Good games have an unparalleled ability to connect the player to an experience completely outside his or her normal life. So it is with Introversion Software's Prison Architect. Ostensibly a game in the style of Simcity, Theme Hospital, and Rollercoaster Tycoon; Prison Architect deals with a much darker and more controversial subject matter. The game is currently still in early development, but is playable and enjoyable in it's current state. You play as the designer and manager of a prison. A private prison funded by federal contracts and grants, specifically. It would be easy at this point to deride the game as trivializing or even glorifying the prison industrial system. I am not going to do that.
Prison is a thing that is completely outside my personal experience. I'm from rural Iowa. When I made bad decisions as a youth, the local cop had a sit down with my parents and they set me straight. When I made bad decisions later in life, I just didn't get caught. Having spoken with people from diverse backgrounds, it has become obvious to me that I was lucky. Had I lived in a different part of the country, or had the circumstances been even a little bit different, I could easily have had far more experience with the American justice system. As it stands, my knowledge of our justice system is second hand, but I do know that our prison industrial system is a very bad thing. However, it is not a thing many people are aware of. For those who are aware, some don't see an issue because they don't see convicts as people. These are a couple areas where this game could be helpful.
Prison Architect puts you in the role of carrying out the sentences of convicted felons. It doesn't matter how you personally feel about their stories, the people in prison are there because the justice system convicted them. Each inmate has a name and a story as well, and not all of them are unambiguously guilty. This is one of the ways the game tries to get you to connect with the inmates as people, not pixels.
It is a very important connection to make, because you control the prison's purse strings and how comfortable an inmate's stay in your facility is is up to you. You can provide only the bare minimums, overpopulate, serve small amounts of cheap food, cut corners, and make a tidy profit. This leads to more riots, but if you cared about that sort of thing, you wouldn't have gone so cheap on everything in the first place, right?
On the other hand, if you make that connection and view your inmates as people it becomes difficult to treat them as less. For instance, the tutorial mission involves building an execution chamber to carry out a death sentence on a man who is unambiguously guilty of double homicide. There is an interesting debate between the warden and the priest on the morality of the death penalty, but in the end it comes to to one thing: prisons don't make laws, they just carry out the will of the courts. When you are constructing the facility to house the death row inmate and the electric chair, you have options. You don't have to upgrade to nicer floors. You don't have to include a well stocked bookshelf in the prisoner's cell. You don't have to add a window. You can easily afford all of those things and more. It comes down to the player's moral choice on whether or not to view the inmate as a person.
This is what is potentially so powerful about this game. If it can manage to pull the player into where they are making these decisions at a moral level, and not just a "checking off boxes, playing a game" level, then it can seriously raise awareness about one of the worst, most shameful aspects of our society. It has certainly opened my eyes to some of the problems. I was aware of for-profit prisons, but the concept had never engaged the logical aspects of my mind before. Now, having played this game and seen all the ways a prison manager can save money and pad the profit margins, it is not a very large logical leap to start thinking of ways to further maximize those profits by keeping inmates in prison longer, and by lobbying for new, stricter laws that will land more people in my cheaply run, but highly profitable facilities. It makes me sick. Worse, it doesn't take much research to find that that is precisely what is happening in America's prisons.
Prison Architect is a brilliant example of gaming as art. It is controversial, provocative, and if the developers get it right in the long run, it could really raise awareness on an important issue.