Why This Exists
The deeper reason Presidency or Prison was created.
Presidency or Prison was not created just to parody political theater. It was created to model a harder question: what happens when power, narrative, and institutional behavior drift far enough from truth that distortion becomes adaptive?
This page explains why this game exists and what this game explores: how decisions reshape incentives inside systems where truth is not always rewarded.
A game about distorted incentives
The project begins from a simple observation: public systems do not always reward what is true, responsible, or morally coherent. They often reward what survives, what spreads, and what can be defended long enough to shape perception.
Why use a game
Argument alone often hardens people before they understand what they are looking at. A game does something different. It lets players experience pressure, trade-offs, reversals, and consequence from inside a system instead of only being told what the system is.
Why the political framing matters
This project draws from documented public behavior, misinformation patterns, institutional failure, and the moral instability that emerges when deception becomes normalized. It does not ask the player to memorize a position. It asks them to confront how power behaves when truth stops being enough.
What the player is actually doing
The player is not outside the system judging it from a distance. The player is inside it, making moves under pressure, trying to gain leverage without becoming trapped by the consequences of how that leverage was created.
Why this should be explored before it is dismissed
Some visitors will arrive already angry at the state of public life. Others will be uncertain, defensive, or simply curious. This project is built to meet all three by inviting exploration first and interpretation second. The goal is not to flatten disagreement. It is to make the structure of the problem harder to ignore.