Prison Architect

[brkl]

Hey, sorry I backed away from this conversation. I didn't mean to set it up and leave.

From responses to my RPS post, it seems making a peaceful prison is not quite as impossible as I thought. Regardless, I'm not convinced enough thought has gone into thinking about what this game is telling people. You can't really make this game and keep it neutral, without a message.

I would like to see stuff like... Say you get a prisoner with a ten year sentence. How fucked up is he going to be after his sentence mentally and physically? Does he get enough exercise and decent food? Maybe he'll die of heart failure before he is released. How is the experience to him mentally? Maybe he'll be out for six months and you'll have to deal with him again. I would love to see some comparisons of prisoners' states before and after. Are there opportunities for education and learning an occupation? There are many issues related to prisons that are deeply interesting. Don't tell me the game can only be 'fun' if prisons in it are Oz-like pits of murder.

[Gormongous]

Hey, sorry I backed away from this conversation. I didn't mean to set it up and leave.

From responses to my RPS post, it seems making a peaceful prison is not quite as impossible as I thought. Regardless, I'm not convinced enough thought has gone into thinking about what this game is telling people. You can't really make this game and keep it neutral, without a message.

I would like to see stuff like... Say you get a prisoner with a ten year sentence. How fucked up is he going to be after his sentence mentally and physically? Does he get enough exercise and decent food? Maybe he'll die of heart failure before he is released. How is the experience to him mentally? Maybe he'll be out for six months and you'll have to deal with him again. I would love to see some comparisons of prisoners' states before and after. Are there opportunities for education and learning an occupation? There are many issues related to prisons that are deeply interesting. Don't tell me the game can only be 'fun' if prisons in it are Oz-like pits of murder.

 

I wonder how a game that seriously considered these issues you raise would look. Because the role and efficacy of prisons are still open questions, with many people arguing that prison sentences themselves are at odds with modern ideals of rehabilitation instead of just quarantine, it would almost have to be something like Sim City, where the variables composing the sandbox conspire to enable a select and limited number of outcomes, which wouldn't allow the full exploration of the questions you pose.

 

Do you think it's possible for a full-featured sandbox game about the operation of a traditional prison to handle the issues you bring up in a forward-thinking way? I'm serious here.

[youmeyou]

I think I'm done with my first prison:

 

 

The bottom 4 blocks are for max prisoners. I finally started integrating them now that they bring a bonus to my grant funds.

 

It's been an interesting and illuminating 81 days.

 

For one, showers are where riots start. Prisoners are at their grumpiest in the morning and even the slightest provocation or delay in access to hygiene can cause them to snap. Once they go off they quickly overwhelm any guard unlucky enough to be in their vicinity necessitating riot police and paramedics.

 

Once you get to a certain point it really becomes more of a slave labor simulator than a prison simulator. The main way to make money in the game is through the workshop. You need money to expand your prison and eventually to sell it at a profit so you can start a new one with extra capital. So the more prisoners you can support working the longest hours without sacrificing food/comfort/recreation/sleep the better you will do in the game. I think that's a super interesting takeaway. In the end it's not about the rehabilitation whatsoever. I'm wondering if that will come in in later patches. I'm really hoping they bring in mechanics like education, religion and group therapy. Elements that - properly implemented - might possibly round out the simulation.

[Merus]

Considering the developers previously made a hacking game that was so committed to its fiction it required you to log in to the locally hosted game with a password, and a fun strategy game about global thermonuclear war, complete with cheery messages about how many 'MegaDeaths' you'd scored, and the sobbing of the survivors seeping into your bunker, I would hazard that the developers are quite deliberately trying to get you to feel a certain way about your prisoners. Whether they also communicate that this is not an effective way to feel about your charges is a stickier question, but I'd imagine they'd be quite open to improving this aspect of the simulation, given appropriate feedback.

[Security_Tubbs]

I got to play this a bit two weeks ago (still haven't bought it).

 

I too noticed that in the end, you can't really make large profits if you don't have your prisoners working in workshops. That's why I designed my second prison to have the workshop really close to the prison entrance (for faster material delivery), and I researched prison labor much sooner. That is also why I was so reluctant to add one hour of free time into the middle of the day. Only when faced with a potential riot did I finally compromise.

 

Speaking of my second prison, I recorded a time lapse video of it, sort of ex tempore. That's why the video starts with almost two buildings finished, and a lot of the prison planned out.

[youmeyou]

Some interesting critical writing on the politics of Prison Architect:

 

http://kotaku.com/what-to-do-with-prison-architect-a-video-game-about-b-1505204131

[Twig]

Oooh this is interesting. Thanks for linking it.

[Bjorn]

That's a bloody terrific article. 

[clyde]

One of the comments:

TeiwazUMrMiyamoto11L

" any simulation is a set of assumptions. So there is bias in any simulation, depending on how you look at it. A lot of people thought when they played SimCity we were really biased to mass transit. It's interesting. One of the fun things is that a model like that gives you something to reflect against. In fact, when people start arguing with the model, that's when I think it's been successful.

First of all you have to clarify your internal model — how does a city really work? Most people, they'll kind of roughly describe it, but they've never really thought in detail what the linkages are between different things. But when they're playing a game like SimCity, which is one set of assumptions, it clarifies their own internal assumptions. And then, when they can start arguing with it, it's crystallized in their internal model to the point where they can now argue against that model, so in some senses I think that's the point of it."

- Will Wright, SimCity designer

In games, the simulation and the rules are the message. Even if you don't intend there to be one, your game means something, just like every other medium. All you're doing is losing control of what it means. And the point of this article is that currently, Prison Architect means prisoners are cheap slave labor, and compulsively violent animals. Based on the authored tutorial at the start of the game, which includes a prompt for the player to think about how humanely death-row inmates should be treated, that's not what the designers intended. Pointing this out is an important part of proper criticism and analysis. It what makes games better. If you want blinking lights and an arbitrary score out of 100 to a precision of two decimal points, go back to the 80's. Today 5:15pm

[JonCole]

God bless you for dipping a foot in those comments, that's a good one. I read a little past that and saw some guy arguing that the Transformers movies have strong female characters.

 

That article kinda turned the tide for me, because I was definitely on the other side of the argument only a few posts up there. But it's now fairly clear to me that while I can maybe say that killing and blood paint a more visually clear picture of a game mechanic than maybe some animations of dudes beating up on each other, it's still worth considering the fact that the rules in places that facilitate daily deathmatches in these virtual prisons are saying something about the prison system inherently.

 

I recently listened to a podcast (I honestly don't remember which one it was, maybe This American Life or some other NPR thing) where they talked about a prison convention, where prison owners/operators and in-prison riot suppression officers met and shared techniques and technology. I'd be really interested to see a deep simulation of prisons that communicate some of the stories I heard from that podcast, where one of the most dangerous things to prison staff are removing a single uncooperative prisoner from a cell and officers are forced to basically form a line of converging riot shields to beat the prisoner into the corner of the cell and drag him out. The podcast also talked about how American prisons much more violently suppress their inmates in a way that no other country really compares; a Chinese prison worker commented on how American tasers are far too violent for their needs, which for some reason was really shocking to me.

 

I'd like to see a game like Prison Architect handle mechanics like that, maybe changing the rules based on the country in which you prison is built where prisoners act differently and the staff members do as well.

[youmeyou]

I recently listened to a podcast (I honestly don't remember which one it was, maybe This American Life or some other NPR thing) where they talked about a prison convention, where prison owners/operators and in-prison riot suppression officers met and shared techniques and technology. I'd be really interested to see a deep simulation of prisons that communicate some of the stories I heard from that podcast, where one of the most dangerous things to prison staff are removing a single uncooperative prisoner from a cell and officers are forced to basically form a line of converging riot shields to beat the prisoner into the corner of the cell and drag him out. The podcast also talked about how American prisons much more violently suppress their inmates in a way that no other country really compares; a Chinese prison worker commented on how American tasers are far too violent for their needs, which for some reason was really shocking to me.

 

I watched the documentary Pedercini recommended (House I Live In) and it talks about prison technology conventions among many other subjects. It's a excellent doc that I recommend everyone watch.

[Dewar]

Isn't the game supposed to make you feel dirty and uncomfortable about these things? I always assumed that it was designed that way to ilicit that sort of response, like Papers Please or DEFCON.

[Gormongous]

Isn't the game supposed to make you feel dirty and uncomfortable about these things? I always assumed that it was designed that way to ilicit that sort of response, like Papers Please or DEFCON.

 

I think the complaint of the article, which I can't corroborate not having played Prison Architect for long but find intuitively true, is that the discomfort in such games comes from choosing what's easy or what's effective over what's right. It's possible to be a good person in Papers Please and to talk everyone out of firing nukes in DEFCON, but in Prison Architect there's apparently no way to stop inmates from behaving like wild animals or to keep playing without using them as slave labor.

 

I personally find it a little disappointing, if so. "Be a brutal warden or make it by the skin of your teeth" is one thing, "be a brutal warden or you don't get to play" is another.

[clyde]

Introversion responds to Pedercini's criticism.

http://kotaku.com/prison-architect-creators-respond-to-our-prison-archite-1508504242

[Gormongous]

Introversion responds to Pedercini's criticism.

http://kotaku.com/prison-architect-creators-respond-to-our-prison-archite-1508504242

 

Maybe I'm just awful, but did anyone else find this video a bit disappointing? Their responses were all i) "We hadn't thought of that," ii) "We're still working on that," or iii) "It's just a game, we won't do that."  Some of Pedercini's best feedback fell under the third category, especially the political systems he noted were missing. In reference to drug laws and corruption, one of the devs said, "That's dark, too dark for our game," in a game about the mass incarceration and exploitation of millions. It really makes me feel like these guys didn't know anything about prisons before making this game and are still mostly uninterested in knowing anything about prisons.

[JonCole]

I definitely get the feeling that they're not particularly interested in an accurate representation of prisons, but rather a mechanically diverse and nuanced simulation. I didn't love Paolo's ideas about the potential for lobbyists helping alter laws to your benefit mostly because the effects of laws or something would probably just result in a modified value like more prisoners, generally shorter sentences, etc. I guess that if that political aspect of the game could actually make meaningful effects on the actual gameplay, it would be meaningful, but I personally can't imagine it being anything but another toy with a story reason to exist and few mechanical reasons to exist.

 

I generally felt satisfied by the video, mostly because I think that their stance that prison "pop culture" is driven by the American prison system so any simulation they try to make would either be blatantly national or accidentally American. As a result, I don't think they should be faulted for not accurately representing American prison systems because that's not what they intended to do. That said, they should try to integrate elements from the "real world" of American prisons since the perception of players is that those elements are missing. It also didn't particularly convince me that drug crimes should be as minimally represented as they are.

 

Re: drugs, I really like the idea of addiction having deep gameplay implications on the mood of inmates. Not only should a drug crime positively indicate drug addiction, but I also think it'd be interesting for inmates with a multitude of petty crimes to have a higher chance of prior drug use. It'd be interesting to consider that while someone may not have gotten busted for doing drugs, drug use could have driven them to commit other crimes and they find themselves jonesing after getting busted for stealing someone's car after breaking into their house.

[Gormongous]

I generally felt satisfied by the video, mostly because I think that their stance that prison "pop culture" is driven by the American prison system so any simulation they try to make would either be blatantly national or accidentally American. As a result, I don't think they should be faulted for not accurately representing American prison systems because that's not what they intended to do. That said, they should try to integrate elements from the "real world" of American prisons since the perception of players is that those elements are missing. It also didn't particularly convince me that drug crimes should be as minimally represented as they are.

 

I guess I'm troubled by this a bit more than you. I play a lot of Paradox games and where their simulations invariably fall down the most is when they design a system using the received knowledge of the medieval or early modern period, as opposed to designing the system using an actual historical framework. The "decadence" model for Islamic dynasties in Crusader Kings II is a great example of a "gameplay first" system that's based on a flawed understanding of history and is consequently incongruous to the point of being unfun.

 

Generally speaking, I think that a simulation-driven game built on something like the "prison myth" mentioned by Introversion is going to fail in some way, simply because a myth like that is an impressionistic agglomeration of hearsay and assumptions, rather than a sensical and consistent set of systems. If you reject the game as a deconstruction of that agglomeration, the only other choice is to alter the systems based on the hearsay and assumptions until it all works together, in which case you're putting in as much effort as if you'd spent a couple months just reading sociological and anthropological scholarship on the prison system in order to form your own framework. It just kills me to hear Delay and Morris say that they have no idea what the condition of UK prisons are, let alone how much it costs to keep someone in prison.

[Merus]

It's difficult when you're making a game like Prison Architect where you're simultaneously trying to have a point, when it comes to representing an image. I have had a game idea kicking around where you'd run essentially a Walmart, and essentially use every nasty trick in the book to make money ('Lower Prices. No Matter What.') When it came time to research the supply chain, with delightful sweatshop conditions, I ran into a problem: there's evidence that, despite sweatshops being objectively terrible, the individuals involved are still grateful. The exploitative conditions in developing nations are, from the point of view of the people of the developing nations, a massive step up over the existing conditions, particularly for women. Once the country starts to develop, the countries start passing laws to put an end to the exploitation - but by that point the countries have more to offer than merely being the cheapest. The most tragic conditions usually come from countries that don't have an infrastructure set up to spend capital wisely; an artisanal product that becomes a fad in a developed country, and the community rips itself apart during the gold rush, which does happen occasionally, but Walmart generally doesn't like surprises.

 

So what happens when I depict the supply lines in this game? The traditional way to do these kinds of games is to allow you to see inside the minds of the agents, so are they going to be grateful for financial independence that doesn't involve prostitution? Do I present them as being aware of how much more they could be paid, despite it being unrealistic? How can I make the system the villain when the system's responding to competing pressures in a logical way? Doesn't this challenge the idea that companies like Walmart are a gross debasement of capitalism, when this sort of thing is what's usually claimed as capitalism's benefits?

 

I kind of moved onto another idea that's not so difficult after that. (Which was an action adventure game about cult behaviour, so it's relative.)

[Thrik]

I'm still excited about this game but am waiting for the final release. I've been trying to follow this whole 'underlying narrative' story but I'm struggling to figure out where we're at now without spending a lot more time than I want to reading about it. Can it be summed up? Is it the case that the developers don't really have any idea about how a prison actually works, leading to a completely unrealistic depiction that's comparable to nothing but itself — and they have no interest in it being anything else? Or is it more like what most people probably imagine a US prison to be like after years of watching things like Escape from Alcatraz, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, etc?

 

See, the latter I'm OK with. I don't really know how US prisons work, and I'm not entirely sure that I want to. But then, for all I know it could be that US prisons are largely singing and roses compared to the aforementioned films' depictions. Yet I am interested in playing a game that exists within the world those films imply the existence of, certainly more so than a UK prison simulator which is likely just gentlemen knocking over each others' cups of tea because they had a disagreement while playing Mario Kart earlier, and leaving passive-aggressive notes for each other on their cell doors.

[Security_Tubbs]

How I personally interpreted it, without thinking too much about it, was that the game took place in a semi-fictional "movie prison". I never thought that dollars and the orange jumpsuits implied it was specifically set in real life United States. Furthermore, the backer submitted biographies for the prisoners further push the world towards a fictional and somewhat insane reality.

 

Still, I find most of the criticism to be interesting, and the reply from the developers to be really good. I do hope the result of this dialog is a better finished Prison Architect.

 

[youmeyou]

It does really seem that they're grounding their simulation in fictional tropes of what a prison is, rather than actual prison research. Which I'm not entirely happy with. But Gormongous has put it much better above. Suffice it to say: It's deeply troubling. When I heard that they didn't even have a clear understanding of UK prisons...

 

It really shifts my understanding of the situation. Previously I had assumed they were going for a less preachy, more "let the player come to her own conclusions" sort of approach; something at odds with Pedercini at the level of methods rather than philosophy (his games usually have a pretty direct message attached). Now I'm not so sure. They are clearly interested in using simulations to better our understanding of the world, but how can we learn from a flawed, fictional understanding?

 

I do think their attitude is great and they have approached the criticism with an impressive amount of respect and attention which is so refreshing and I hope to see more of in the industry. Also an awesome side effect of open game development and early access. There's still plenty of room for them to vastly improve the nature of the simulation. And they already mentioned they had previously been working on some of Pedercini's complaints, parole and recidivism being a huge one.

[brkl]

The fact is that they are currently selling a very successful game that depicts some of the weakest members of US society as violent animals. Prisoners in the States can't even vote. I can't call their attitude great unless they very quickly take real steps to turn their game from exploitation to something more constructive.

[Bjorn]

A reasonable, rhetorical question that could be asked would be:

 

What if you made a simulation of trying to run a small business in an impoverished US inner city neighborhood and filled it with all of the terrible movie tropes, cartoonish levels of violence, racist stereotypes and were completely blind to the actual reality of living in such a neighborhood?   Would anyone defend it because it was just a game?

[youmeyou]

The fact is that they are currently selling a very successful game that depicts some of the weakest members of US society as violent animals. Prisoners in the States can't even vote. I can't call their attitude great unless they very quickly take real steps to turn their game from exploitation to something more constructive.

 

 

Yeah, I agree with you. I was mostly referring to them engaging in thoughtful discussion on the matter. Can you imagine Maxis making a video about why SimCity pushes such a car-centric, western-centric city model? Every simulation is going to have a political bias based on what it leaves and what it includes. Like I said, the fact that they agree with Pedercini's quote: 

 

Moreso than simply playing games, making and hacking games is a great way to investigate the world around us. It forces us to compare the digital models of our games with the mental models in our heads. 

 

while at odds with what they have so far done, does lead me to believe they will take his and others' criticism seriously.

[JonCole]

I still think the most troublesome thing as it pertains to gaming is how Prison Architect is still an early access game but seemingly not being treated as such. Especially as it pertains to this:

 

Maybe I'm just awful, but did anyone else find this video a bit disappointing? Their responses were all i) "We hadn't thought of that," ii) "We're still working on that," or iii) "It's just a game, we won't do that."

 

I'm in agreement that the third type of response is a bit shitty given what things they are regarding with "It's just a game, we won't do that." I still think the first two are fine, especially granted their early access status. Regardless of your opinion of what early access means, how it's being used liberally or how it's easily ignored, there's still something to be said when the developers clearly state it's an unfinished game and responses to constructive criticism are "we are or are going to integrate that into the final product".