Slogging away. Making progress. Playtesting story elements. Did you know I have no idea how to run an evil corporation? Somehow that's never come up in any of my games so far.


Anyway I just had an awesome idea for a video game. The key thought: In strategy games, espionage tends to be a bolted-on extra, often added as an expansion pack or something. What if espionage was part of the core gameplay?

Concept: Two powerful 21st century rival nations, vaguely China and America, vying for economic and political dominance. The new avaunt garde style of information warfare and cyberespionage.

There are two types of labs, military and commercial. Each lab can be assigned to work on a piece of future tech - social media, robotics, cybernetics, whatever.
You have no idea what each technology does. Each piece of tech has a variety of benefits and consequences, partially randomized at game start. For example, robotics might give a small boost to the economy and an enormous boost to social unrest, meaning if you just blindly release it to the public as soon as you've developed the technology you could create a disaster.
Each piece of technology has two sets of uses - the use a military can put it to and the use civilians can put it to. Stuff that comes out through the military labs has a good idea of the military applications, stuff that comes through the commercial labs has a better idea of the civilian applications. Research always tells you what the upsides are before the downsides.
The longer a tech stays in R&D the more control you have over it - you can discover more of the possible ramifications, or even work on reducing the negative consequences of the rollout.

So in this game, technology is always a risk, and one you don't fully understand the consequences of unleashing. However, you can't just take your time and be safe because if your rival rolls the dice on a risky technology and it pays off you'll be at a deficit.

The layer that interacts with the research system is the agent layer. Agents are also two types, commercial and intelligence. Commercial agents represent your state-industrial complex and can push the distribution of new technologies in your nation, their nation or in the wider world. Intelligence agents do a variety of stuff but mainly safeguarding or infiltrating enemy labs.

There are two stats for each tech:
- Regulation: Player controlled, this is a range of restrictions ranging from 'banned', 'intelligence agents only', 'military only', 'restricted commercial', 'commercial'.
- Spread: This is based on who actually has the technology in a region. It ranges from 'top secret' to 'ubiquitous'. So you might try and ban AI in a world where literally everyone can access the information on how to make an AI. Intelligence agents can work to spread or contain the spread of technology.

So it's possible that, say, one nation develops a tech with massive social destabilizing consequences. They activate their commercial agents and try to spread it in the rival nation. The rival activates their intelligence agents to contain it but they're too late, banning is no longer feasible, so they have to grudgingly settle for restricted commercial legislation while working on a counter-tech.

It could also be a case where one nation notices a rival aggressively pushing an unknown tech and reflexively bans it in response. Turns out that they just banned a tech with only good effects and set their research back years while the rival reaps the benefits uncontested.


So it's a game about calculated risks, brinkmanship and information control. The tension between the economic benefits of a free society and the risks of unregulated technological rollout. Cyberpunk from the perspective of the Megacorps.

Now I just need to find a games studio to pitch it to!