Ha! Now I'm imagining what else would happen if Steam was built by John Rawls. Maybe after finishing a game of Prison Architect, you should be forced to play as a convict for a randomly-determined sentence before you are allowed to play any other games. As someone who loves games and loves talking about them, I really wish people would stop making this move. What the move does do is suck all the air out of the room and prevent interesting, useful discussions about games. They shape it and are shaped by it, and that's a totally valid thing to talk about. This is an attempt to play a 'get-out-of-being-part-of-culture-free' card, and it just doesn't work. It's in the first comment on the Kotaku article. The "it's (just) a game" rhetorical move is a played out and discredited attempt to derail any criticism of problematic games. And if someone mistakes a work of fiction as a reliable source of information about the real world, then the problem lies with the consumer, not the work. Things that happen to imaginary people in games (or movies, or books) are not happening to real people. Hospitals and theme parks and railroads have already been done - might as well do prisons! This makes the game feel really distant from its subject, and distance from the subject of US prisons is what lets them continue to exist as they are. Prison Architect feels like it just deploys the visual language and tropes of the US prison system as convenient set dressing. DEFCOИ was a deeply unnerving game, but it really engaged with the unappeasable, inevitable feeling of dread that comes out of mutually assured destruction. Or maybe it's that Prison Architect doesn't really seem invested in its subject matter. Maybe it's because the mechanical banality of a management sim seems too close to the mechanical banality that perpetuates the evil of the US prison system. At first this was surprising because I've played lots of games that are objectionable in much more over-the-top ways. Yeah, Prison Architect really put me off. Posted by GenjiandProust at 1:58 PM on Janu That can be changed, obviously, but skinning the game in an American setting then being surprised when people complain that it doesn't deal with the reality of American prisons is a little disingenuous. If you are going to tackle a project like this non-exploitatively, then you really need to do that research, don't you? Lastly, I was a little annoyed with the "we weren't modelling American prisons, everything is always about the Americans" when they used dollars and American terms and imagery. They also had a bunch of points where they kind of hit behind "well, we didn't research that," and that seemed.
They had some pretty solid answers to some things, but I felt they fell back on "it's just a game isn't it?" a little too much, because it's clearly not "just a game," or no one would be talking about it (and I can't believe that they aren't aware of that). Anyway, listened to the video, and it was. Posted by Teakettle at 1:21 PM on JanuĪhem. This, combined with shrinking budgets, is leading to greater creativity in punitive systems and also a real focus on reducing recidivism. Fewer people are going to prison, at least in the areas my research focused on.
However, if trends in incarceration continue, things should improve in the next 20 years or so.
Prison architect exercise how to#
We know how to design prisons which use space as an element which inspires people to make better choices. The research we have access to in regards to the correctional system is really fascinating and has applications to all captive and semi captive groups (schools being an obvious example).
It's a fascinating field - there is a lot of humane and wonderful thinking being done, and a lot of incredibly barbaric outcomes happening despite that. I've done a lot of research on prison architecture and the history of incarceration in the United States in general.