Role-Playing Games are fantastic entertainment.

En Taro Adun, Executor. This one is a lighthearted post and for good reason.
We have millions of people incarcerated or detained across the USA.
We don't have the luxury of strolling into Regal Cinemas to watch the latest sci-fi flick with a tub of popcorn and a beer in hand. Nor do we have the pleasure of logging in to Steam, Origin, or Epic Games and downloading the latest free-roaming, do anything you want title.

We typically have access to a small, sparsely populated library, rely on family and friends to acquire additional books beyond what our facility and fellow inmates have, and wait patiently for months for the volunteers who run the various prison book outreaches to send us a few well-loved titles.

Beyond that, entertainment was sparse. Access to it has improved, thankfully, in the form of hardware adoption by state prisons -- the tablet on which I write these posts. We now have additional portable entertainment choices, but some of them are painfully expensive in the scale of what we inmates make ($0.00 a month, plus anything my friends can bless me with).

On the outside, I was a bargain seeker; my thrill was getting the most delight per dollar possible. If I could get an extra dollar's worth out of every dollar, I delighted in it. When I shopped, I was that miserly middle-aged squinter in the aisle, dithering over the saltines and buying two smaller boxes because it was actually 0.7¢ per ounce less than the big box, or scanning my phone for the coupons that I can pair with the paper coupons I clipped or printed.

Here, that version of the joy is gone, replaced with finding joy in a $7.48 video game purchase. Of all the media available to me -- music, movies, and games, the venerable RPG is going to turn up to have the most play value, potentially the most replay value, and the most cost effective choice for an inmate who just wants something to do at the end of their day or when in their cell during count and it runs long (three or four hours is unusually long, but...), or even when their dorm is on lockdown and they are stuck in their cell for days on end.

As so, I'm 17+ hours in on a game title I will leave unnamed in this post, and I am nowhere near finished with it. I am familiar with this title, having played it before in a different format. It was easily a good buy, in the relative scope of purchasable titles, and other than mild performance issues, quite enjoyable.

You'd hope, then, that there would be a push by developers to get their legit titles into the hands of those of us which the world is passing by. Something calm and honest to do as we sit penitent for months and years on end.

I think no-one wants to realize or acknowledge we are a market beyond the companies dishing out hardware to prisoners; this results in the gross majority of our available content being trite, highly overpriced shovelware. There are a large number of Match 3 titles, featuring fruit, gems, or shapes; many more block destroyers that depend on two or more of the same color touching; a disturbing number of car parking simulators, just to touch on a few things we have.

There are a number of titles I won't mention by name because of a personal reason, though, that prove to be worth their weight in delicious veggie burgers (or tantalum, your choice; I'll take the veggie burgers).
$7.48 brings us many calendar days worth of enjoyment, a story, music, suspense and drama, and when you finish, you can play it again, unlike our $7.98 movie rental. You don't even have to play the game the same way, so it's variable in the enjoyment it delivers.

My biggest wishes, with regard to the content we get, is hopelessly complex:

• Game publishers should offer a licensing deal to businesses that are exclusively catering to prison systems. This would legitimize some of the titles I see here, ahem.

• Inmates who have shown an interest in game development should be offered classes that teach this, and be given a chance to make their own games.
  Yes, this will result in more match 3 titles (Bejeweled clones), more block destruction titles (Toy Blast clones) and such at first -- they are, after all, the training wheels of game development, I am sure.
  But! We inmates have time, imagination, and in some (maybe many cases), a drive to succeed. Given direction, maybe your new favorite mobile RPG will come from behind the concertina wire.

• Public libraries with eBook lending could, and ideally should partner with these hardware vendors to make reading more accessible.
  That one is almost self-explanatory, but, flavor: we have access to an uncurated selection of eBooks through the Securus library. The content is largely scraped from Project Gutenberg's available books, along with a sprinkling of free eBooks from authors like Cory Doctorow (Makers was a great read, as was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by the way) and Ann Wilson.
  Apart from the few pops of modern flavor, we have books over a century old. Fiction and fact don't always survive the trip forward into time; we learn new facts, and it can even skew our view of fiction.
  Fresher eBooks would be more entrancing, both of fact and fantasy, filling a window of learning in a beneficial manner.

Alas, I fear that this is but a Phantasy of mine. :)

Always, be good to yourselves, to each other. Take time to explore a new food this week, something you've never tried.
It's good for your mind, even if you think it tastes like fermented gym shorts.

Thanks for reading!