Simulation contract¶

What the game models and what it refuses to. Players learn from it what to expect, and the design is held to it.

The simulation models¶

Breakdowns¶

• Critical infrastructure services: energy, water, transport, communications, public services, commercial activity, residential habitability

• Dependencies between them (water needs power, hospitals need both)

• Degradation over time from underinvestment

• Gradual deterioration that may go unnoticed until too late

Districts and buildings¶

• Districts with different characteristics (wealthy, poor, industrial, mixed)

• Buildings that fail in their own ways, such as a pump or a hospital

• The unequal distribution of impact (systemic inequality is a feature, not a bug)

• This inequality can worsen or improve based on player choices

Trust and anger¶

• Public trust (aggregate confidence in leadership)

• District-level trust

• Media attention and narrative framing (simple headlines with optional depth)

• Protests, political pressure, regulatory intervention

• Political capital (lost fast, regained slowly)

Remedies¶

• Remedies drawn on the system pages, the Palace’s own and other people’s

• Each costs money, time before it acts, or both, and pulls more than one loop

• Pressing other people to act, at a price in political capital

• Which districts come first, and which notice

Consequences over time¶

• Immediate effects (service restoration, cost)

• Delayed effects (recurrence risk, trust changes, political fallout)

• Cumulative effects (political capital, trust, the treasury)

• Duration penalties (longer outages hurt more)

The story¶

• How events are framed (neglect, attack, bad luck, incompetence, investment)

• How official statements shape framing

• How rumours spread during information blackouts

• How narrative shapes political consequences

Time and pacing¶

• Real-time simulation with pause

• Variable speed (fast-forward through quiet periods)

• Events unfold at realistic relative speeds

Endings¶

• A four-year term, served to the end

• Removal by the guilds, when political capital runs out

• Revolt, when anger in the poorer districts stays at its height

• Bankruptcy, when the treasury stays empty

• Early retirement

• No victory, only reflection

The simulation will NOT model¶

Technical details¶

• No packet captures

• No CVEs, exploits, or malware names

• No “how” of attacks, only “what failed” and “what it costs”

• No firewall rules, patch versions, or configuration settings

Individual threat actors¶

• No named hackers, criminal gangs, or nation-state groups as characters

• Actors appear only through the events they cause

• No attribution minigame (attribution is uncertain and arrives late, if at all)

Perfect information¶

• The Palace does not see every failure at once

• Some failures stay hidden until complaints, the press or a cascade bring them out

• Causes are known only after an investigation, which costs time

• Whether a fix holds is known only when it fails again, or does not

Unlimited resources¶

• The treasury is finite and contested (other departments want it)

• Political capital is finite

• Time is finite (a four-year term, crisis windows)

• Attention is finite (not everything can be investigated)

Easy fixes¶

• No silver bullets

• Every choice has trade-offs

• Some damage is permanent (lost trust never fully returns)

• Good decisions often hurt now, bad decisions hurt later

Winners¶

• No high scores

• No “optimal” playthroughs

• No beating the game

• Only surviving, and accounting for the choices made

• Only “You served your term. Here is what happened.”

Technical jargon¶

• No “availability, integrity, confidentiality” framing

• No “risk matrices” or “risk scores”

• Plain language only: “People are angry,” “The hospital is struggling,” “The brewery can’t brew”

Required deep attention¶

• Simple headlines always visible

• Richer stories available but optional

• Players can engage at their preferred depth