
Design and Punish: A Review of Prison Architect - prismatic
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/design-punish-review-prison-architect/
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chiaro
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.

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samstave
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.

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searine
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.

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chazu
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.

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ffn
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.

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unixhero
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...](https://youtube.com/watch?v=15dxuAbTC0A&itct=CBQQpDAYBSITCJSgy_T20MgCFckPDQodP5YMjDIGcmVsbWZ1SPyb5KT-1qGShQE%3D)

Origins of open worlds:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=EdV_2svrDVc&itct=CB0QpDAYAiITCK_...](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EdV_2svrDVc&itct=CB0QpDAYAiITCK_tu8H30MgCFcnPHQod96sN-
DIGcmVsbWZ1SJ7b2-37i4Sl-AE%3D)

I highly recommend watching all his feature videos.

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

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azernik
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](http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip)]
or
[[http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi](http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi)]

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thecosas
Has anyone here played the game? Is it good?

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spenczar5
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.

