The Prison as Playground Global Scripts and Heterotopic Vertigo in Prison Escape

Located in the disused penitentiary in Breda, the Netherlands, the real life game Prison Escape offers a playground through which players can get close to incarceration without actually being locked up. The power of the space as a former penitentiary, the imagination of the players, and the script of the game all rub against each other to create what I call heterotopic vertigo. This experience of the simultaneity of layers of meaning at work in the space pushes to the fore one’s own position as player in connecting heterotopias of deviation, exotic heterotopias of the imaginary prison and the temporarily transgressive heterotopia of play. In order to analyse how this works in Prison Escape, I will focus on the mugshots made of players during the game and on my own experience of the interactive game script. I argue that the heterotopic vertigo caused a “bleed” from the game world to my own that triggered awareness of the erasing work done by my own phantasmagoric interpretations of globalised and stereotypical imaginaries surrounding the prison. In this way, heterotopic vertigo’s sensations of estrangement productively break down the naturalised conception of the prison as an outside to society.