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Jan 16th, 2018 at 20:19:49 - Prison Architect (PC) |
The start of Prison Architect was somewhat rocky for me. This was either due to the fact I can sometimes be technologically inept or the game was having some trouble running on my unfortunate macbook pro (which usually only has to run art software or text editors for coding).
I found the beginning of the game to be quite abrupt, I enjoy being thrown into the midst of things and Prison Architect did not disappoint. The tutorial involves building a new room for a prisoner who is going to be put to death: you are called by the CEO who states rather bluntly that this prisoner needs this room "for his big day". Said prisoner is in jail for double murder, but I can check his information to see that he has a wife, two children, and a living father. I also am the one in control of the electric chair that I've built- having been given the ability to turn it off and on.
I ran into some issue with the game here, where I could not successfully designate rooms to be a cell or an execution room. I ended up restarting the game after attempting to figure out what was wrong for the first fifteen minutes. I was then thrown into a blank slate instance of the game where I had to build everything from scratch.
So far, I feel the most notable part of this game is the player needing to consider everything a prison would need in a real world setting. I've realized that I will likely need to write out a budget for this game and do some difficult thinking on where to allocate resources. While I want to do as little harm as possible, this is a maximum security prison and some prisoners will be put to death as part of their sentencing. While they're just bits of information on a computer, I feel empathy for them and want to make their digital lives comfortable while also somehow managing resources. This game has certainly changed my way of thinking in order to adapt to playing. It's blunt with what must happen in order to maintain a virtual prison (poor living conditions, killing prisoners, etc.) and could be considered by some to be unethical for possibly altering player behavior to contradict beliefs.
I think this is a bit of a stretch because so far it has not been gratuitously gory or anything of that nature. The game feels very corporate and impersonal. Players do not have to look at prisoner stats on their lives if they do not want to. It makes me think about how difficult it must be to manage a real prison with real people! I think that is the true ethical commentary of the game. While the game itself seems pretty typical for a simulator (though dark in nature), players inevitably consider how real prisons are managed and how the people in them are being treated. This aspect of the game interests me quite a bit because so far Prison Architect has been very difficult! I will look deeper into possible ethical issues within the game itself when I play again, but from the surface, Prison Architect plays like I would expect a prison simulator to be like.
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Emma Morrissey has been with GameLog for 6 years, 10 months, and 14 days |
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