But the problem with this sort of praise, and, perhaps, this model of game design, is that when everything is “systems,” it’s easy to forget why identity and identification matter in the first place. It’s true that the conditions of our lives are produced by the systems we are embedded in. Yet no one experiences life as a system. Rather, we live as actors in these systems. And to make systems the exclusive locus of inquiry runs the risk of crushing individual experience, the only kind we can ever truly know. To its credit, Prison Architect attempts to keep sight of the individual through its narrative tutorials, which revolve around particular prisoner’s experiences in prison as a counterweight to its alienating simulation. Yet the gesture comes off as a small consolation, tagged on at the end of the game’s development (and indeed, “story mode” is among the most recent additions to the game).

The other purpose of these micro-narratives is to remind the player, however poorly, that although the prison might be a system with its own internal logic, it is just one node in a larger system that contains legislation, lobbyists, policy, post-industrial urbanism, and any other number of actors that make up the rhizomatic grasp of the prison-industrial complex. Remember Foucault: The prison is not simply a site, but an idea built about discipline and punishment built long before the cornerstone is laid.

Prison Architect alludes towards the forces beyond the prison that themselves construct the prison through a weak, narrative variation on the “Kids for Cash” scandal. Yet the gesture is hopelessly superficial and utterly absent from any meaningful mechanics. The prisons of Prison Architect are essentially hermetic systems: The complex ethnology rarely reaches beyond the prison’s walls. For an argument about the nature of contemporary American prisons, this is a glaring defect. For real prisons, though, it’s better understood as a feature. One reason prisons are often constructed in rural areas is that it obscures their relationship to the other actors in the judicial system (consider: Many European prisons are contained within the same building as the courtroom). The prison, isolated in space, becomes an ontology. Crime, discipline, and punishment are axiomatic, and thus, impossible to contest.

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Every simulation, of course, is a simplification of the real-world system it models. The issue with Prison Architect is not that it fails to represent every aspect of prisons’ complexity, but that the aspects it omits are among the most important for understanding why and how mass incarceration is the way it is. Perhaps this makes for a better game, but it’s ludicrous to pretend that it makes for a worthwhile study of the 21st-century American prison, which has much more to do with decades of punishing state and federal policies on incarceration than the variety of meals inmates are offered. At their worst, Prison Architect’s simplifications exclude the identities and histories that have been swallowed up by the grey, carceral wastes of America.

Introversion Software

Nowhere is the cost of Prison Architect’s exclusions more palpable than in the game’s treatment, or lack thereof, of race. It’s hardly controversial to say that racism is inseparable from the prison-industrial complex, which makes race’s near-total absence from Prison Architect both bewildering and insidious. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates persuasively argues that the American prison-industrial complex constitutes the latest technology in a long history of structuralist white supremacy. “Peril,” Coates writes, “is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is [America’s] mechanism for maintaining that peril.”