'It was never about that, it was always just a game.'Īs Morris explains, the similarities to real prisons are a result of the deep systems in the simulation. 'We never wanted to create a super accurate prison sim that could be used to model future prisons,' Morris said. Though the idea of the game was sparked by Delay's visit to Alcatraz in San Francisco, Introversion managing director Mark Morris told me that he and Delay didn't do a huge amount of research on real prisons while developing the game. 'In this example it's clear to see how humane conditions are sacrificed in order to minimize operating costs by design.' 'Supervising the movement of a large number of people in a prison takes a large number of guards, so it was a clever idea to have people stay in the pods, even though that leads to an incredibly boring daily routine,' Sperry said. That cost is reduced even further if the dayroom doubles as a 'chow hall,' which in older prisons used to be a different space. He explains that the 'podular' prison design, where cells are arranged around a big 'dayroom' in the center, minimizes staffing costs by allowing less guards to watch more prisoners. He's also pushing the American Institute of Architects to prohibit the design of spaces that inherently violate human rights in their code of ethics, namely prisons. Raphael Sperry is an architect, Soros justice fellow, and president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). It's especially satisfying if you're the kind of person who gets off on a well-organized bookshelf or clean desktop, which I am.īut then I remember the subject matter, and I realize how awful the job I'm doing well is, especially since it's surprisingly true to life. That's what's fun about management games. Solving any problem will require you to use the space allotted to you efficiently, and after enough time, that's how you start to see the world. The most basic building blocks of the game are the square tiles that make up the map. 'Right from the very start, we knew we had to let the player know that this was a different experience, he has to think differently about it.' 'It would be very easy to think of it as building a hotel or something,' he said. By the time you execute the prisoner, the act seems like just another item on your ever-growing 'to do' list: build more cells, expand the mess hall, establish a common room where you can start a drug rehabilitation program, fix the pipes for the showers, and oh yeah, execute this prisoner.Ĭhris Delay, creative director at developer Introversion Software, told me that it deliberately picked the darkest part of prison life for the first chapter of the game.

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