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.
Welcome back!
Usually, we finish dev diaries with a quote. Today, we will begin with a striking paragraph from Britannica:
"Great empires disintegrated; nation-states emerged, flourished briefly, and then vanished; world wars twice transformed the international system; new ideologies swept the world and shook established groups from power; all but a few countries experienced at least one revolution and many countries two or more; domestic politics in every system were contorted by social strife and economic crisis; and everywhere the nature of political life was changed by novel forms of political activity, new means of mass communication, the enlargement of popular participation in politics, the rise of new political issues, the extension of the scope of governmental activity, the threat of nuclear war, and innumerable other social, economic, and technical developments"
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-system/Development-and-change-in-political-systems
This abominably long sentence perfectly captures the gist of political change in Espiocracy. Countries and governments are simulated with the emphasis on change rather than static stability. Constant political panta rhei sits at the heart of the game - it combines points of divergence in the Cold War, grandness in the grand strategy genre, and the activity of intelligence agencies. In fact, for some (larger) countries this is the core gameplay, the main way to win.
States of states
Political changes are modeled with Markov chains. Use of this tool in political modelling goes back as far as the 70s:
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2600315
More recent works use them even to model the future:
Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Logistic-Regression-and-Markov-Chain-Model-for-of-Shallcross/
And this is the current shape of political Markov chain in Espiocracy:
Hopefully, "show, don't tell" explains the model on its own. If you need a few nerdy details:
- Circles and connections represent, respectively, all possible states and transitions
- Transitions have assigned accumulation factors spiced with RNG and integrated with other systems such as actors (in standard Markov chains this is just probability)
- All factors of transitions coming out of a single state must sum up to 100%
- The state is memoryless - previous states theoretically don't matter
- In practice though, factors are shaped by other systems which do react to a sequence of states
- Steps are discrete, but will be seamlessly integrated with the in-game flow of time
- Some (factors of) transitions are controlled by schedulers, for instance elections
Struggle for power
Fundamentally, political fate of countries and governments is controlled by possible political changes. Players compete to affect them via direct activities (e.g. plotting a coup) or indirect means (e.g. funneling money to social movement). The latter also extends to population, actors, and larger external circumstances. This is where a crisis can lead to government resignation, death of a fierce dictator can open up the pathway to liberalization, or where a nuclear bomb collapses a country into anarchy.
There's one more critical factor which governs possible changes: axis from democracy to autocracy.
In a simple yet meaningful approximation of very complex phenomenon, the game attempts to capture multi-decade trajectories of political systems. Every political change - and some events - has capability to slightly move country's position on the axis. On the one hand, it means that strong democracy (usually) cannot change to dictatorship overnight, and instead needs years of undermining (active measures vibes!). On the other hand, it conveys the fact that you (usually) cannot just slap democratic structures on a country and call it a day (Afghanistan vibes) or follows the history of some post-autocratic countries which, after brief democratic period, returned to various shades of dictatorship.
Mind you, democratic-autocratic axis is political supradomain, further fleshed out to many subtypes, from crowned parliamentary democracies to dynastic communist autocracies.
Regnum Defende (defend the realm, motto of MI5)
Interaction with political changes will greatly differ between the countries. There are:
- Possible specializations in capabilities, types of contacts, and operations
- Strategic materials which, when revealed, can topple whole governments
- Legal constraints, such as anti-assassination policy in the USA after JFK death
- Inter-agency agreements, for instance CIA and KGB did not directly interfere in internal politics of the opposite superpower
- Number of allies to strengthen and enemies to weaken
- Costs of actions, operations, infrastructure
The last point effectively limits interference capabilities for most countries in the world. Czechoslovakia (generally) won't be able to affect political changes in the USA, but may interfere in politics of neighbors if it dedicates enough resources. That doesn't mean lack of agency though - instead, minor countries usually focus on rare but still significant internal political changes. The design here reflects strategic approach to espionage (counterintelligence), in which frustrating blows out of the blue are replaced with consciously fought battles.
Importantly, the game doesn't choose optimal political changes for you. Quite the opposite, it introduces economic (and by extension, moral) ambiguities, which follow historical examples from many corners of the world - intelligence agencies fiercely fighting to strengthen weak government (e.g. Israeli Mossad), siding with external actors who take over the country but will increase their influence (e.g. Czechoslovak StB), supporting autocratic capitalist over democratic communist (e.g. CIA in Congo), and so on.
Example simulation
After starting with a quote, let's finish with an old prototype simulation. Below, every country walks political Markov chain in one-year steps, with colors (confusingly, sorry for that!) corresponding to democracies (blue) / autocracies (red), and pins signalling transitions:
Final remarks
The next dev diary will explore one of the crucial historical processes of Espiocracy which intersects with the framework of political changes: decolonization.
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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Photo credit: Santeri Viinamäki