I’ve recently been playing a lot of Rollercoaster Tycoon again.
A lot of Rollercoaster Tycoon. Three games at a time. It’s very fun! I played through two at a time a while ago, and that was pretty chill, so now it’s three.
The main reason I decided to try this out again was my discovery of Marcel Vos on YouTube. He does a lot of very thorough mechanics breakdowns for Rollercoaster Tycoon, including, among other things, the interesting point that security guards are mechanically completely unnecessary. That got me thinking, hey…
…does Rollercoaster Tycoon encourage abolishing the police?
Just in case you weren’t aware or clear on the matter, very briefly, the notion of abolishing (or, to a lesser extent, defunding) the police is that police in the US are overburdened and ineffective; police officers (and other bodies of policing, like ICE and military) are the default means of conflict resolution, whether appropriate to a situation or not, and many necessary social services have been offloaded onto them when care-focused efforts would be both less expensive and more effective. More than just reallocating resources, it’s about evaluating why we feel the need for policing at all and finding which care-focused solutions will be cheaper and have better outcomes. Not sending cops to handle mental health crises, for example.
Okay, but roller coasters.
In Rollercoaster Tycoon, you have a few types of staff available to hire. Handymen clean the park, mechanics maintain and fix rides, entertainers make nearby guests happier, and security guards prevent nearby guests from vandalizing benches and other décor. Only unhappy guests vandalize, so as long as there’s nothing particularly bad about your theme park, vandalism simply won’t occur. Having played about 100 hours worth of the game recently with no security guards, the only time I’ve seen any vandalism was along a couple paths I neglected to assign handymen to, thus the guests were simply reacting to the worrying assortment of nearby vomit.
RCT implies that no guests are inherently vandals and will only vandalize in response to some fundamental problem. It’s a simplified model, of course, but it sounds on-brand to me.
In particular, this contrasts with one of the primary arguments against completely abolishing the police: the Essentialist argument that some people are just inherently bad. Parkitect takes this approach; while guests might vandalize due to unhappiness, occasionally a group of new guests will be set to be vandals regardless of their enjoyment of the park. The player is alerted when this happens, ostensibly to beef up security in opposition to the incoming threat.
I haven’t played Parkitect a ton, but I usually found that my security guards were never around right when vandalism happened, and I’d still have to find and replace broken stuff afterward. To my mind, this, too, nicely encapsulates the state of policing: Either the player has to hire an excess of security guards just in case they might catch criminals in the act, or they just don’t bother and recognize that it’s just cheaper and likely inevitably necessary anyway to clean up afterwards.
Now, you might reasonably point out that this is just a cute observation about RCT in hindsight, and you’d be right about that, but one main obstacle to making progress on police injustice is the inability of some people to simply conceive of an alternative to things as they are. Some people simply cannot imagine a society without a police force, so “radical imagination,” as activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham describes it, is an important tool. Simulation games have for a long time acted as a means to pose big questions and offer interesting, if simplified, answers, and it’s useful to interrogate them further.
(Oh, lastly, I’m always tickled by this product registration screen from the original game disc’s installer. Look how much fun these people are having!)
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