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.
Many topics near the Cold War and espionage deserve a full separate game. Espiocracy, out of sheer necessity, has to narrow down such topics into a single main angle. That was the case for conventional wars (angle: special forces), diplomacy (international structures), or science and technology (paradigms). Propaganda is another such large topic.
The main angle of propaganda in Espiocracy? Controlling the narrative.
Views, Causes, Major Events
As you can recall from the earliest dev diaries, views (eg. pro-Soviet sentiment or fear of nuclear war) form the backbone of human psychology in the game, giving people memory, motivation, alignment, and so on. In the most naive approach to propaganda, you can just select any view in the game, and then task your assets with promoting or undermining it.
This method, however, merely addresses a view as a black box. It is used in the game as a secondary cheap tool (chosen perhaps by smaller intelligence agencies). Actual impactful propaganda begins a little bit further: with manipulation of the inner workings of views.
Views in the game connect causes with effects - for instance, Germany unleashed WW2 which led to widespread anti-German sentiment at the beginning of the game in 1946. Many other major events before and during the game can create and/or modify views.
Naturally, this doesn't happen instantly, and instead, such events need time to propagate through media, become topics of debates, or reach books and movies. Main propaganda tools in Espiocracy focus on this twilight zone. Players can modify the "how" of the view-making and view-modifying process - they can control the narrative.
The Narrative
When a major event happens in the game (invasion, terrorist attack, political change, international crisis, large accident, and so on), players begin a battle over controlling the narrative around this event.
In simplest terms, "control" is a set of 0-100 parameters, one global, and a few for participating/relevant/superpower nations. Details, such as the initial level of control, are highly dependent on the event and its details. For instance, the story of the Sputnik launch starts as fully controlled by the USSR, and the only thing that the American player can do is slightly subtract Soviet control domestically - whereas the assassination of JFK is more or less carte blanche in terms of control, difficult to take over, prone to be never fully controlled by any party, and then be lost to dozens of conspiracy theories (not only from players but also from other actors in the game).
Between the onset of the event and highly variable moment of people moving on (which, again, depends on many details, other events, and even forms of media), players vie for control by:
- Using geographically and culturally positioned radio stations, newspapers, bribed journalists, partially controlled actors, spies, front organizations, and anything else that can potentially influence the masses
- Acquiring related intelligence, documents, recordings, witness reports
- Leaking chosen parts to the press, surfacing the event to the government, and further, modifying details
- Enforcing censorship (including jamming stations), diverting the attention by popularizing another significant event, supplying strong rebuttals
- Preparing forgeries, false flags, accusations, convincing lies
- Directly attacking other parties trying to manipulate the event
Once one of the players controls the majority (51+) of the narrative, they can launch propaganda campaigns that exploit the story, modify its perception, and accomplish various small feats along the way.
Campaigns
A propaganda campaign in the game is a kind of intelligence operation that uses propaganda assets (mentioned above, radio stations, and others) to primarily either amplify or suppress the controlled event.
While the main goal is usually obvious (eg. Soviets suppressing the Chernobyl disaster or Americans amplifying Khrushchev's "secret speech"), details and consequences - defined by available assets as well as direct configuration of the campaign plan - forge campaigns into unique adventures that:
- Shift new views in terms of direction (eg. revert pro-X to anti-X), subject (eg. assign blame/merit to another entity), emotional load (eg. from anti-X to hatred of X), and spread
- Ignite reactions from actors and nations, eg. smear campaign causing targeted political leader to resign
- Lead to new events, eg. Red Scare
- Use white / grey / black propaganda methods, utilize totalitarian / free environment, use assets from publishing houses to smuggled samizdat machines
- Choose between resonating with one or another set of nations, for instance appealing to Latin American nations while repelling African nations
- Associate concept A with B, eg. NATO with Nazis (a common theme in Soviet propaganda)
- Have various trade-offs, for instance between simplicity and spread, between costs and vulnerability to counter-propaganda, between exposing own propaganda assets and strength of the campaign, between domestic effect and abroad, and so on
- Affect control over this event and potentially over other events
Such campaigns, launched to manipulate fresh controlled events, form the majority of propaganda machine in the game - but there are more variants of them and adjacent details.
Variants and Corollaries
Some major events are active for a long time (for instance: wars). In these cases, the battle for control over the event is also a long-term affair where it can frequently change hands, influenced by the evolution of the event, campaigns, and so on.
Manufactured or even false flag events can also become a basis for propaganda. Their main downside, naturally, is the cost of preparing them and much higher vulnerability to counter-propaganda.
Speaking of which, following standard mechanics of intelligence operations, players can launch counterintelligence (in this case: counter-propaganda) operations upon detecting foreign campaigns reaching their soil. Usually, it takes very much a counterintelligence form, with arrests of relevant journalists, infiltrating outlets suspected of being under foreign control or surveilling participating actors to identify their handlers.
In addition to working fresh major events, there are two more special types of campaigns. Future events, such as an invasion of another country, can be preceded by a campaign that engineers consent. Past events, for instance, a past alliance with a universally hated nation, can be modified by campaigns that rewrite history both domestically and abroad.
Outside of controlling the narrative, nations have a set of psychological parameters modifiable through player actions. Some of them were mentioned before (eg. diplomatic weight), others are experimental (eg. atomic ambition), while some are largely integrated with the propaganda tools described above. One parameter from the last category is soft power, developed by international contributions (sometimes unusual, for instance in real history North Korea acquired soft power in Africa by sending... mass gymnastics instructors - an action also available in the game), which then supports battle for control and subsequent campaigns.
Final Remarks
The next dev diary will be posted on September 6th!
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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"Anyone can believe a convincing lie; we’ve all fallen for a few. But the blatant lie does some useful things. It reveals the skeptics, or at least the skeptics who open their mouths. It forces the supporters deeper into the web of lies. They have to accept this, knowing it is a lie, and dig themselves deeper. It’s brainwashing, making them choose to accept the propaganda rather than the evidence before them" - author and year unknown