Prison Architect has been no stranger to controversy during its time in development. The game might not receive the same venom as some Early Access titles but Prison Architect has come under its fair share of fire. That anger is frequently rooted in the belief that Introversion hasn't gone far enough to account for some aspects of the prison experience. Now that the studio has nailed down a timeline for the release of Prison Architect v1.0, we spoke with Introversion Software managing director Mark Morris about the controversies and criticisms surfaced during development and how those critiques have impacted the creation of Prison Architect.
It's not Morris' first interview on the subject. In fact, the Introversion co-founder appeared on MSNBC's Weekends with Alex Witt last month to address some of the controversies surrounding Prison Architect. The discussion only lasted a few minutes but, in many ways, echoed similar conversations that followed a Kotaku article titled "What To Do With Prison Architect, A Video Game About Building Prisons?" when it was published last January.
In many ways, Introversion Software's path has been more impressive than the studio's ongoing ability to wait out the storm. Instead of a Kickstarter campaign, the studio let word of mouth, along with regular YouTube promotion, be the deciding factor in whether or not Prison Architect survived the game dev wasteland. And then Prison Architect's popularity exploded.
Within two weeks, Introversion had raised more than $250,000, and the average Prison Architect buyer was spending at least five dollars more than the base cost. By the end of 2013, Introversion had raised more than $9 million via the Prison Architect website and the game's Steam Early Access listing. It might not be the ever-growing stack of cash that keeps Star Citizen in the headlines but Introversion's success --particularly as a company that skipped out on Kickstarter -- helped chart a new course for indie devs.
"Kickstarter had a few really high-profile, uber successes," Morris told iDigi. "We've also seen games have a more-public development cycle. Overgrowth and Minecraft were kind of the two big inspirations on that front...It was the combination of those two movements that led us to think we can development a game in the open -- and monetize that development -- that led to us taking the approach that we did."
Valve would eventually reach out to Introversion Software, asking the studio to let Prison Architect join Kerbal Space Program and a handful of other respected projects that gave Steam Early Access some much-needed credibility in the early going. But the increased exposure would eventually bring controversy to Introversion's doorstep.
Prison Architect was on Steam for more than a year, before Kotaku published Carnegie Mellon professor Paolo Pedercini's critique; a period in which Morris felt Introversion had been exceedingly transparent about the project's alpha status and ongoing development. The Prison Architect team didn't publish a roadmap, as we've seen for other projects, but the studio's monthly Alpha Update videos frequently included mentions of new/potential features. It's alpha status seemed quite obvious.
That didn't stop Pedercini from publishing a detailed examination, approximately 3,000 words in length, taking Introversion to task for not including certain features/mechanics in the studio's unfinished prison management simulator. In some cases, like a paragraph asking fans to "help Introversion make a not completely cursory and stupid simulation", the author openly assumes Introversion is incapable of delivering a thoughtful take on the subject.
And, on some level, the Prison Architect team believed the criticism was a bit early/unnecessary.
"I think, certainly with the Kotaku article, that the gun had been jumped. That we were being criticized for a game we hadn't finished," Morris told iDigi, "There were many points he was making, about what would make the game better, and we had plans to do them. Not all of them. There were some new issues. But the majority of what he said, we already had covered."
Of course, once public discussion begins to take place, it can be difficult to continue down the studio's planned path without giving the impression that it kowtowed to the game's first real media criticism. Obviously, there are worse impressions one could make than a seeming willingness to be flexible. But any content creator can probably explain the dangers of letting consumers think criticism will affect your product. There's a reason "don't feed the trolls" is a saying found in damn near every comments section, Twitch chat and gaming forum on the web.
"We didn't want it to perceive as if the whole development had been written by someone else," Morris told iDigi. "We knew what we had planned, but we didn't want to put [a roadmap] in the public domain because we didn't want to overpromise.
"We never wanted to be open about the roadmap for Prison Architect but a lot of what we were doing would have been obvious to any game designer or critic... It almost felt to us as if we were being challenged, that we hadn't done enough, but at such an early point in the cycle," Morris added.
Some of the mechanics Introversion Software was criticized for not including would be added to the game over the next 12-plus months, including drug and alcohol rehabilitation, educational courses and a death row system that demands players to carry out the digital executions themselves. The PA team hopes, by focusing on the clinical process by which a state ends lives, players might take a few moments to examine their own feelings on the death penalty.
The studio isn't out to change minds, per se, but a video released alongside the update makes clear Introversion wants people to at least consider the implications of their in-game actions.
"It's not like GTA in a prison," said Morris. "We want the player to be able to experiment with different approaches to prisons. To have meaningful choices, within the way they play the game, and to challenge them. To make them think about a real-world topic."
Morris said Introversion isn't trying to communicate a particular message with Prison Architect, instead leaving the decision-making to those who spend time with the game. The team hopes it can build a robust enough simulation for those meaningful thought experiments to be examined. All of the human experience may not directly translate to new video game mechanics, but Prison Architect does manage to consider a startling number of logistical possibilities with a fair amount of tact.
When asked if he thought game developers had an obligation to be familiar with local politics in any market where their game is to be sold, Morris acknowledged critics' concerns but pushed back on the idea that Introversion needs to familiarize itself with one or more regions' politics. After all, even if the moral questions surrounding certain mechanics are more than valid, Introversion stands by the fact that Prison Architect isn't set in a particular region. In fact, Introversion went out of its way not to set the game in a specific region.
"One of the things that I'm still not happy we've got quite right is [communicating] that the prison in Prison Architect is not set in any time or in any place," Morris added. "It is Plato's concept of a prison, rather than a commentary on any particular country's prison system. But some of the language we use, the orange jumpsuits, automatically lead people to believe it's a U.S. prison."
Morris says the Prison Architect dev team is intentionally trying to address systems and problems, like escaped convicts or drug use, that challenge the staffs of correctional facilities around the globe. It's this sort of relatability that Morris believes is helping driving the discussion surrounding Prison Architect.
"If you make something, and you make it well, it naturally will cause people to think about an issue," Morris said. "But if that's going to be your goal, then you have to be aware of cultural norms ... I think we've done OK. But we don't explicitly set out and research every country or territory to see how they perceive things."
Introversion has addressed many of the criticisms leveled against Prison Architect but the game's vague U.S. ties haven't gone anywhere. A response video from Introversion, published shortly after Pedercini's critique, did point out that almost any color would seemingly place PA in a specific region. And the team isn't opposed to offering localized prison systems, but knows they'll have to approach those features with as much (if not more) consideration as any of Prison Architect's other issues.
"Being a little bit more localized might come after we've released version 1.0...But it's so tricky," says Morris. "You have to be really careful. You have to start thinking, 'Is this difference that I'm putting in there just trivializing an entire culture?' And it often is."
Morris is aware that distinct cultural differences, not to mention differences in incarceration standards, will inevitably make the experience different in each corner of the world. He mentions just how easy it would be to offend someone by making light of something quite serious or reducing cultural differences to something as simple as the food being offered to inmates. While there's obviously plenty of room for nuanced discussions of these situations, or systems like Norway's 21-year maximum incarceration laws, Introversion wants to spend the final stretch (before 1.0) improving Prison Architect in multiple ways.
Right now, there is no real consequence for keeping inmates in solitary confinement for long stretches. Now that Prison Architect offers control over most aspects of inmates' daily lives, it's not hard for PA players to force daily routines that wouldn't be tolerated by inmates in real correctional facilities. You could leave an inmate in solitary, from the time he breaks a rule until release day, and there's no real punishment for doing so. The inmate will be suppressed, which can destroy morale over time, but there's not much they can do about it from a confinement cell.
"I'd like there to be a check and balance to that," Morris said. "I've seen prisons where everybody is in solitary ... and one of the things I like about Prison Architect is that it gets you to think about these extremes. Would you suppress somebody (with solitary confinement) for an extraordinary length of time, knowing they'd survive, knowing they wouldn't necessarily be the same person?"
It's one of several areas that Morris would like to see improved but solitary confinement presents a unique problem for the Introversion team. Every aspect of the Prison Architect experience must be handled with a certain amount of care and consideration. But solitary confinement remains a hot topic of discussion on the global stage, as more research shows placement in "segregated housing units" can have a severe impact on a person's mental health.
Morris may be sympathetic to the issue, going as far as to confirm Introversion is considering using depression/self-harm as a sort of punishment for rampant usage of your SHU. But, like any potential game feature, there's quite a bit more involved than simply deciding you'd like something to be in the game. Particularly with a project like Prison Architect, which has already proven to be fairly controversial before its even considered to be feature-complete.
"It comes back to these difficult questions," Morris said. "How would we measure it? How would we report it back to the player? We have this idea of using the re-offending rate. Well, if you keep someone in solitary for 20 years, he's probably not going to reoffend. But he might hang himself in the outside world. If he does that, is that another metric that's going to count against you? There's a real subtlety in that issue. Something we need to be very careful about the manner in which we'd implement it."
It's a problem that isn't likely to be solved before launch, Morris says, but one that remains important to the Prison Architect team. Leaving prisoners locked in solitary confinement, for weeks or months at a time, is about as "extreme" of a system as you could institute in a correctional facility. And one of the team's stated goals is to have checks and balances for any/every extreme correctional approach that can be implemented in Prison Architect.
Despite dealing with such controversial issues, Introversion's latest game doesn't seem to generate the same public anger we've seen for games like Battlefield: Hardline. It's a pass we'd hoped to examine in our discussion with Mr. Morris, considering public resentment practically killed B:H before launch. But it turns out Introversion hasn't spent much time with Visceral's first take on the Battlefield franchise. Or any other game about prisons, prisoners or law enforcement, for that matter.
"We tend to play games that are in similar genres, in terms of play style," Morris told iDigi. "Theme Hospital and Dwarf Fortress got a lot of play, to see how they solved certain issues. But, for the theme of law enforcement or (for us) prisons and incarceration, I don't really care that much about how gaming has treated it in the past because I want our interpretation to be new and fresh."
Morris does have one theory on why, despite recent debates about police in America, fans aren't getting as riled up about the idea of running a correctional facility.
"We don't tend to talk about the prison guard because they're kind of one step away," Morris told iDigi. "Most people could have an encounter with a police officer on a daily basis. They probably see police officers on a daily basis. But most people don't come into contact with prison guards, which is why its slightly lower down the agenda.
"That would probably not be the case if there had been a high-profile murder in a prison, or by a prison guard. I think certainly in the US, and the UK to a lesser-extent, there's a big cultural concern about police brutality and racism in the police force. But I don't know that that concern transitions to the correctional officer in the same way. If you were to sit down with someone and say 'The police are racist' I think you'd probably say 'The prison guards are racist' as well. But we don't tend to talk about the prison guards. And I think that's because they're one step away. "
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Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional Prison Architect coverage throughout the game's remaining time in development and for however long Introversion Software continues to support Prison Architect in the years following launch.
