But the reasons betray Introversion’s intentions: The game comes first, everything else, last. There are good reasons to choose the electric chair and its symbolic capital over its less spectacular successor, lethal injection. Yet this oddity quickly comes to represent Prison Architect’s relationship to its subject matter: For all of Introversion’s developer diaries about their sensitivity to the minutiae of the penal system, Prison Architect isn’t shy about its distortions and oversights, necessary sacrifices on the thirsty altar of “fun.” Prison Architect, after all, has been marketed and developed as one (British) studio’s take on the contemporary (American) prison-industrial complex. The electric chair, its fatal technique refined and its debut hastily forgotten, ruled capital punishment for nearly 75 years, but a series of botched executions in the 1960s sparked a Supreme Court case that led to its effective retirement.Īt first, the historically anomaly is odd. A milquetoast, Walter White-type has murdered his wife and her lover, and you, the architect, must carry out his punishment. Prison Architect, Introversion Software’s long-awaited incarceration simulator, begins by asking the player to construct an electric chair.
