Dev Diary #6 - Actors 🤴
What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.
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Welcome back,
Captivating games, movies, books have one trait in common - they tell fascinating stories. After all, storytelling is what we've been doing for thousands of years, gathered around the fire, learning how to hunt, inventing creation myths, and we continue to do so in the era of a global village.
Strategy games - despite their chess-spreadsheet-like nature - also tell stories, although usually implicitly, through unexpected outcomes or conflicts between players. Direct character-based stories were traditionally reserved for RPGs and adjacent genres, until titles such as Crusader Kings and Rimworld - both important inspirations for me - showed how a strategy game can feature rich storytelling based on characters. Espiocracy will push this side of the genre a little bit further.
What if we tie everything to characters? What if the world and countries represent groups of characters rather than bags of stats? What if characters include also organizations and sectors? There is better word for this kind of entity, coming straight out of the espionage lingo: actors, from the ability to act.
Transcript: Actors are tied to type-specific actions, managing relations, following agendas, developing capabilities, interacting with the player, and most importantly - building stories.
Actors will keep the world alive, create narratives from many points of view, represent plots running autonomously in the complex world. It should also not escape your attention that this system is designed precisely for a true espionage-based strategy game. Support a leader hostile to the enemy? Check. Break into Boeing design bureau? Check. Recruit Marilyn Monroe? Check. Use Yuri Gagarin in propaganda campaign? Check. Fund George Orwell? Check. Kidnap Gerard Depardieu? Wait a moment!
[h2]Actor Types[/h2]
Transcript: Table follows pattern of type (example subtypes) - example actors. Leader (president, military) - Stalin, MacArthur. Author (writer, director) - Orwell, Tarkovsky. Inventor (scientist, engineer) - Crick, von Braun. Pioneer (astronaut) - Gagarin. Celebrity (model) - Monroe. Political party (mass, cadre) - CPSU, Democratic. Social movement (pro-view, anti-view) - separatist, Ban the Bomb. Influential company (industry) - Volkswagen. Top research institution (nuclear) - Kurchatov Institute. Influential media (newspaper, TV channel) - Pravda, CBS. Large mob (Italian, Japanese) - Cosa Nostra, Yakuza. Trade union (miner) - NUM. Terrorist (local) - Red Army Faction. Guerilla (exiles) - 26th of July Movement. Religious (Orthodox) - Moscow Patriarchate. Sector (media, industry) - French media, US industry.
Actors are both historical and generated. The latter option is much more involved than a simple procedural generation: population serves as the source (to the point where, for instance, a leader can hold views that were popular when they were growing up), actors create other actors, void after loss of an actor is filled by another contender. Proper balance between historical and generated actors can be a personal thing for the player, therefore it will be highly configurable and moddable.
[h2]Activity[/h2]
Main actions are intuitive and correspond to the actor (sub)type. Examples include:
Transcript: Leader (president) can, for instance, declare a war or sign a treaty. Author (writer) can write a book or give an interview. Political party can promote a candidate or support a movement. Social movement can protest or influence politicians.
There are also three universal groups of actions:
Activity shapes not only the history, but also the fate of the actor. Some actions are more optimal in specific contexts, but actors - like in the real life - are not always rational. Instead, their actions are guided by competence, traits, and goals. It adds an interesting layer of complexity especially at the level of leaders, as you can probably imagine consequences of electing an incompetent leader...
[h2]Influence[/h2]
All actors represented in the game are actually influential actors - important or at least potentially important for the fate of the whole country.
Actor's influence is quantified to a single parameter, defined by:
As with many other features of the game, influence is two-way street. On the one hand, it is meticulously acquired by actors over years. On the other hand, it unlocks actions, defines their reach, and is subject to dramatic changes. For example: a writer with low influence suddenly succeeds with a bestseller and hugely increases own influence, because now the country (or even the whole world) listens to the interviews and waits for the next book. And the player can interact with the author to push them into ridiculing Western or Eastern systems... (Yes, Orwell-Huxley vibes!)
Influence system neatly clarifies some complex mechanisms. Some leaders have no legal power (not enough influence) to declare war on their own, authors writing in lingua franca English have wider global reach (higher influence) than other authors, cartel parties can naturally emerge by accumulating influence and gatekeeping it from new parties, and so on.
[h2]Great Man Theory[/h2]
Let's address an elephant in the room. Is it "Great Man Theory The Game"?
The answer is straightforward: no.
Classic (Napoleonic) great man theory is out of the question, since there are incompetent leaders and those who are competent, can posses ill-fated views and negative traits.
Modern great man theory deserves more detailed rebuttal. Folks in discussions adjacent to Paradox games often equal the theory with apples and oranges. First approach, probably closer to the historical discourse, assumes that high-ranking individuals were largely products of their environments. I think this is a fair approach to history and I reflect that in the design: individual persons come from and are rooted in the population, population itself creates actors and is represented by actors such as social movements. In addition, fate of many actors lies in the hands of the common folk (by changing influence, reacting to actions, voting in elections, and so on) - which is also tied directly to views held by the population.
Now on to the oranges: sometimes discussion around great man theory quickly evolves into discussion about historical determinism. It's not hard to find voices equaling the theory with a view that Stalin, in the case of earlier death, would be replaced by an approximate copy of Stalin, because high-ranking individuals are deterministic slaves of history (shout-out to Tolstoy!). This approach is strongly rejected by the game on very simple grounds - deterministic history would be boring.
[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]
The next dev diary will explore the first method of interaction with actors - Contacts and Targets - on October 1st.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
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"Chess is not a game. Chess is well-defined form computation. Real games, real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics and deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do" - John Von Neumann
---
Welcome back,
Captivating games, movies, books have one trait in common - they tell fascinating stories. After all, storytelling is what we've been doing for thousands of years, gathered around the fire, learning how to hunt, inventing creation myths, and we continue to do so in the era of a global village.
Strategy games - despite their chess-spreadsheet-like nature - also tell stories, although usually implicitly, through unexpected outcomes or conflicts between players. Direct character-based stories were traditionally reserved for RPGs and adjacent genres, until titles such as Crusader Kings and Rimworld - both important inspirations for me - showed how a strategy game can feature rich storytelling based on characters. Espiocracy will push this side of the genre a little bit further.
What if we tie everything to characters? What if the world and countries represent groups of characters rather than bags of stats? What if characters include also organizations and sectors? There is better word for this kind of entity, coming straight out of the espionage lingo: actors, from the ability to act.
Transcript: Actors are tied to type-specific actions, managing relations, following agendas, developing capabilities, interacting with the player, and most importantly - building stories.Actors will keep the world alive, create narratives from many points of view, represent plots running autonomously in the complex world. It should also not escape your attention that this system is designed precisely for a true espionage-based strategy game. Support a leader hostile to the enemy? Check. Break into Boeing design bureau? Check. Recruit Marilyn Monroe? Check. Use Yuri Gagarin in propaganda campaign? Check. Fund George Orwell? Check. Kidnap Gerard Depardieu? Wait a moment!
[h2]Actor Types[/h2]
Transcript: Table follows pattern of type (example subtypes) - example actors. Leader (president, military) - Stalin, MacArthur. Author (writer, director) - Orwell, Tarkovsky. Inventor (scientist, engineer) - Crick, von Braun. Pioneer (astronaut) - Gagarin. Celebrity (model) - Monroe. Political party (mass, cadre) - CPSU, Democratic. Social movement (pro-view, anti-view) - separatist, Ban the Bomb. Influential company (industry) - Volkswagen. Top research institution (nuclear) - Kurchatov Institute. Influential media (newspaper, TV channel) - Pravda, CBS. Large mob (Italian, Japanese) - Cosa Nostra, Yakuza. Trade union (miner) - NUM. Terrorist (local) - Red Army Faction. Guerilla (exiles) - 26th of July Movement. Religious (Orthodox) - Moscow Patriarchate. Sector (media, industry) - French media, US industry.Actors are both historical and generated. The latter option is much more involved than a simple procedural generation: population serves as the source (to the point where, for instance, a leader can hold views that were popular when they were growing up), actors create other actors, void after loss of an actor is filled by another contender. Proper balance between historical and generated actors can be a personal thing for the player, therefore it will be highly configurable and moddable.
[h2]Activity[/h2]
Main actions are intuitive and correspond to the actor (sub)type. Examples include:
Transcript: Leader (president) can, for instance, declare a war or sign a treaty. Author (writer) can write a book or give an interview. Political party can promote a candidate or support a movement. Social movement can protest or influence politicians.There are also three universal groups of actions:
- Interacting with other actors (to the point of friends and enemies)
- Balancing internal growth and external actions (spending limited resources)
- Moving between countries (rare but sometimes significant, for instance former leader fleeing country after an invasion to establish government-in-exile)
Activity shapes not only the history, but also the fate of the actor. Some actions are more optimal in specific contexts, but actors - like in the real life - are not always rational. Instead, their actions are guided by competence, traits, and goals. It adds an interesting layer of complexity especially at the level of leaders, as you can probably imagine consequences of electing an incompetent leader...
[h2]Influence[/h2]
All actors represented in the game are actually influential actors - important or at least potentially important for the fate of the whole country.
Actor's influence is quantified to a single parameter, defined by:
- Recent actions and their results
- Current role in the legal system
- Size (in the case of organizations)
- Relations
- History
As with many other features of the game, influence is two-way street. On the one hand, it is meticulously acquired by actors over years. On the other hand, it unlocks actions, defines their reach, and is subject to dramatic changes. For example: a writer with low influence suddenly succeeds with a bestseller and hugely increases own influence, because now the country (or even the whole world) listens to the interviews and waits for the next book. And the player can interact with the author to push them into ridiculing Western or Eastern systems... (Yes, Orwell-Huxley vibes!)
Influence system neatly clarifies some complex mechanisms. Some leaders have no legal power (not enough influence) to declare war on their own, authors writing in lingua franca English have wider global reach (higher influence) than other authors, cartel parties can naturally emerge by accumulating influence and gatekeeping it from new parties, and so on.
[h2]Great Man Theory[/h2]
Let's address an elephant in the room. Is it "Great Man Theory The Game"?
The answer is straightforward: no.
Classic (Napoleonic) great man theory is out of the question, since there are incompetent leaders and those who are competent, can posses ill-fated views and negative traits.
Modern great man theory deserves more detailed rebuttal. Folks in discussions adjacent to Paradox games often equal the theory with apples and oranges. First approach, probably closer to the historical discourse, assumes that high-ranking individuals were largely products of their environments. I think this is a fair approach to history and I reflect that in the design: individual persons come from and are rooted in the population, population itself creates actors and is represented by actors such as social movements. In addition, fate of many actors lies in the hands of the common folk (by changing influence, reacting to actions, voting in elections, and so on) - which is also tied directly to views held by the population.
Now on to the oranges: sometimes discussion around great man theory quickly evolves into discussion about historical determinism. It's not hard to find voices equaling the theory with a view that Stalin, in the case of earlier death, would be replaced by an approximate copy of Stalin, because high-ranking individuals are deterministic slaves of history (shout-out to Tolstoy!). This approach is strongly rejected by the game on very simple grounds - deterministic history would be boring.
[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]
The next dev diary will explore the first method of interaction with actors - Contacts and Targets - on October 1st.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
---
"Chess is not a game. Chess is well-defined form computation. Real games, real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics and deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do" - John Von Neumann