Design and Punish: A Review of Prison Architect | Hacker News Reader

Design and Punish: A Review of Prison Architect

killscreendaily.com

35 pointsprismatic16 comments

Seems like no one's read any kind of literary criticism. It's not that bad, and moreover, it's a pretty positive indicator that the medium is being taken more seriously.

You may disagree with how successful the endeavour was, but having video games place the player within a cruel system and force them to make alienated and morally ambiguous choices is an interesting and valid criticism of the way these systems play out in real life. Papers Please is another pretty good example. The article does decent job at evaluating how effective Prison Architect is as social commentary, in my opinion. It can hardly be accused of reaching too far if this commentary was one of the intentions of the devs themselves.

Commenters here would do well to reread pg's hierarchy of disagreement, and actually engage with the points that are made.

I didnt read this article yet -- but your comment reminds me of that old game "Dungeon Keeper" -- where you build cruel dungeons and deploy minions into it for various amusements.

That was the most pretentious review I've ever read.

Someone needs to beat this guy over the head with a copy of The Elements of Style, or at the very least confiscate his thesaurus.

Games writing is currently a race to the bottom in terms of seeing who can render the most meandering, self-important quasi-review of game X. My personal theory is that the phenomenon of absurdly self-important critics accompanies the legitimization of any new art form; I can't think of any other reason for the explosion of facile garbage in games journalism.

Agreed, and this goes waaaaaay beyond just mere online review journalism too. Even textbooks for game engines are now cluttered to the brim with self-important lessons on "objective morality" and even "serving social justice" (e.g. Gibbon's Intro to Game Design for Unity). It's just amazing how, despite all the improvement in the medium, game-writing has actually become worse than it was in the days of just forum posters writing guides, faqs, and reviews on GameFAQs.

Yet there are still brilliant writers out there.

Although I am unsure of where all of this narrative comes from, it's so good it nearly brought a tear to my eye:

Nuclear Fruits https://youtube.com/watch?v=15dxuAbTC0A&itct=CBQQpDAYBSITCJS...

Origins of open worlds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EdV_2svrDVc&itct=CB0QpDAYAiITCK_...

I highly recommend watching all his feature videos.

"Prison walls entrap subjectivities as much as they corral physical beings."

Yikes.

A PARTICULARLY CAPTIVATING AND COLORFUL ANT FARM

I'm sure "carceral" is a nice word, but five times?

The "review" barely mentions the game. This is not a review, it's attention seeking.

I'd like to point out that there are lots of "reviews" that only tangentially mention the thing they're ostensibly reviewing, but are still very good and worthwhile pieces of writing (see some of Orwell's essays, for example).

The problem are:

a) this insists on pretending that it's still about the game (assigning a numeric rating, making the concluding paragraphs refer to the game)

b) the writing is terrible.

For some examples of this not-really-review genre done well, see [http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip] or [http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi]

Has anyone here played the game? Is it good?

I've been playing since mid alpha.

Yeah, it's pretty good! It's at least fun for a little while. It's an interesting series of puzzles to build an efficient system, and the flavor of the game is fantastic - every now and then you sit back and think a bit about prisons in general.

But for the most part, it goes for gonzo silliness. Which is a good thing! It's a game, and it's mostly pretty fun.

I'd recommend it. I think you'd probably play it about 15 or 20 hours and then wouldn't touch it for a while.

I played this game a lot when it was still early access. I thought it was pretty fun but there were some bugs at the time that messed up several prisons i had built. I gave up playing shortly after that.

I assume those bugs have been fixed though! I should give this game another go.

Absolutely phenomenal. Reminds me a lot of the older Maxis games like SimTower. Simplistic yet complex at the same time. The recent addition of escape mode adds some much needed flavor and the campaign is a perfect way to learn how to play.

There are still annoying bugs as of last week, but the game has a lot more polish than it did in alpha. I think Prison Architect is the sort of game that's worth persevering with, particularly for younger players, because the interdependent requirements of the facility, budget, staff and inmates provide a good backdrop upon which to pose ethical questions about incarceration in general that cannot be matched by other genres of media.

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