The morality behind Prison Architect

Back when my youngest was a young teen, we bought him a computer game called Theme Park. The object was to build an amusement park in a way that drew crowds, got them playing games of chance and eating junk food and made a hypothetical profit. It was fun and relatively innocent. The worst that could happen was that some imaginary theme park guests threw up their sodas on a ride. So when I came across a new computer game called Prison Architect, I taken aback. Have we really sunk to the point where we've made a literal game out of the prison-industrial complex? Apparently so. As explained in a recent New Yorker article, the game in which you design your own penitentiary - complete with execution chamber - is making millions. How sick is that? We've devolved from carousel design to death room design in just a decade or so. The game includes scenarios like preparing for a killer's execution. It's a sign that we've lost touch with our humanity when everything is a game, when the idea of putting a human being to death is some kind of entertainment. And yet, what can we expect from a culture that so devalues a large segment of the citizenry and thinks of them as nothing more than a resource to be exploited for profit. Prisoners work for nothing or a few dollars per day, citizens face jail over unpaid parking fines, and companies big and small benefit from our high rate of incarceration. It should come as no surprise that someone made a game out of it. One does wonder, though, what's next? Which will we see first? Plantation Owner, in which the object is to buy slaves as cheaply as possible to run the farm? Or will it be Concentration Camp, in which the object is genocide?