In certain ways, Prison Architect does allow the player to reckon with the ethical demands of running a secure and fair (and, of course, profitable) correctional facility. “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t have an opinion on whether prisons are too soft or need to do more to rehabilitate,” Morris said. That twist also provided a contentious theme. Alcatraz inspired Delay to subvert the concept, changing it from a game in which players had to break into security systems into one in which they had to design them. At the time, Delay and his team, who are based outside London, were stuck on a different project, a high-tech-heist simulation. The idea behind Prison Architect occurred to Introversion’s lead designer, Chris Delay, during a tour of Alcatraz, the defunct island penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay.
In their 2006 game DEFCON, for example, players must wage global thermonuclear war, wiping out the populations of enemy nations while keeping their own people alive by the end, the death count rises into the millions. Introversion, which was formed in 2001 by three university friends and retains a subversive aura, has a history of turning moral quandaries into games of strategy. “We have tried hard not to project any of our own morality onto the prison design.” Neither, he added, is the game meant to be scolding or didactic. “What we have created is sensitive and well considered, not a gratuitous exploitation of suffering purely for the purposes of amusement,” he told me. But Mark Morris, the co-founder of the British video-game developer Introversion Software, stresses that his company’s latest release, Prison Architect, is intended to provoke thought.
More than half of the state correctional facilities in Colorado, for instance, have inmate populations at or above their design capacity, and in Alabama the overall prison-occupancy rate is a hundred and eighty-nine per cent of capacity. That tenfold increase has led to substantial overcrowding. In 1970, about one in every thousand American adults was serving out a sentence in a federal, state, or local penitentiary by the start of this decade, the figure had jumped to one in a hundred. A video game that invites its players to oversee the incarceration of miniature cartoon people could, during what is a time of boom and crisis for the real-life penal system, be seen as tasteless.
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