“Video games often ask us to imagine radically different futures. What if a subterranean species of hivemind beings erupted from the earth to eliminate humans from existence? What if you had to be the parent of a small child during the zombie apocalypse? What if you had to navigate the world in a radically different way than you do now?”
“we can see the shape and scale of the futures that video game developers build for us.”
“These futures, though, are extrapolations of our conditions.”
“The worlds that games present to us are always bound up in the material conditions of the world we live in right now.”
“It is not surprising, then, that we’ve yet to see a game about prison abolition.”
“Prisons mark every part of contemporary American life. They exist as a mode of social control in which certain populations are marked as more or less likely to commit crimes, a process with an explicit historical lineage that has, for example, led to black Americans being imprisoned at five times the rate of white Americans. They exist as a means of extracting labor for private gain in a wide system of penal labor that belies a legacy of American slavery. They even exist as a mode of biological control, as the recent case of a jail system that offers to trade jail time for contraception and sterilization demonstrates.”
“Angela Davis begins her book Are Prisons Obsolete? with this exact problem:
In most circles, prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered to be so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.”
“This naturalization process—where we see prisons are simply an immutable fact of life—has seamlessly made its way into our depictions of the social world.”
“The game imagines the prison as a pressure valve for social problems.”
“The SimCity franchise has had various implementations of the prison system beginning with the introduction of the “Prison” building in SimCity 2000.”
“even though crime rates fell by 23% in the period between 2006 and 2014, the rate of incarceration only decreased only by 7%. Crime dropped significantly, but the amount of people who went to prison only decreased by a third of that number.”
“That’s what Angela Davis means when she says that prison is understood as “natural;” systemically, we have a collective belief that there must be a steady influx of people being imprisoned for crime to decrease at all.”
“You are not only being told a story, but your continued participation in the game mechanics and narratives that are being put in front of you are what propel them along.”
“In 2016, the United States’s prison industry was worth around $5.3 billion dollars.”
“In contrast, the video game industry is worth $45.6 billion dollars.”
“The numbers tell two stories. The first one: Despite the difference in size and profits, video games remain alien to some. There are still people who don’t play games. They are not yet ubiquitous within our society. So how ingrained must prisons be for us to take them for granted? How normal must we think prisons are for us to believe that depriving people of their freedom, perhaps for life, is justice?”
“The second, and more hopeful story, is this: Many video games are about imagining, and a world without prisons is imaginable. Like all political projects, it is even attainable. And a strong stance from game creators that questions the natural and normalized prison is a step toward that better future.”