IMAGE COURTESY INTROVERSION SOFTWARE

The first prison that I designed was humane. I planned for a princely lounge area, a gourmet canteen, an Alexandrian library, and a Serengeti of a rec yard. Then the money ran out before I could complete the perimeter fence: the first busload of inmates made a break for freedom before they’d had a chance to express their gratitude. The second prison that I designed was a monument to frugality. I packed the inmates together like cattle, in spartan cells with no more than a chair and a prayer mat for entertainment. I reserved a king’s ransom, however, for the perimeter fence. It still stands, unbreached.

A video game that invites its players to oversee the incarceration of miniature cartoon people could, during what is a time of boom and crisis for the real-life penal system, be seen as tasteless. In 1970, about one in every thousand American adults was serving out a sentence in a federal, state, or local penitentiary; by the start of this decade, the figure had jumped to one in a hundred. That tenfold increase has led to substantial overcrowding. More than half of the state correctional facilities in Colorado, for instance, have inmate populations at or above their design capacity, and in Alabama the overall prison-occupancy rate is a hundred and eighty-nine per cent of capacity. But Mark Morris, the co-founder of the British video-game developer Introversion Software, stresses that his company’s latest release, Prison Architect, is intended to provoke thought. “What we have created is sensitive and well considered, not a gratuitous exploitation of suffering purely for the purposes of amusement,” he told me. Neither, he added, is the game meant to be scolding or didactic. “We have tried hard not to project any of our own morality onto the prison design.”

Introversion, which was formed in 2001 by three university friends and retains a subversive aura, has a history of turning moral quandaries into games of strategy. In their 2006 game DEFCON, for example, players must wage global thermonuclear war, wiping out the populations of enemy nations while keeping their own people alive; by the end, the death count rises into the millions. The idea behind Prison Architect occurred to Introversion’s lead designer, Chris Delay, during a tour of Alcatraz, the defunct island penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay. At the time, Delay and his team, who are based outside London, were stuck on a different project, a high-tech-heist simulation. Alcatraz inspired Delay to subvert the concept, changing it from a game in which players had to break into security systems into one in which they had to design them. That twist also provided a contentious theme. “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t have an opinion on whether prisons are too soft or need to do more to rehabilitate,” Morris said.

In certain ways, Prison Architect does allow the player to reckon with the ethical demands of running a secure and fair (and, of course, profitable) correctional facility. The game’s introductory tutorial, which explains some of its more trivial mechanics—how to lay foundations, erect walls, hang doors, install wiring—centers around the construction of an execution chamber for a man named Edward Romsey. His crime—the murder of his wife and her lover, whom Romsey discovered in flagrante delicto—is recounted in vivid flashbacks while prison personnel cry alternately for blood and clemency. A man identified as the C.E.O., meanwhile, says simply, “Try not to worry about what happens next. We are just here to do a job.” (That phrasing began to seem especially loaded earlier this year, when the nonprofit organization Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility presented the American Institute of Architects with a petition proposing that members who design execution chambers and solitary-confinement cells be censured. “Is there nothing so odious that the A.I.A. wouldn’t step in?” the group’s president, Raphael Sperry, asked, in the Times, after the petition was rejected. “What about concentration camps?”)

Nevertheless, my experience of the game demonstrated how quickly the business of prison planning can obscure the human aspect of the project. Should I line my floors with wooden planks and ceramic tiles, or with mosaic squares, the choice of the aesthete jailer? Should my inmates live individually or communally, with or without the privacy of bathroom walls, in natural or artificial light? Will my generator supply enough current when the switch is thrown on the electric chair? Each inmate comes with a personal fact sheet, as if the pieces on a chessboard had each been given a name and a backstory, but it’s easy to overlook this detail once you become engrossed in balancing the books and drawing up the blueprints. There is, however, power in the game’s request that you inhabit many roles: it makes it difficult to retreat from the knowledge that each job is a link in some dread chain of cause and effect. You are complicit, whether you are laying bricks or planning menus.

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.”