Attitudes Toward Punishment and Rehabilitation as Perceived Through Playing a Prison Tycoon Game

Abstract

The present study brings personality research into the realm of computer games. We used a novel method-the Prison Tycoon computer game-to explore participants' attitudes toward rehabilitation and punishment. Forty-two men and 48 women were asked to construct a virtual prison equipped with rehabilitation, correction, and neutral facilities. Financial investment spent on each respective type of facility was treated as an indicator of a participant's particular attitudes toward punishment. Additionally, participants completed the NEO Five-Factor Personality Inventory. Results indicated that Neuroticism and Openness to experience may be reliable predictors of one's willingness to rehabilitate prisoners (measured as the amount of money spent on rehabilitation/correction facilities). This novel experimental method sheds new light on the issue of reliably and ecologically measuring attitudes in the lab and provides further evidence that computer games offer a new, effective alternative to classical research methods in this area.

(Mis)Representations of Prison: Gender- and Prison-Themed Video Games

“…Prison video games are a relatively new line of research (see, e.g., Downing & Levan, 2016; Levan & Downing, 2016; Macmillan & Page, 2009; Moran & Etchegoyen, 2017; Oleszkiewicz, Kanonowicz, Sorokowski, & Sorokowska, 2018). Such games have the potential to be spaces of double exclusion (Crawford, 2005) and masculinization: Players exist in a fictional masculinized space (prison) within another masculinized virtual space (video game).…”

Virtual Total Control: Escaping a Simulated Prison

“…Despite a fair amount of research on prison portrayals in film, little scholarship has explored prison portrayals in video games (see, e.g., Downing & Levan, 2016; Macmillan & Page, 2009; Oleszkiewicz, Kanonowicz, Sorokowski, & Sorokowska, 2015). By drawing on an interactive gaming portrayal of prison life, the current inquiry fills this gap, examining a “sandbox” (i.e., freeform rather than linear) experience, in which players/viewers are able to interact with and form emergent prison narratives.…”