know how else to react to such an unexpected and unwelcome act of sexual aggression from a person she had previously admired. She said the responses to sexual harassment are, all too often, to focus on the victim, rather than the transgressor.

"You don't have the foggiest idea what you would have said [in that situation]. Stop blaming the victim," she said.

At last year's GDC, Romero quit trade body the IGDA following a party in which skimpily dressed women were hired as dancers. In the aftermath of E3 last year, various reports emerged of women working in the game industry, facing unwelcome attention and upsetting remarks from some male attendees.

In another speech during the rant session, Mitu Khandaker from developer The Tiniest Shark talked about negative reactions to her decision to include a trigger warning in her game Red Shirts. The game featured satirical examples of sexual harassment which had triggered physical reactions among some players who had suffered real life abuse. She said she was "pissed off on multiple levels" by people criticizing and questioning her decision, without much in the way of experience of trigger responses.

Other speeches at this year's tenth anniversary GDC rant focused on issues like distribution portals and monetization in free-to-play games.

Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, saw its profits more than double in 2013, when the studio earned 816 million Swedish kronor ($128 million), The Wall Street Journal reports.

Revenue was up 38 percent to 2.07 billion kronor ($322.4 million) last year, according to figures provided to the Journal. As the publication points out, the Swedish studio of fewer than 40 employees crossed this milestone with a game first released in 2009 and which eschews the free-to-play model.

The financial results are the latest in a series of ongoing milestones for the blocky sandbox game across several platforms. Earlier this year, Markus "Notch" Persson announced that Minecraft's original PC version had reached 100 million registered users, 14.3 precent of which converted to paid accounts. In February, Notch revealed that Minecraft sold more than 14 million units on PC since its release. Released in May 2013, the game's Xbox 360 incarnation surpassed 11 million sales as of February 2014. Sales figures as of January 2014 put Minecraft's PlayStation 3 version sales at more than 1 million units since its December 2013 release.

Minecraft is also available for Android and iOS and is headed to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PlayStation Vita. A Minecraft movie is in development at Warner Bros.