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I can't tell you the names of any of my inmates in any of my prisons. The smallest holds a couple of dozen, the largest has over a hundred, crammed together like battery hens in a place whose only purpose is to provide effective and prolonged detention. Some are serving lengthy terms for very serious crimes, others wander free after just a few game hours within my walls. None of them make any kind of impression on my memory.It's a shame, because they all have rap sheets and many have biographies. Each also has their own needs and desires, Sims-like requirements that include things like Recreation, Privacy and, of course, the ever-predictable call of the Bowels. But I don't look at this information. I don't care. What I care about is how many of these people there are, where they are, if they're following the procedures I've set up and what sort of disruption I might have to prepare for.
And this is the amazing thing about Prison Architect. I don't know if this is deliberate, I don't know if it was the intention of the creators that this be so but, even in its alpha state, even as an undirected sandbox experience that pops up error messages or sometimes turns prisoners into floating heads, all it makes me care about is whether the system works. The people inside the system become irrelevant, faceless and interchangeable.
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