I’m preparing for my first “real” session tomorrow evening, and I’m somewhat stumped for Corporation moves for some of the Corps my players have created.
Vishkar New Media is a huge media conglomerate that essentially wants to be 22nd Century Buzzfeed. They rely on automatically generated lowest-common-denominator content produced in overwhelming amounts just so one of those billion things goes viral and they can start pushing merchandise within hours. They have no qualms about abusing copyright law and shamelessly stealing other people’s content. Their market practices are extremely aggressive, earning them the ire of other corps.
Rikimaru Foods is a junk food conglomerate that constantly bribes public health authorities, scientists and journalists to claim their garbage synthburgers cure cancer rather than cause it. They have a significant media presence; their face is a fat, obnoxious female chef.
HDD Conglomerate is a merger of Disney, Durex and a bunch of smaller companies. Their business model is essentially “sell them drugs, then sell them cartoons to watch while on drugs, then a truckload of dragon dildos once they grow up a bit”. They control huge tracts of land in Central America, where they put up hundreds of theme parks.
All of these are very evocative, instinctively repulsive, and dirty chrome. So that much is good. You can see where they can start to come into conflict. But I kind of can’t think of any cool moves they could make that would be both unique to them and clearly visible to the players.
For Vishkar, I was thinking so far:
– Steal someone’s spotlight (one player has the Illustrious Directive, another is a Reporter)
– Buy someone out and shut them down (but this hardly feels unique)
– More?
Rikimaru:
– Lie through their teeth (while evocative and could interact nicely with the Reporter, I’m not sure how to frame it in practical terms, what could it really result in)
– More?
HDD:
– Corrupt and abuse the innocent (sounds largely like a long-term thing, though)
– More?
I’d be glad to hear your thoughts.
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Stick “Viral Marketing” in there somewhere, and all the cute forms of viral marketing that may take place in the future. You say they are big enough to turn all of Central America into theme-parks? Imagine multi-level marketers paid to walk around in pairs and mention the new Boy James album within earshot of hundreds of millions of people, in their languages, dozens of times a day.
You might have fun going through the Corp cards of a game of Android: Netrunner, the collectible card-game which is a re-edition of a 90s game that got “lost in the shuffle” of the glut of CCGs of the time. But it postulates future corporations “advancing agendas” of various sorts. You just pick the ones which have nasty effects on characters.
For Vishkar, remember that all of those ads and clickbaits are tracking people. The real product here isn’t the media or the marketing. The product is the deep data knowledge they have on everyone. There’s the famous story about Target’s systems correctly deducing that a particular teenager was pregnant and sending targeted ads to her before her father knew.
So maybe they have a move like “sell dossier on someone”. If it’s on one of the PCs this could advance a different corp’s clock, or it could introduce complications into a mission by messing with their contacts, triggering +hunteds, etc.
“Make them famous” could also be an interesting move. In a land of people searching for 15-minute stardom who’s going to be able to tell if some of those stars are artificially pushed by the company? The effects on a group of PCs who want to stay under the radar are obvious, even if it’s not pointed at them—but if that corp’s clock ever hits 00:00 then the PCs should definitely be the hit stars of a new reality show!
Great ideas here. As a different perspective, if nothing grabs you, you don’t need to make specific moves. Also, if you have some ideas but you’re not sure if they’re quite what you want, you can use them for now and change them later.