From Harm to Repair: A Participant-Grounded Account of Sociability in Games Under Extreme Constraint (Prison)

Abstract: Commercial multiplayer games are producing a crisis of sociability alongside their crisis of mal-engagement. As the social platforms mediating an increasingly atomized social life have hollowed out, rather than replaced, the conditions for human connection (Srnicek, 2016), toxicity, hate, and harassment have increasingly become default features of online play (Anti-Defamation League, 2024; Romhanyi, Wells, & Steinkuehler, 2026). This pattern is not incidental or merely player failure. Game design, including game design for learning and behavior change, has largely treated sociality as a byproduct of gameplay or means to another end rather than a design target in its own right — and the outcomes largely show it.
Here, I set this problem against a curious counterpoint: an incarcerated-led gaming program at San Quentin, the oldest and most notorious prisons in California, observed to generate outcomes that directly oppose such trends — reduced prejudice, emotional co-regulation, and warm vibes of kinship in an environment structurally organized to prevent all three. Prison strips away the confounds that make the sociotechnical
interworkings of a well-played game (De Koven, 1978/2013) hard to see elsewhere: existing trust, freedom of association, low stakes. What remains is a clearer view of the underlying mechanisms of sociality in games themselves. Drawing on Goffman’s (1961) analysis of social encounters, Tronick’s (1989) rupture-and-repair model, and Allport’s (1954) contact theory, I sketch a working causal account of how shared, bounded,
mutually-attended play generates kinship across affiliation and social role — even, and
perhaps especially, under conditions of maximum constraint.

In this presentation, I trace this new line of inquiry, beginning with participant-led, empirical investigation of the mental health contributions of the San Quentin Skunkwork’s Transformative Gaming Program using a staggered waitlist RCT experimental design and of the theoretical model hypothesized using abductive microanalysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) of in-program interactions — currently in the final stages of pilot piloting.  I then discuss an informal replication of this phenomenon in a Sociology of Games course I taught inside RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego through UC Irvine’s LIFTED program and how this work has opened up new pathways not only for research (San Quentin) but also for design (development of The Board, a game for impact about the California parole system designed by an incarcerated student at Donovan currently caught inside this very system) and teaching (a game design studio workshop class co-taught with Kurt Squire weekly at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles).