The trouble arises when viewing Prison Architect as anything other than a particularly captivating and colorful ant farm-which is exactly what Introversion wants its players to do. No simulation can, of course, perfectly represent its subject, and so verisimilitude is a poor basis for judging Prison Architect as a simulation. Particularly admirable is Prison Architect’s sensitivity to how incarceration can exacerbate or ameliorate the interlocking problems of drug addiction and alcoholism (in 2002, 68 percent of inmates suffered from substance dependency), lack of education (roughly half of inmates are functionally illiterate), and recidivism (more than 60 percent of released prisoners will return to prison within three years).Īt the same time, however, the distortions Prison Architect makes-escapes are constant, riots are quotidian, and, above all, race is virtually devoid of meaning-betray Introversion’s prime directive: the pleasure of the player.
#GAMES LIKE PRISON ARCHITECT SERIES#
Whereas Valusoft’s lamentable Prison Tycoon series gleefully exploited mass incarceration as a vaguely subversive veneer for its shoddy simulations, Prison Architect genuinely attempts to model the systems that, together, comprise the complex ethnology that is the 21st-century American prison. And, to a degree, Prison Architect achieves this goal. Introversion has been transparent about its desire for Prison Architect to provoke reflection about the American prison-industrial complex, and to do so in a way that does not exploit the suffering of those caught behind its jaws of steel. Few games can hope to match Prison Architect’s emergent storytelling, and fewer still can balance brutality and poignancy like it does. And Prison Architect, to be sure, is an excellent game, worthy of comparison to its canonical inspirations, Dwarf Fortress and Bullfrog Productions’ 1990 construct-and-manage simulations. But the reasons betray Introversion’s intentions: The game comes first, everything else, last.
There are good reasons to choose the electric chair and its symbolic capital over its less spectacular successor, lethal injection. Yet this oddity quickly comes to represent Prison Architect’s relationship to its subject matter: For all of Introversion’s developer diaries about their sensitivity to the minutiae of the penal system, Prison Architect isn’t shy about its distortions and oversights, necessary sacrifices on the thirsty altar of “fun.” Prison Architect, after all, has been marketed and developed as one (British) studio’s take on the contemporary (American) prison-industrial complex. The electric chair, its fatal technique refined and its debut hastily forgotten, ruled capital punishment for nearly 75 years, but a series of botched executions in the 1960s sparked a Supreme Court case that led to its effective retirement.Īt first, the historically anomaly is odd. A milquetoast, Walter White-type has murdered his wife and her lover, and you, the architect, must carry out his punishment. Prison Architect, Introversion Software’s long-awaited incarceration simulator, begins by asking the player to construct an electric chair. The Game Design of Everyday Things: To Shape the Future.Want To Learn About Game Design? Go to IKEA.
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