Thursday 15 February, 2018

My third session of Prison Architect was good. I decided to just use one of the campaign prisons to mess around with instead of building one from scratch since I feared that would take too long (although I plan to in the near future. I hired lots of guards, made solitary confinement areas and made the prisoners schedules very strict. I did frequent searches and some bangups, but I started feeling bad before any riots happened. I get feeling guilty mistreating people, even in a video game.

I'm still trying to figure out some of the more advanced features of the game, such as policy, bureaucracy, grants and finances. These features aren't required to have a basic functioning prison though. It's been cool to see all the detail put into this game. Some features I really liked were the drug and alcohol recovery programs you could have for the prisoners. That was required to do in the campaign to help the addicted inmates. Another program that looked interesting was the spiritual guidance, but I didn't experiment with that one. Like I mentioned before, there are many ethical dilemmas and scenarios in this game that I find fascinating and I'm glad so much thought and functionality went into what I originally thought was a very basic sim game.

Good job! It's clear you are having fun with the game and the ethical dilemmas presented before you, but I recommend that you focus on just one for your OPA. It can be difficult to fully address more than one ethical of these ethical dilemmas when you only have a page. That being said, it's interesting how these virtual lives can still make the player feel bad because of how we treat them. Maybe the developers wanted players to question how real prisons are run and how difficult it can be for everyone involved.