I had thought to hire a technician to run the machine, and the poor guy was standing near the new CT scanner, looking bewildered.

It was sitting on bare subfloor, in an area where I hadn’t even gotten around to putting in wall partitions. I had put in a new CT scanner on one side of the unfinished third floor, which also housed my X-ray unit. He asked where my imaging department was, and I showed him: it was three floors up, and… severely under construction.

And that makes the similarities between the two at first fascinating, and then unnerving. But Project Hospital is a game, and the healthcare industry is supposed to keep people alive. This loop keeps the game engaging: It’s a system that you can learn, develop, and master, with difficulty and complexity increasing as the scenarios get larger and new elements are introduced. You’re creating efficiencies in the physical space available to you in order to extract the highest possible profit per hour. That’s how management sims like Project Hospital or Parkitect or Railroad Tycoon work: you want to do as many things as you can and make sure those things are as expensive as possible. healthcare system, particularly in the structural incentives to do more, charge more, bill more. I thought that would be an interesting thing to write about-how despite the best of intentions, simulation games always have to cut corners somewhere and fit things into a framework of fun.īut the more I talked with him, the more I felt a creeping unease both at how the supposedly gamey elements of Project Hospital mirror elements of the real U.S. I wanted Dad to show me where Project Hospital was different from a real hospital. Of course, it’s still a game, and games are supposed to be fun. Drawing up schedules for other physicians to keep the ER running was something he intensely disliked, almost as much as attending mandatory meetings required by hospital management. It’s clear to me he loves this side of the job, while the administrative side of the role has been a much less natural fit. I remember dozens of dinner conversations in which he’d excitedly describe difficult cases of inserting emergency airway tubes into patients that arrived at his ER, unable to breathe on their own.

This was Dad's work too, and he loved it. Project Hospital isn’t: It’s a serious management sim that wants to realistically show players something about how hospitals work. It’s a bit of a rarity-of the games that have taken on healthcare as their topic, almost all of them ( Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital, Surgeon Simulator) have all been goof-fests. Project Hospital is a game very much in the mould of Theme Hospital, but with a decidedly more serious approach to the subject matter.

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