Whether directing people toward the most profitable section of Pleasure Island, and ensuring that they're dehydrated and on a sugar high when they get there, or turning an intensive care waiting room into an efficient factory line, I've been mining artificial people for all that they're worth since I was a kid. It's striking how quickly I've accepted that human beings are the resource I have to manage, and how it took this particular approach to the genre to make me realise thatвЂ™s pretty much what I've been doing since I first loaded up Theme Park back in the day. I can spend hours building a facility that seems like an ideal of a humane form of imprisonment, and I can spend hours constructing a Benthamite panopticon nightmare, and then nudging it toward chaos and riot just for a laugh. Prison Architect happily descends into (or is elevated toward) farce, but its comedy is an emergent device, a result of rules and behaviours rather than a whoopee cushion or joy buzzer.ДЄs to whether it manages to accommodate the grimmer aspects of life (and death) behind bars into both its simulation model and its style, I'm still not entirely sure. They consult the performance of their stocks instead of a patient's charts and there's a comedy sound effect for every illness and demise.

It rolls up outside the hospital in a tiny ambulance that fifteen red-nosed doctors spill out of, with dollar signs obscuring their eyes. Theme Hospital's satire has a squirty flower on its lapel and honking great shoes. Was it an ill-judged attempt to shock with no real significance, or was it a perfectly pitched gateway into a management simulation unafraid to look into the extremes of its chosen setting? The backdrop of an apparently straight tale of murder, anger and regret made that tutorial all the more difficult to swallow. The first time I played it, at Rezzed a few years ago, I was confused by the gap between the rather jolly graphics and the sinister, clean execution chamber that the tutorial taught me to build. Introversion's Prison Architect is the natural heir to those Bullfrog games of old. Dungeon Keeper wasn't the only Bullfrog management game that had you playing as the villain.

The intro, which sees a patient ejected from the operating table and dumped into the darkness beneath the hospital when his credit history doesn't check out, is a playful but brutal swipe at for-profit healthcare. In that sense, Theme Hospital was a natural progression. Applying corporate management to a 'fun' activity exposed the tough business behind the painted on smiles. It's easy to forget that the value of Theme Park's setting was in the cynical humour as much as the actual colour and carnival atmosphere. If that theme also supports a complex social or economic simulation, all the better.

Rollercoasters, golf courses, Sexy Empires. ДЄ great management game often has a theme that is enjoyable to play with, in and of itself. What is the best management game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today's door is.

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