“...it attempts to simulate the complexities of prison life.”

August 20, 2018 7:52 AM

Prison Architect: once you're in, you can't get out [The Guardian] “Prison Architect is a simulation in which players take on the design and running of a major US correctional facility. On first loading the game you’re tasked with taking over an existing prison. The current CEO wants you to build an execution facility for a double murderer, known simply as Edward. It is through this rather macabre tutorial that you’re shown the basics of prison architecture, creating foundations, building walls and adding power and water utilities. You’re also shown how to escort the non-playable characters around the prison. It’s an introduction that makes two things clear: that the prison system is effectively a business, and that it’s a business that involves death.” [YouTube][Game Trailer]

• A Clink of One’s Own [The New Yorker]

“It isn’t clear whether Prison Architect has prompted many of its players to undertake what Morris called a “proper exploration of the prison system.” Certainly people have bought the game in droves. It has been in “open development” since 2012, meaning that players have been able to play a pre-release version in exchange for funding Introversion’s further work on it. (So far, the company has earned more than ten million dollars this way.) But Morris says that the process of developing Prison Architect has sharpened his personal views on incarceration. “There are some dangers of an unchecked prison-industrial complex that I hadn’t previously considered,” he told me. A clearer proxy for the game’s moral ramifications, however, might be the discussions about it on Reddit, where long threads are dedicated to the ins and outs of prison management. A sample request: “Need some help getting my income back up + dealing with dead prisoners.””

• Prison Architect Devs Wonder if Their Game Should Have Looked Less Like America [Kotaku]

“Even though the game uses dollars for its currency, places its inmates in orange jumpsuits, and begins its campaign with a reference to the electric chair, the game is intended to simulate what Morris calls “a prison in the sky.” The two men, who are British, disagree on whether they did enough to make that clear. “When we first tackled this project, we assumed that you could isolate a prison from the society in which it is constructed,” Morris said. “That was our goal. And so you think about the boundaries of the map—the bus comes in, and there’s people on the bus, but the game does nothing to simulate the society from which those people come into your prison.” He went on to say, “One of the issues that often gets talked about is race, and the fact that we’ve not really dealt with it. And race is a huge issue in U.S. prisons. But that’s because race is a huge issue in U.S. society. It’s very difficult for us to build the simulation beyond the walls, if you like. We had to draw a line somewhere and say, ‘No, we’re simulating a kind of ideal prison in the sky.’ And I think that a lot of the reviewers, certainly in the U.S., have not accepted us saying that. “They’ve said, ‘Now hang on. It looks like it is set in America, it smells like it is set in America.”

• 'Prison Architect' Has No Room for Political Action [Waypoint]

“What the simulation lacks, though, is any explicit modeling of coercion and power structures. The prisoners are either 100% fine with working or they revolt and burn everything. There is no hint of the massive organizational capacity that allowed thousands of prisoners in dozens of prisons across the country to reach out, despite repressive conditions, and coordinate the time and method of a nationwide strike; no conceptual space in the simulation to show how inmates were able to overcome race, gang allegiance, and other barriers surely shocked prison administrators. In Prison Architect, inmates only rebel in ways that are self-destructive and aimless. But imagine a version of the game in which prisoners overcame their basic needs for comfort, shelter, and food to surprise you, the player, with organization, determination, and a list of demands. But do prisoners even have a point in striking? Sure, they may have individual grievances but prison labor in general supposedly has many benefits. They bring up useful sounding programs, like arts & crafts that are then sold to the general public, as well as a restaurant you can go to in a prison, staffed by prisoners. But these anecdotal cases, while certainly appealing, belie a massive system with far-reaching economic effects, especially in the U.S. with its wildly out-of-proportion prison population.”

posted by Fizz (29 comments total)

The art style seems to borrow a lot from that of Rimworld, especially the design of the pawns, which is funny because I think the Rimworld developer has said the pawn are a placeholder until better ones can be designed.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 8:34 AM on August 20, 2018

Hm. They think that it's not specifically American? And (according to the Kotaku article) that the main thing that indicates American-ness of the prison is the color of the jumpsuits? How is the presence of a death penalty -- and specifically via electric chair -- not specifically American? I mean, the only Western country that still has a regularly deployed death penalty is the US and pretty much the only country to ever use the electric chair is the US. These creators are British, no? Is American cultural hegemony so pervasive that capital punishment is considered universal and neutral rather than a bit of an outlier?
posted by mhum at 8:35 AM on August 20, 2018 [10 favorites]

I am sure that were Michel Foucault still alive, he'd have a lot to say about this game, see Discipline and Punish.
posted by Fizz at 8:39 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

The art style seems to borrow a lot from that of Rimworld

Other way around, the developer of Rimworld "drew some inspiration" from Prison Architect.
posted by Eleven at 8:48 AM on August 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

Ah, thanks for the clarification. Since I hadn't heard of PA I assumed it was the newer game.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 8:53 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Prison Architect is one of those games I bought in early access before I realized I really didn't like playing unfinished games. And I've still never played it. I guess it officially was released back in 2015? But then there's major content updates coming still.

Social and political issues aside, how is it as a game? Is it fun? Does it feel complete?
posted by Nelson at 9:13 AM on August 20, 2018

I've sunk many hours into this game since its' early-access days and know it inside and out. It's full and complete and very sophisticated now (though was very glitchy and processor intensive in the beginning) I'd highly recommend it.

It's fantastic how a fairly simple simulation of prisoner and staff 'needs' and their pursuit of fulfilling them can generate entire complex story arcs. Gangs will spread prisoner to prisoner like a virus and get into wars with each other. Unhappy or sloppy guards will let through drugs and weapons leading to addiction issues and violence. A particularly violent psychopath prisoner might destabilize your 'nice' prison and force you to use violence when you set out not to.

The central thesis that the game proves is how violence and dysfunction are usually results of poor management coming from a 'routinization' and/or pursuit of quick profits rather than actual sadism. You might set out to build a 'good' prison in good faith but some aspect of the game will always force you into moral gray areas where you have to grapple with multiple 'bad' choices.

It's a great game, it's just very addictive - there are many ways to play and many features and settings to explore. You can even play as a prisoner inside your own prison which is like a game inside of the game.
posted by mit5urugi at 9:19 AM on August 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

Prison Architect: Nintendo Switch Edition was released today, by the way.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:36 AM on August 20, 2018

I played this a while ago and for a sec I was drawn in to it - the same feedback loop you'd get from a Maxis game only with a little more grit, right? The the "what the hell am I doing? This is gross" hit me and i uninstalled it. I get that it's a simulation that's trying to explain how and why things happen in a prison setting but in the end you're playing a warden and I want nothing to do with that.
posted by thecjm at 9:46 AM on August 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

I have an acquaintance who designs board games; one of their games is a semi-coop where the players play as anarchosocialist factions in a modern American city at the start of a revolution. The actions of the police are simulated by die rolls and a deck of event cards. When asked whether they'd consider a version of the game where most people play as revolutionaries and one player plays as the police, they always respond that they're not interested in either making or playing games where people pretend to be cops, since that can unconsciously give people the idea that it's okay to be a cop.

And that's why, although I love Maxis-likes, I'm never going to touch this game. Pretending to run a prison in a game makes it seem like it's okay to be someone who makes a living running prisons.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:54 AM on August 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

I kind of loathe the "oh this forces you to make morally grey choices" variety of games. It's like a multiple choice dialogue screen that lets you yell at someone, threaten to stab them, or compliment their racist t-shirt, or any of the 90s larp "romance" mechanics that mostly reveal the authors were totes misogynistic. I don't enjoy this and it says something about you if you think this is "gritty" or "realistic" or whatever.

All games make you make contrived choices. imo those choices ought to normalize and encourage kindness, generosity, joy, sincerity, compassion, justice, and so on. if none of your core mechanics enable triumph via cooperation, if everything about your made-up reality is zero-sum, I am not impressed by the situations you consider imaginable and interesting.
posted by bagel at 10:24 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

And that's why, although I love Maxis-likes, I'm never going to touch this game. Pretending to run a prison in a game makes it seem like it's okay to be someone who makes a living running prisons.

.... yeaaahhhh....

My first (and previously only) exposure to this game was randomly seeing it in a Game Stop, and upon seeing the cover art my reaction was basically 'uh what the fuck'. It didn't put it in particularly great framing, in part because of the cartoony style and in part because, I mean, there's a guard with a night stick about to hit a dude as the centerpiece.

I'll have to read more than just the linked review when it's not my lunch break but I admit this wasn't one I expected to see on the blue. Obviously I haven't played it and won't be (moreso because I've got other games going on in my life) but curious to see where the discussion goes. You always bring interesting stuff, Fizz.
posted by nogoodverybad at 10:27 AM on August 20, 2018

IIRC, Prison Architect started out as a cyberpunk hacking/heist game where the player would have spent all their time breaking into banks and prisons and the like. The developers (Introversion) were having a hard time making that game work after several years of development, and then it finally dawned on them that they were having way more fun with the tool they had built to make the banks and security systems than they were with the heist portion of the game. So they switched over to the actually fun game.

I always got the sense from interviews that they were a bit troubled by the ethical implications of a prison management game. That said, the pro-authoritarian quality of the game is one reason Prison Architect is the only Introversion game I don't own, though I'm sure it's fun.
posted by surlyben at 10:47 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

one of their games is a semi-coop where the players play as anarchosocialist factions in a modern American city at the start of a revolution. The actions of the police are simulated by die rolls and a deck of event cards.

What's the game? That sounds really interesting.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:53 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wonder if there's a way to make a game like this that lets you step outside of the ethical qualms/queasiness that this generates. I ask this not because I want an excuse to play the game, but more as a thought-exercise.

I mean if you replace humans with animals/aliens/sentient plant-life, it's still just as disturbing to inflict this kind of control/surveillance/oppression. I'm sure it might be easier to rationalize the oppression and the violence inherent in the management of this sim with a so called "lesser species". Hmm...
posted by Fizz at 10:56 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

> What's the game? That sounds really interesting.

"bloc by bloc"

fwiw, the politics swing way more anarchist than socialist. I said "anarchosocialist" because I wanted to make it clear that no one plays as an ancap. Marxist-Leninist groups get more than a bit of side-eye in the game. For example, one of the ways that it's semi-coop rather than purely cooperative is that you sometimes get secret goals at the start of the game, and one of the secret goals is "vanguardist." If you don't have the vanguardist goal, everyone wins if the group as a whole liberates the squares containing state buildings before the national guard arrives, but if you're a secret vanguardist you're trying to have your own faction gain control of the state buildings... in which case you win and everyone else loses.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:01 AM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

There are games where you play as an agent in bad or ethically compromised systems. I can think of Papers, Please and Beholder as two examples. I think those two games feel less icky to some, because you're not the leader, but a middle manager that's being threatened or coerced to do bad things. For those games, the win conditions are a lot lower stakes than creating the "perfect prison". Simply being able to survive while not giving up your character's decency or morals feels like a victory.

And I can also think of games where you play as the "leader" of real life villains. Axis & Allies gives you the opportunity to play literally as the Axis Powers. But I think in that case the whole war is abstracted into dice rolls and moving pieces so players don't have to face the reality of all the terrible shit that the Axis (and honestly, also the Allies) did during the war.
posted by FJT at 11:08 AM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I wonder if there's a way to make a game like this that lets you step outside of the ethical qualms/queasiness that this generates.

Huh, and here I'm thinking the moral queasiness is one of the most interesting parts of the game. I mean most videogames are ethically horrible. Literally mass shooting simulators or genocide simulators and it goes unremarked what the morality of that is. Playing a game that forces you to engage more hands-on with an ethically questionable scenario seems really interesting to me. But I'm speaking only theoretically here, perhaps the game lets us down because it puts us in the compromised position, makes us uncomfortable, but then doesn't let us come to any happy conclusion. Papers Please wears its controversy a bit more on its sleeve, it's more directly apparent that you're supposed to not like what you're doing.
posted by Nelson at 11:30 AM on August 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

We live in a world of morally-black choices, the morally grey choices in games like this are often still nice than the ones we make everyday in the real world casually or without thought. I also love when videogames have more to them than "fun," videogames are art, they shouldn't all be fun, positive fantasies. Art can make you sick, can make you upset at the world, can make your realize you had convictions you didn't know were important, tbhimo "fun" is the weakest thing a videogame can pursue. The reaction of some here against playing the game on moral grounds is interesting. On one hand, I guess it's kind of neat for there to be a moral objection to doing questionable things in a game. On the other, it smacks of that kind of pointless, shallow, self-serving moralism of first-world people going on about principles as they use poison devices and wear unethical clothes and enjoy the benefits of war and violence and capitalism.

I love when games force you to confront the ugliness of human beings, often games have you doing the ugliness of human beings with no thought whatsoever as to what you're doing or why. There's a "bad guy" so you have to just kill things until you win, even though killing one thing makes you technically a bad guy, but the game will never acknowledge or insinuate that because you're the "hero."
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:43 AM on August 20, 2018 [8 favorites]

> The reaction of some here against playing the game on moral grounds is interesting. On one hand, I guess it's kind of neat for there to be a moral objection to doing questionable things in a game. On the other, it smacks of that kind of pointless, shallow, self-serving moralism of first-world people going on about principles as they use poison devices and wear unethical clothes and enjoy the benefits of war and violence and capitalism.

I mean, on the one hand: yes. But on the other hand something we've learned over the course of this young grim century is that the structure of the platforms we use to communicate end up at least partially determining the nature of the communications we have — a platform structured like twitter inspires people to have and share twitter-ey thoughts, a platform structured like metafilter inspires people to have and share metafilter-ey thoughts, and so on.

Games can be understood as a platform in this sense; the "free" actions you take in the game are shaped by the rules and design of the game, and if you're not careful they can make you think that (for example) being a capitalist who imprisons people is a reasonable, acceptable thing to be. Making choices in the context of a platform that encourages you to think and act a particular way can cause you to make similar choices when off the platform.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:59 AM on August 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

I also really enjoyed their previous game - DEFCON.

You control a nuclear arsenal on one of the major continents and try to nuke another nuclear superpower killing billions of people before they nuke you.
posted by mit5urugi at 12:10 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

You control a nuclear arsenal on one of the major continents and try to nuke another nuclear superpower killing billions of people before they nuke you.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
posted by Fizz at 12:12 PM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am more comfortable making raiders into hats on Rimworld than I am with playing Prison Architect, as it turns out. That probably says something about me.
posted by Sequence at 1:50 PM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I’ve played this game a lot but not for a few years, so I don’t know how different it is now. I tired to be humane. I really did. But the prisoners kept coming and my money kept dwindling and before I knew it I was housing prisoners in huge bunkhouses, which made them fight more and then I had to hire more guards and it just kept going downhill from there. I felt so conflicted and like it could never be truly sorted out. Suddenly I’m McManus. My morals are irrelevant because I’ve created hell, my good intentions meaningless.

I really like this game.
posted by Betty_effn_White at 2:53 PM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

I bought this game during a Steam sale over a year ago. Never played it because my computer broke soon after, but I got a new computer and a couple of months ago I noticed a friend has been playing it a lot so I was going to give it a shot.

But then 3 weeks ago I started working in a prison and I decided that maybe I can't shoulder the guilt of working for the actual prison industrial complex to survive AS WELL AS being the imaginary warden of my very own prison for fun and games.

(Instead I spend a lot of time playing Ultimate Fishing Simulator.)
posted by elsietheeel at 4:25 PM on August 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

Here are some screenshots from a bit of the framed story that forms the basis of the tutorial. The tutorial tasks you with building the execution chamber for a convicted murderer. It's interesting how it frames the murder and your task as a player/warden.
posted by Fizz at 4:26 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wrote about my feelings about Prison Architect before:

But I do think it's a thoughtful and thought-provoking consideration of the mechanics of incarceration -- not, really, of the fact that we incarcerate people at all, but of the problems and questions society faces once we've decided we're going to incarcerate people. I think some people find the game disturbing because it doesn't deal with questions of guilt or innocence, but I think that's not the question this game is trying to ask; I think instead of focusing on that part of the justice system, it's focused on what we do once we decide there's going to be a prison (and every country has some kind of prison system). I think those are REALLY IMPORTANT QUESTIONS that we don't often ask; we spend a lot of time talking about, say, racial bias in prosecutions, but not a whole lot of time talking about how prisoners are treated in prison; once they're behind bars, they become pretty invisible. This game does a pretty decent job of opening that black box and forcing the player to think about, what kind of prison are we going to run? What decisions do I want to make, and what are the practical outcomes of those decisions? I'm sure you all know someone who complains, "Prisoners shouldn't get to watch cable TV! It's an outrage!" Well, thanks for that, theoretical policy ranting guy; here, take this sim and you try that policy out and see what happens.

I will say as the simulation has gotten more sophisticated, the gamification aspects of it have, for me, taken over too much and made it too easy to play as a "fun game" instead of grappling with the ethical and practical issues prisons raise. In 2014 I said I'd consider using it in an ethics class to explore some issues around prisons; I feel like in 2018 I probably wouldn't. As it's become a better game, I think it's gotten too easy to get sucked into the GAME part and ignore the underlying moral questions the simulation asks.

But yeah, it's super-interesting to me that people happily play games where THE WHOLE GAME is running around murdering people (sometimes in very realistic and graphic fashion!), or wiping out whole civilizations, or killing thousands in imaginary armies, but playing a game about the practical reality of prisons is somehow the morally appalling thing!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:20 PM on August 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

*checks Steam library*

Oh, look, there it is. Maybe I should give it a go.
posted by krisjohn at 7:54 PM on August 20, 2018

Looks interesting. But as someone who works at a prison, the layouts are kind of atrocious.
posted by ericales at 11:19 PM on August 20, 2018