Australian Game Simulates Prison Escapes

An anonymous reader writes "The Australian newspaper The Age is running a story about a computer game that simulates real detention centers, inviting players to find a way to escape. The game uses actual Australian detention center layouts, and simulates things like the exact time that meals occur and "episodic violence". The kicker is that the project is sponsored by an arts group that has just received $25,000 in Australian government funding to develop the game."

Comments

Amusing

[Wingchild]

I can't figure out what the overall goal of the original grant was; were they trying to design some kind of simulation that guards could use in order to figure out how to best deal with complicated, changing environments, much as the United States Army uses game-like simulators to prep for realtime battle conditions?

Or are they trying to make some sort of weird MMORPG out of the jail environment? I mean, it's a frontier that hasn't actually been touched yet. I don't know any MMORPG where you can be an inmate and relive your deepest, darkest OZ fantasies.

Hell, either way kinda works out for the powers that be. As players find new ways to escape, the administration can fix them in the real prison, then release a patch fixing it in the game as well.. ;) I sure do wonder how they're going to stop inmates that have a wallhack, though.

Right

[HopeUnknown]

The game uses actual Australian detention center layouts, and simulates things like the exact time that meals occur and "episodic violence".

So games where you mow down armies of monsters with imaginary weapons will poison our childrens minds, but a game that teaches you to escape from real prisons gets government funding? What a wacky world we live in.