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Unfortunately, bad things happen when I get a little too absorbed in my construction projects and neglect the people inside them. The depth of the visual simulation adds welcome appeal to the game’s low-res aesthetic. I get engrossed watching them deliver construction materials from storage before they build out my design square by square and haul in large single pieces like appliances and doors to finish everything off. In Prison Architect, workers construct everything sequentially. In many sims, buildings magically fade into existence as I lay them out. Then I connect power and water lines as necessary, supply the necessary staff, and customize the building with optional extras like windows and flooring. A kitchen, for example, needs a minimum of four refrigerators, four stoves, and a trash can. Then, I designate spaces inside for specific functions and provide the basic objects it needs to work. Whenever I make a new building, like a cell block or a cafeteria, I first lay out the foundation and the walls. On the surface, it provides me yet another playground for making mischief in the lives of virtual people, but the longer I play, the more I get invested in the challenges of running a safe, riot-free facility that effectively rehabilitates criminals into contributing members of society.

I’m playing Prison Architect, a management sim that tasks me with the construction and daily operations of a prison. The latest sim in my collection somehow pushed me out of these destructive habits, though. And I never could manage a playthrough in Black & White without teaching my creature some hilariously bad habits. I delighted in making the world’s most unsafe amusement park attractions in Roller Coaster Tycoon. I remember using cheat codes in SimCity 2000 to unleash devastating floods on my burgeoning metropolis. I totally understood his joy in smashing wooden block constructions, because that’s exactly how I’ve played sim games my entire life. Again and again, he’d gleefully smash everything I created, sometimes not even waiting for me to stack more than one block on top of another before giggling adorably and ruining yet another structure. It didn’t really matter what it was, because his favorite part of the game was to knock the blocks over. Then, I’d start building something: a tower, wall, a pyramid, whatever. I’d sit on the carpet and prop him up between my legs facing a pile of wooden blocks. Here’s a game I played with my son when he was little, before he could even walk.