He was always calling for more cops and more jails.
A feature of the game was that,Ĭity Hall advisors, ambitious officials who would try to steer you, as Mayor, towards certain priorities and decisions. He noted that as a child, he would occasionally play SimCity 2000 ( Maxis, 1993). In the brief post, he reflected on his youth, and the playing of a computer game. On 11 August 2019, Rutherford tweeted a short thread about ‘ why Boris Johnson is wrong about prisons, isn't tough on crime, and why Sim City 2000 has all the answers’. Max Rutherford is the Head of Policy at the Association of Charitable Foundation, an organisation which aids other UK-based foundations and grant-making charities. Overall, this chapter aims to provide a new consideration of digital games as their relation to prison settings might promote an alternative consideration of the potential rehabilitative utility and value from digital technologies in, around and after prison. Furthermore, it considers how in reality, a security dominant ideology limits the ability to conceive of the role of digital technologies within the prison system in any manner other than to see them as threat, and hence fails to recognise the potential rehabilitative potential of the digital and games. In such countries as the United States and the United Kingdom alike, the playful premise of Prison Architect ( Paradox Interactive, 2019) profitable incarceration is enacted every day in the stark realities of prison warehousing, which are far from a game, for the real players has seemingly become the dominant and unquestioned solution to the crime problem. It considers the importance of the tension between security and rehabilitation as an unsolvable reality at the centre of western, late modern, neoliberal and post-industrial mass imprisonment, specifically in the US and England and Wales. However, having considered this aspect of the prison video game, the chapter broadens its focus to consider how ‘gaming’ in prison aptly illustrates these tensions in praxis. The primary intent and purpose of this piece then is to consider how this extant prison-themed video game reflects dominant (and often quite binary) norms and ideas concerning imprisonments competing function (juxtaposing security and rehabilitation as binaries that can never be fully reconciled). It considers the case of the leading prison simulation game, Prison Architect ( Paradox Interactive, 2019), and considers how that game's portrayal of prison, specifically both its function and management, polarises and contrasts between themes of punishment and rehabilitation, in turn reflecting what are often broader societal debates about incarceration. This chapter aims to explore how a prison-themed video game may have come to shape some understandings of the nature, character and function of the carceral realm.
PRISON ARCHITECT FORESTRY FULL
The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence.
PRISON ARCHITECT FORESTRY LICENSE
The full terms of this licence may be seen at License