Prison Architect: First Impressions

Down below in the courtyard, the inmates are tiny orange specks to my omniscient eye-in-the-sky. Their chunky jump-suited bodies mill around, the pleasant hum-drum of conversation bubbling through my headphones.

My guards, meanwhile, are ambling along the perimeter. Ever watchful, their cute cartoonish eyes are all narrowed slightly, as if inherently suspicious.

But at present, the atmosphere remains totally calm. I continue watching my workers, as they lay a strip of cabling to the small brick building being constructed at the edge of the facility. The execution room.

This mission, the first and only mission the game currently has (more of a tutorial, really), has you tasked with building an electric chair inside an established prison.

When the cabling is complete, my view is suddenly drawn away from my colourful guards and prisoners, to one small cell. Inside this cell, the condemned man, Edward, awaits his death sentence. A Priest appears to comfort him.

In a sort of stationary storyboard cutscene, a hand drawn (and much more realistic) picture of Edward and the Priest in the cell appears, the holy man laying a forgiving hand on Edward's head. The goofy visuals the game usually sports contrast sharply with the stark detail of the adult-comic style presentation of this "cutscene".

Intrigued, I watch Edward's last walk to the execution room I built myself. Along the way, the prison guards recount his story.

Suddenly we're inside Edward's mind. We see a cutesy-graphics representation of his house, to which he is returning...with a gun. Completely dissonant with the graphics, cries of lustful pleasure fill the speakers, and sinister music builds in the background. Edward walks to his bedroom door, and the screen is again peppered with hand-drawn pictures. This time they show his wife, and the man she's cheating with, caught in the middle of sex. A distraught Edward raises the gun and mercilessly kills both.

In the "cutesy" graphics display of the scene, the two naked (but undetailed) characters are suddenly smeared with pools of ugly red blood. The words "DEAD" flash above them, over and over again.

Jesus.

For a moment I stare, surprised...shocked, even, that the cutesy game I was playing could convey such adult sentiment.

--

In just this one scene (and the rather depressing execution that follows), we are offered a powerful and unexpected look into the rights, wrongs and grey areas of the death penalty.

Now admittedly, when I first heard of Prison Architect, I wasn't interested. I thought it'd be another shitty "Prison Tycoon" game.

Then I saw it was by Introversion, the same developer that made Defcon and Uplink, two of my favourite games, competent for not only having deep game mechanics but also in exploring greater moral themes relevant to reality through gameplay.

Uplink explores the freedom of information, corporate society and whether it's morally right to even have personal information databases if skilled people can hack into them and misuse our data. Defcon is like a playable simulation of the detached horror of nuclear war.

So that sold it to me. I bought into the paid Alpha of the game.

--

Sure enough, Prison Architect has everything you'd expect from a management game, but even in this early stage of development it shows a really interesting psychological angle even outside of the story scenes already in the game.

Take my first prison: I tried to build it as a medium-security installation, in which I'd keep the prisoners happy and well entertained, ruling them through respect rather than force and deterrent.

To that end I built a spacious yard, larger cells, a sanitary shower and a nice entertainment room. Prisoners were allowed family visits, and all seemed to be happy.

Within a few days, they decided to smash it all up.

Oddly, I actually found myself feeling slightly annoyed - which I then realised is the brilliance of the game. I'd tried my best to cater to the needs of these people, to keep them at least comfortable in their place of incarceration. They'd all been listed as "happy".

They'd repaid me by ruining the equipment I provided to them in a fit of meaningless violence.

I watched with dismay as my guards began brawling with them. The inmates beat the prison's Chef unconscious, badly hurt a builder and before it was all over a prisoner had been stabbed to death in the shower block with a knife lifted from the Kitchen; the blood stubbornly staining the floor was a damning indictment of my failure.

Without the money for a Janitor (it was all spent on repairs), that blood stayed there for days afterwards, the floors and walls around it turning grimy from lack of cleaning. With each in-game day representing around a year, that means that dried blood simply stayed on that floor for a good 5 years, a stubborn reminder of that horrible incident.

Faced with a lack of Recreation (thanks to the fun stuff being broken), the prisoners started fighting again. And the vicious circle continued.

My latest prisons have learned: more guards, less focus on appeasing the prisoners, more on containing and controlling them.

Cells are built to house maximum numbers of prisoners, not to comfort them. Entrances are barred with multiple checkpoints. The relaxation rooms are patrolled by guards.

Then you start thinking of your prisoners as enemies, not people entrusted to you. You start seeing them as vicious bastards that will happily murder you, your staff and even each other.

So yeah...I've only just started playing, but already it's providing an interesting comment (and perhaps even insight, if accurate) on the mind-set of those who actually run these large federal institutions.