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.
Good design of any product, counterintuitively, sometimes shouldn't be about the end result and instead should focus on the process of making it.
The Empire State Building was built in less than a year and one of the main principles behind its design was... schedule for trucks with concrete. It may be compared with the World Trade Center towers which, despite superior technology, took a decade and went far over budget to complete. While architects of the first building organized the site around trucks arriving every minute (!), the director of the second project prioritized the end result and "continually fought against compromising his architectural vision in the face of various practicalities" (more).
Game development resembles a construction site. In this context, there are mechanics that may be good for the game - and desired by the players - but which will also encourage poor or lazy code, slow down progress, or even contribute to development hell.
Having observed the development of a few mods trying to make a game out of the Cold War and modern times, I can risk a hypothesis that one of such areas is a detailed international organization, especially the United Nations. It's a graveyard of good intentions. There are endless structures, actions, details, ripple effects, and edge cases that may be really fun to read about. You could make entire games about a large room in New York or Brussels. And the players! There is always a subset of people very passionate (and vocal) about these organizations. Even in the case of this diary, folks started speculating on "what new mechanics will be revealed".
The answer is: none. Espiocracy, deliberately, uses already existing mechanics to capture the soul of international organizations. Funky details may be slowly added in the form of accumulated content (or mechanically after the release) but I intentionally avoid any deeper implementations for the sake of good design.
Control and Member States
The game features the most influential organizations in the framework of actors.
Primary gameplay around them is focused on control. Standard actors by default have full control over their actions. For instance, many players begin with full control over their actor agencies...
...which then can be chipped away by other entities, as shown in the previous diary, and in the following example of a Soviet player controlling a Polish player:
In contrast, international organizations usually have minimal control over their actions - with exceptions such as ICJ launching investigations - and the rest is distributed between member states.
These are usually not equal. Different levels of control approximate diplomatic prowess, participation in the Security Council, or the role of the USA in NATO and the USSR in the Warsaw Pact (or observer members with nil control). As with any other actors, control gates access to proposing and ordering actions. Proposed action, depending on its details, may be further proceeded through debating-voting mechanics borrowed from governments of Espiocracy.
Types of actions depend on the subtype of the organization. Examples include:
- Statehood-Defining (eg. UN): legitimize invasion, propose border changes, establish trust territory, call for elections
- Legal (eg. ICJ): settle a dispute, set up an international criminal tribunal
- Military (eg. NATO): invade, conduct exercises, share nuclear weapons
- Regional (eg. EU): integrate economies, fund less developed countries, agree on military action
- Common Interest (eg. BRICS): promote common views, coordinate responses
Global, Dynamic, Spyable
In addition to evolved control mechanics, influence takes here slightly different angle:
Global influence of international organizations stems mainly from legal prerogatives and the participation of member states. Typically for actors, internal life of the organization reflects and influences the external world. United Nations - or any other organization - may evolve during a campaign into a much more influential or much more toothless entity through natural actions such as taking in powerful members or catastrophically failing in a mission (eg. the IRL death of Secretary-General in Congo in 1961).
Naturally, the dynamic nature lends itself also to the set of international organizations. All of them may be dissolved, new ones may be established through a single decision or from a series of summits, organizations may create subsidiary organizations (eg. the UN creating ICC in reaction to events analogous to war crimes of the 1990s), members may join, leave, be expelled, and so on.
Finally, let's take a brief look at more unusual espionage beats associated with international organizations:
- A HQ with diplomats from many countries is naturally a hotbed for espionage
- Membership gives access to good covers for operatives, allowing them to infiltrate HQ and target other members
- For the host country, it creates interesting gameplay of both the easiest access to many useful targets and of harsh reality of dealing with a nest of spies in the homeland
Final Remarks
This was a brief diary, unlike the AAR coming on December 24th - stay tuned!
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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"Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol" - Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the UN, about diplomacy (1967)