MSG A game for professionals

Beta Playtest Edition 2.0

Written, designed and illustrated by Wood Ingham

with

Brand Partnership Specialist Becky Lowe

Reimagineering Consultant Benjamin Baugh

™

a johnheronproject publication

2 MSG™

Beta playtest edition 2.0 2008

MSG™ is © 2008, 2009 Howard David Ingham

Text © 2008, 2009 Howard David Ingham, FR Lowe and Benjamin Baugh

All illustrations © 2006-2009 Howard David Ingham

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

A johnheronproject publication

johnheronproject.com

Printed in Adobe Heiti, Kozuka Gothic Pro and OCR A Standard.

BAC LLC™ would like to thank the Assets and Freelancers who posed for portraits:

FLIS27 / Kayleigh Tresize (page 5); Milosz Karadzic (page 12); NULE16 / Tara Singh (page 25); Nadja Karadzic (page 54); GREG21 / Kade Wright (page 58); Ezra K (page 64).

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Contents5 MSG™: a game for professionals

6 Part 1: Playing MSG™

6 The rule that makes the game work

7 Phase i: getting motivated

7 Everyone creates a Representative

14 Everyone creates the Brand

17 Recap

18 Phase ii: getting to work

18 1. cBay: everyone bids to be the Company

21 2. Picking a Situation

22 3. Playing through the Situation and setting the stakes

30 4. Resolving Situations through taking Risks

34 How to win with MSG™

37 Options and Variants

37 Variant: bidding every round

37 Option: keeping Reps between games

38 Option: fatal endgame

38 Variant: no winners, only one Company player

38 Option: gambling the Market

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40 Recap

42 Part 2: MSG™ and you

42 What the Brand and the Company want

51 Brand U: getting a job

52 Optional Rule: Perks and changing status

54 Freelancers

56 Perks

58 Assets

62 Perks

63 Things on your CV

66 Wood talks about resistance

68 Appendix: Situations

80 Appendix: SpamNames

82 MSG™ for dummies

86 Rep Record sheet

87 Company Record sheet

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MSG™: a game for professionalsMSG™ is a fun pastime you can share with your friends. Also, your enemies. You can play once and forget it, or turn into an obsession.

MSG™ is a beautiful thing.

MSG™ makes everything tasty, addictive and only slightly carcinogenic.

MSG™ is a message, written in textspk and sent direct to your HeadSpace™.

MSG™ is a new kind of game for a new kind of lifestyle. MSG™ looks like science fiction but isn’t, really.

We live in the best of all possible worlds. The 21st century worked out OK. We’re still making cars. We’re still wearing training

shoes and baseball caps. We’ve still got TV. And the internet. Where are your children

going to be when the future turns out right? What are they going to be doing? Wake up and

smell the decaf: they’ll have to get a job. And the question they’ll have to answer is: do they have what it takes to succeed, and keep their souls?

Playing partsThis is one of those games where everyone

plays a part. As in a role. Like in theatre, or Doctors and Nurses. You create a fictional person, a company Rep, as it happens, and you step into their shoes. You pretend to be your Rep most of the time, but you’ll also get the chance to play other people, especially the other Reps’ bosses and colleagues.

Don’t panic — you don’t have to be a wannabe actor to play MSG™. Just step into those shoes and pretend that you’re sitting around the boardroom table in a perfect world. Can you get ahead and keep your conscience intact?

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The way the game works is this: most of you take the part of Reps. You pretend to be a sometime employee of our fictional Company. In each round of play, one of the players takes the part of the Company. The players taking the part of Reps have to work their way through any number of morally difficult situ-ations. The Company tries to crush the Reps, or gets the Reps to crush other people. The Reps can let the company do this, or they can find ways around it.

The best way to learn how to play the game is to play and figure it out as you go along. So. Let’s dive in and start playing. We’re going to go through step by step. You don’t really need to prepare the game in advance, and all you need are pieces of paper (preferably with official MSG™ Rep Records printed on them, but we’ll let that slide), and quality-produced name-brand writing implements.

Every player in MSG™ starts with a pool of Resources from which they can draw in order to take Risks (don’t panic — all the terms and stuff will be explained in the course of orientation). You can just use pencil and paper to keep track of Resources, but the best way to show the movement of Resources is by using some sort of counter. We recommend using the glass stones that you can get from the larger stylish household stores.

Only buy branded goods, remember, because branded goods are quality goods, and quality good optimise your leisure time.

Your Leisure is Important To Us.

The rule that makes the game workWe call the one basic rule that makes MSG™ work the Risk. Put as simply as we can, everyone gets a pool of points. We call those Resources. If you want to decide what happens next in the story, you secretly risk some of those points. Both sides show what they bid at the same time.

The player who Risked the most points wins. She throws away her bid and gets back what the other player bid.

The whole game has lots of variations and little quirks that we’ll go into later on (what happens in a draw? Why doesn’t everyone run out of points really quickly?) but in a nutshell, that’s it.

Part 1: Playing MSG™

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Phase i: Getting motivatedOnce you’ve got everyone around the boardroom table (or the dinner table), it’s time to start playing.

Play begins with all the players describing the fictional people whose parts they’re going to play and the Brand they’re going to work for.

Everyone creates a RepresentativeA Representative (or Rep) is an imaginary person who works for the Brand, but isn’t employed by the Brand, because that’s not how the Brand does things. But I digress.

So. Like I was saying. Everyone who plays MSG™ gets to take on the role of a Rep, and your Rep isn’t only representing himself, or the Company. He’s representing you. Now your Rep can be anyone you like — anyone employ-able, anyway. Your Rep can be just like your, or completely different. Ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, anything you want.

You all get to roleplay your Rep from the start. Playing the character is part of creating the character, in fact.

Everyone takes turns to do this. Decide who goes first (if you can’t decide, the person who earned the most last year wins, because the richer you are, the more chances you get).

You’re first? Great.

First, introduce yourself to the group:

PLAYER: Hi, I’m [NAME]. Pleased to meet you.

OTHER PLAYERS: Hi, [NAME].

Feel free to describe yourself a little. You can do it like this, (although you don’t have to):

PLAYER: I’m [AGE] years old, and I origi-nally came from [PLACE].

...and so on. Are you fat, or skinny? What’s your hair like? Do you have an accent? How hip are your clothes? Have you had any cosmetic work done? Or maybe some hot and edgy tattoos and piercings?

Say anything you like, but don’t take too long about it. And be superficial: the inside stuff comes later.

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Here’s Becky’s Rep.

BECKY: I’m Tara Singh, Asset NULE 16. Pleased to meet you.

OTHER PLAYERS: Hi, Tara!

BECKY: I’m 22 years old, and I originally came from New Delhi. I’m tall and sort of skinny. I keep my head shaved because of the sockets and things, and I stick to functional clothes — T-shirts with the company logo, those loose-fitting cotton trousers with the pockets, brand name trainers. No jewellery, really. I have a brand logo tattoo. I’m always professional. Career-oriented. I don’t smile much. Or ever, really. Although part of that is because I have had a lot of orthodontic work done recently, and I have serious braces on my teeth.

I like the braces. That’s a nice little quirk, and it’s the kind of thing that might get mentioned later.

Define Who You Are: Status, Expertises

Are you a lover or a fighter, a poet or a dreamer? Do you love your spouse and kids? Dis you have dreams of fame and fortune? Does truth define you?

We don’t care.

No, really. That crap can come later.

No, who you really are depends upon your job. So what’s on your CV?

First thing you decide: are you a Freelancer or an Asset? They’re both amazing, exciting roles to live in. We’re going to talk a bit more about playing Freelancers and Assets and what the differences are later on, but if you want a quick summary:

If you’re a Freelancer, you work for Brand U — that’s you we’re talking about. You’ve got the freedom to make your own decisions about work, salary and clients. The Company’s your only actual client and you don’t get holidays or sick pay, but hey. Benefits are for losers. It’s all about the freedom, baby. Freelancers specialize in Marketing.If you’re an Asset, you get true security: with an up-to-the-nanosecond array of software, NuSB™ ports, wireless hardware and psychosurgical enhancements implanted directly in your heADspace, you’ve got the kit to deal with nearly any situation. Sure, the Company owns 45% of your brain, but statistically very

9MSG™

few Assets get their brains repossessed. And scare stories, apart, viruses aren’t really a problem. Mostly. Assets specialise in IT Solutions.

Once you’ve chosen your exciting executive opportunity, pick two more things you specialise in. These are your Expertises. Freelancers know this stuff because it’s part of their experience. Assets know this stuff because they’ve got the software for it. This is a list of things you might want to know about:

• Accounts

• Business Stabilisation Solutions

• Executive Management

• Finance

• IT Solutions

• Healthcare

• Human Resources

• Law Enforcement

• Legal and Litigation

• Marketing

• Mergers and Acquisitions

• Parallel Markets

• Personal Assistant

• Professional Services

• Sales and Business Development

• Security Solutions

Some of those might sound like business NewSpeak to you. If you’re stumped as to what each of these things helps you with, go check Things on Your CV? later. We can wait a minute or two. But not too long. Come back quick. Time is money.

BECKY: I’m thrilled to be an Asset, which means I have expertise in IT Solutions. I’m also programmed for Executive Management and HR.

Oh yeah, you’d better have some Relationships too

Thing is, even though the Company would rather its Reps didn’t have lives outside of their Freelance or Asset contracts (yes, we know the Company says that it cares about your personal life, but, duh, actually it doesn’t) your Rep has actually had a life. Or something approaching it.

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So you’re still playing the part of your Rep. what you have to do now is come over all encounter groupy. You have to spill this stuff to the rest of the group:

• iLove: One person you care about deeply;

• iHate: Two people you hate even more deeply;

• My Secret Tragedy: Something really bad that happened to you in the past. This is not actually a secret. Everyone knows about it.

The first thing to bear in mind is that you shouldn’t explain who these people are beyond the simple relationship and maybe its history. There’s a line or two on the sheet for who they are and what they do, but you shouldn’t fill that in beyond the person’s name and relationship to you. The third part, the “more information” line, that needs to be left blank, because you’ll find that stuff later in the game.

Here’s Becky again. She’s just checked out the SpamNames list in the appendix for inspiration. This is what she’s come up with:

BECKY [playing TARA SINGH]: The one person I care about is my brother Rahul, who I lost touch with and really want to see again. On the other hand, I really hate Bronsard Advantage — he’s an executive. And Pristeen Pyat, too. Who’s another executive. And a complete bitch.

WOOD: OK. So what’s your Secret Tragedy, Tara?

BECKY. Um. OK. My Dad killed himself when I was sixteen, leaving me an orphan. Which is why I ended up selling out to the Brand — I didn’t have any choice.

OTHER PLAYERS: Ooh. That’s really sad.

If you can make My Secret Tragedy like something out of a popular magazine, that’s even better, though

DAVE [playing EZRA K]: My wife left me. For another woman. And then had a sex change. So she’s a man now. Which is bloody confusing, I can tell you.

Now that’s more like it.

And that’s it. That’s your Rep. Now write this stuff on your record sheet and let

Don’t work smarter. Work harder.

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someone else have a turn.

But wait! There’s more!

Here’s a quirk: you can make up your own relationships from scratch, or you can tap into other people’s relationships. You can even take other players’ Reps as people you love or hate. The only rule is that you can’t take a person who hasn’t been named yet unless you make this person up yourself.

So, for example, you can’t just say “I care for Becky’s iLove” if Becky hasn’t had her go yet, and you can’t say “I hate Dave’s Rep” if Dave hasn’t told you who his Rep is.

And don’t forget your USP

One more thing: you need to be able to describe your Rep’s Unique Selling Point, one trait that your Rep has that makes her stand out. It can be anything you like, anything from professionally motivated:

BECKY [playing TARA SINGH]: I’m an ice-cold businesswoman. Honestly. My steely outer exterior hides a

[Becky writes “ice-cold businesswoman” on her Rep sheet.]

...through to frivolous:

GRAHAM [Playing GREG 21]: I really like CheesyFlakes. Mmm, CheesyFlakes.

[Graham writes “really likes CheesyFlakes” on his Rep sheet.]

It doesn’t matter. If you want your Rep to think he’s an alien, or have a third nipple, or a massive collection of football stickers going back 100 years, go knock yourself out. It can be anything you like.

Anyway. Here’s another example from the same team of players, set out from start to finish, this time:

ROB: Hi. I’m Milosz Karadzic. Pleased to meet you.

OTHER PLAYERS: Pleased to meet you.

ROB: I’m from Kiev, originally. I’m about 35 years old. I’m a big guy with fashionably messy dark hair. I usually miss patches when I shave. I wear a business suit. It doesn’t fit me all that well, because I work out. I smile a lot, and everyone laughs at my jokes. This is because I’m scary. I’m a Freelancer,

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so I know Marketing. I’ve also got experi-ence in Business Stabilisation and Parallel Markets.

BECKY: So you’re in with the mob.

ROB: No, I know about Parallel Markets. What is this “mob” you speak of?

BECKY: Ah. Right.

ROB: Now. I’m in love with Tara Singh.

BECKY: Wait, what?

ROB: But she doesn’t know that.

BECKY: OK.

ROB: And the two people I really hate are Pristeen Pyat, who I can’t shoot because she’s my boss. And my wife Nadja. In fact, she’s part of My Secret Tragedy. See, she was the teenage girl-friend I ended up having to marry because her dad was in the mob —

BECKY: You mean the Parallel Market —

ROB: — and I got her pregnant.

BECKY: So you have a kid?

ROB: No. She got an abortion a couple of days after the wedding.

BECKY: Oof. That’s

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rough. So that’s the tragedy?

ROB: No, just being married to Nadja. Because I can’t get rid of her, see. If I did, her dad would kill me. And she’s a complete pain.

DAVE: What’s your USP?

ROB: I love the smell of cordite in the morning. I am also quite fond of it in the evening.

Resources

So far all of this has been pretty intuitive. But this is the part where we start defining Reps with numbers.

No, wait, come back.

Every player in MSG™ gets these two pools of Resources from which they can draw in order to take Risks. They’re described in points, and in some respects, while they’re not the central part of the game, they’re the central part of game play, because most of the course of playing the main phase of the game depends on how you risk and spend these points. In the end, winning the game — whichever version you’re playing — depends upon how you’ve used the Resources.

So your Rep has two pools of Resources, and we call them Resources because they measure in a really abstract way the personal resources your Rep has.

Compassion is a measure of how your Rep still cares about other people. The Company tells you to have respect for your fellow associates and your fellow human beings. And it wants you to completely ignore that, because it’s all about profit. Compassion doesn’t stop your Rep doing bad things — and sometimes she’ll have to, because she’ll have no choice — but as long as your Rep has at least one point in Compassion, she has a glimmer of that connection between her and other people.

Self on the other hand describes how much confidence your Rep has , how much inner strength. The Company wants strong, assertive people and at the same time does its very best to grind those qualities out of everyone who works for it. Self doesn’t mean that your Rep is always able to stand up for himself, but as long as your Rep has at least one point in Self, he still has some sense of self-esteem and self-worth.

When you create your Rep, you get some points to divide between Compassion and Self. How many? Well, that all depends. Each division of points slightly changes the way the stakes work. You can take:

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11 points, with neither Resource having fewer than four points (divide them 6/5 or 7/4);

15 points, with neither Resource having fewer than five points (split 8/7, 9/6 or 10/5);

19 points, with neither Resource having fewer than seven points (split 10/9, 11/8 or 12/7).

Talk it through with the other people you’re playing the game with. More points means higher stakes.

We find that the easiest way to record how many Resources your Rep has in the game is with counters. We recommend using the glass stones that you can get from the larger stylish household stores. Only buy branded goods, remember.

It’s important to look after your Resources. The object of the game is to be the player at the end who has points in both Resources, and has the most points in both Resources on his sheet.

If you really must, you can simply write the points down on your record sheet. If you’re really flash, you might even want to record them on a palmtop or PDA.

Here’s an example...

[Everyone agrees on having 15 points for Resources.]

BECKY [playing TARA]: I have five in Compassion and 10 in Self. I’m not a very empathic person, but I take no crap.

ROB [playing MILOSZ]: I have seven in Compassion and eight in Self. I don’t much like what I do for a living. But moral qualms don’t stop me doing my best to staying true to myself.

Everyone creates the BrandRight. You’ve all made the Reps, and there’s only one thing you have to do before the first phase of the game is done. And that’s coming up with a Brand.

The Brand is the central focus of the Company. It’s the logo that’s on your trainers, your T-shirt, tattooed all over your body and burned on your brain. It’s not the same as the Company. The Company serves the Brand, and tries to look like it’s following the Brand’s core values.

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Brand Name

The Brand name we’ve been using in our games is BAC, otherwise known as The Barthes Corporation. Wood came up with that name a long, long time ago, after Roland Barthes, who was this twentieth-century philosopher who was all about the symbols and signifiers and about how we attach meaning to stuff that doesn’t have meanings of its own, and things like that.

Which is far too heavy for this kind of thing, but what can you do? He’s a pretentious twerp.

Anyway, you know that green triangle with the circle in it that we put every-where? That can mean anything you like. That’s the point, really.

You don’t have to use our example Brand. In fact, we’d prefer it if you didn’t. Brainstorm for a couple of minutes until you come up with a name for a Brand. Serious, goofy, satirical, it doesn’t matter. If some of you hate it — or, better, all of you hate it — that’s brilliant, because it means you’ll understand a little of what it is to work for an organization that makes you cringe every time you look in the mirror and see the Brand logo they tattooed on your forehead.

Brand Values

What’s the Brand about? Time for some Brand Values. In short, everyone takes a turn to pick a buzzword. The buzzwords that you get help you to define what the Brand is about.

By “about”, by the way, we don’t actually mean “about”. Because what the Brand is actually about is profit, duh. No, when we say “what the Brand is about”, we mean the things the Brand projects in its marketing, the things that the Brand wants you to think it’s about.

Anyway, here’s a list to get you started. If you can come up with buzzwords not on the list, that makes us happy. Also, don’t be afraid to pick a Brand Value that directly contradicts someone else’s.

• Affluence

• Comfort

• Creativity

• Edginess

• Efficiency

• Excellence

• Family

• The Future

• Growth

• Hipness

• Hope

• Hygiene

• Maturity

• Nostalgia

• Passion

• Romance

• Sex Appeal

• Simplicity

• Speed

• Success

• Trust

• Winning

• Value

• Youth

Done that? OK. Talk about about what the Brand’s logo is like, what its adverts look like, that sort of thing. Spend about five minutes on that, if you like.

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Becky picks Youth. Rob picks Trust. Graham

picks Winning, and Dave picks Simplicity.

How do they work together? The marketing

lit for BAC™ features lots of young people,

winning competitions of various kinds, but

living and dressing in a very natural, mini-

malist sort of way. They’re not threatening

or edgy. They look like the kind of people

you would want to have as your friends. The

slogan they pick is “Motivation for Life”.

You don’t have to define the buzzwords, really. They’re up for grabs. A lot of company slogans and brand identities don’t make any sense, and if yours doesn’t, that’s wholly OK.

Company Resources

One last thing before you’re done with setting up: give the Company one pool of Resource points equal to all the players’ Resource points added together. And put those in the middle of the table, within tantalising reach of everyone.

Becky, Dave, Graham and Rob are playing a

15-point game. 15 points times four players

is 60, so the Company gets a Resource pool

of 60 points. Everybody moves the pile of

counters to the middle of the table and stares

at them hungrily.

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Making RepsName your Rep

Decide how old she is, and where she comes from.

Choose your Rep’s Status

Asset (Expertise in IT Solutions) or Freelancer (Expertise in Marketing)

Choose two more Expertises

Accounts, Business Stabilisation Solutions , Executive Management, Finance, IT Solutions, Healthcare, HR, Law Enforcement, Legal and Litigation, Marketing, Mergers and Acquisitions, Parallel Markets, Personal Assistant, Professional Services, Sales and Business Development, Security Solutions, or something else.

Create Relationships

Pick one iLove, two iHates, one Secret Tragedy.

Add a USP

Anything you like.

Assign Points

Divide 11, 15, or 19 points (agreed with other players) between Compassion and Self.

Making the BrandDecide on a Brand name and identity

If everybody hates the name, that’s best. Brainstorm logos, ads, what the offices look like, that sort of thing.

Each player picks one Brand Value

Affluence, Comfort, Creativity, Edginess, Efficiency, Excellence, Family, The Future, Growth, Hipness, Hope, Hygiene, Maturity, Nostalgia, Passion, Romance, Sex Appeal, Simplicity, Speed, Success, Trust, Winning, Value, Youth, something else.

Assign a Company Resource Pool

The Company gets points equal to the total of all Reps’ Resource pools.

Recap

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Phase ii: Getting to workThat’s the first part of play. But it’s not the main part — that’s this part, the part where we tell stories and work on winning.

So in short, play goes like this:

1. Everyone bids to see who gets to be the Company first, and in what order. Everyone who won an auction pays the points they bid into the Company Resource pool. The player who goes first puts his Rep to one side and takes over the Company’s Resource pool. He’s now the Company.

2. The Company picks a Situation and describes it to the other players. He plays the part of the supporting cast listed in the Situation summary. The Reps’ players can narrate in other supporting cast as they wish.

3. The Reps work through the Situation in the boardroom and the field, and try to come to a solution. During the working of the situation, Reps can gather Soap.

4. One or more of the Reps takes a Risk. The winners describe what happens next in each case.

5. The Situation ends. Everyone takes a breath, and then the next player in line takes on the role of the Company. Repeat steps 2 to 5 until the game is over. Steps 2 through 5 are called a Round.

6. Play ends when everyone has been the Company. The winner is the player whose Rep has the most remaining Resources while having at least one point remaining in both pools. The winner gets to narrate what happens next to the other Reps.

And that’s it. What comes next is the part where we explain what all that means.

1. cBay: Everyone bids to be the Company MSG™ works on competition, but the first rule of the game is this:

You are only allowed to oppose the Company. You can’t oppose other players during situations. Likewise, you can only screw over the Reps directly — although there may be plenty of indirect screwing over — when you are playing the Company. The Company is the faceless body that presents dictates from on high, introduces stupid rules and makes your Reps’ lives miserable. When you’re the Company, you can be evil. And you cannot win without being the Company.

Every player controls a Rep for most of the game and it’s the Rep that wins the game for you, but every player gets to control the Company once.

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At the start of the game, everyone bids in an auction.

Everyone looks at their Resources and offers up a bid. You have to pick one of your Resource pools to bid from, Compassion or Self. The first person has to bid one point, and if it’s your turn to bid you must either raise it by at least one point or pass from bidding altogether.

If you’re the winner, you have to pay the number of Resource points you bid to the Company. Take those points from your Rep’s Record Sheet and then put them into the Company’s Resource pool.

The other players get to bid on who goes second, starting from the next player after the winner of the first auction, who sits this one out. The winner of that one goes second. He pays his points into the Company Resource pool... and so on until there’s only one player left, who goes last

If you have three players (and MSG™ isn’t really designed for fewer than three), you’ll end up having two auctions ; if you have four, you’ll end up with three auctions, and... you get the idea.

It runs like this:

It’s time to bid for the first round of the game.

BECKY [playing TARA SINGH]: Self. One.

ROB [playing MILOSZ KARADZIC]: Compassion. Two.

GRAHAM [playing GREG 21]: Compassion. Three.

DAVE [playing EZRA K]: Pass.

BECKY: Self. Four.

ROB: I’m out.

GRAHAM: Yeah, I’m out too.

[Because we’re at the start of the game, Tara has 10 points in Self. Becky can bid up to nine of them if she wants (although she’d be really stupid to do so, because Tara’d be at a serious disadvantage when she plays). But she can’t bid them all. Becky pays four points from Self into the Company Resource pool, leaving Tara with five points in Compassion and six in Self.

Becky gets to be the Company first. She sits out the next auction.]

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ROB: Self. One.

GRAHAM: Compassion. Two.

DAVE: Self. Three.

[Rob and Graham bow out, so Dave pays the three points to the Company and writes his name down second on the “Company players” list, after Becky. The last auction starts with Rob putting up a point of Self and Graham bowing out, so Rob goes third and Graham goes last. Graham’s the only one who starts with all his Resource points.]

Here’s the choice you make: if you go first, you might start with fewer points, but you get to assault the other players with horrible situations first. If you go last, you don’t pay a thing, but you have to survive all of the previous

When you put your Rep to one side. Where is he? He’s on holiday, or in training, or in a meeting, or whatever you want. Give it a rationale .

BECKY [playing the COMPANY]: Asset Singh has been called in for ReMotivation Treatment. OK. Time for a situation.

Why you want to be the CompanyBut why play the Company when you have to draw from your precious pools of Resources to do it? Well, obviously, there wouldn’t be a game if you didn’t. There’s another thing , though:

While the other Reps were off getting screwed by the Company, your Rep was out of town, on holiday, laying low, hanging around in coffee shops and generally getting back in touch with life. On the other hand, maybe he went insane waiting for the call from the Company and didn’t recharge his batteries at all.

When the next Round begins, your Rep has chance of coming back into play with a cut of the Company’s profits. It works like this:

For every five points or part of five points you won in Risks while you were the Company, your Rep gets back one point of the Resource he used to win the auction that got him the role of the Company.

Which means that if you won a total of between one and five points , your Rep gets one point; Between six and ten points gets you two points in your Resource, between ten and 15, three points of Resources. And so on. You have to put this in the Resource you spent on the bidding.

Becky is playing the Company. While she is the Company, Becky wins a total of 11 points from the other players’ Reps in Risks.

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We’re going to get to Risks properly later, honest.

She spent a whole lot more than that, but this means that she does get three points to put back in Tara’s Self Resource Pool (because she spent four points from Self to win the auction, remember). So at the beginning of the second Round, Tara has nine points in Self. Which is not great, but better now than any of the other players because they lost quite badly this time round.

2. Picking a SituationIt’s the Company’s business to foist a Situation upon our Reps. Now. If you’re good at improvising and this sort of thing, you can wing it, but at the end of this book, you’ll find a load of ready-made Situations that you can just pull out of the book and use.

The Situations are pretty simple, really. They look like this:

TitleRationale: This is the fundamental story behind the Situation. The set-up that the supporting cast reveal through the

More stuff: Not all Situations have this part. If a Situation does, it’s a circum-stance or set of circumstances that the Company should reveal to the other players at some point, but doesn’t have to reveal right at the start.

Even more stuff: Like the “more stuff” section, this part isn’t in all the Situations. It covers even more additional complications. These shouldn’t come into play until the Company has revealed the “More Stuff”.

Supporting cast: These are the people whom the Company can get to play in the Situation. The player taking the role of the Company can play any other supporting cast, too, but the supporting cast members mentioned here are the ones limited to the Company. More on that later. None of these characters have names, allowing the players to apply the names of their Reps’ enemies to these people, or to bring in running characters from earlier scenes. The Company picks one of the supporting cast as the Spokesperson, who states to the Reps what the Company wants.

Extras: Extras are the nameless walk-ons. Bystanders who don’t have any direct effect on the outcome of the scene, but whose presence adds a bit of colour.

What the Company wants: This is the part where we find out what the Company will do if the Reps don’t do something, and usually goes into the

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consequences of that. The Spokesperson is the cast member who explains this to the Reps. What the Company never, ever does is offer any alternative solutions. Now that’s partly because the Company is fundamentally unimagi-native, but mostly because it’s not the Company’s business to come up with those solutions. Those are up to the other players.

Go check out Appendix: Situations (page 68) for lots of Situations, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. We encourage you to make up your own, though. When you’ve played a few games, you can probably come up with some of them on the fly. You don’t have to write them out like this.

3. Playing through the Situation and setting the stakesPhew. After all that, we get to the central part of play, the part that matters and everything.

Essentially, everyone narrates the event surrounding the Situation. The Company begins by explaining where the Reps are — the boardroom? The office? In the field? — and explains the Rationale to them. It is then up to the players, Reps and Company, to create a story.

All the players have an equal responsibility to thrash out a solution to the Situation. And while the Situation is running, the players who remain in control of their Reps play themselves, and should talk in character as much as possible.

It shouldn’t take too long — a Situation shouldn’t really amount to much more than ten minutes of role-playing. The Reps talk amongst themselves and to the various supporting cast members, and when each has come up with an idea that would either solve the problem or extricate themselves from it.

Supporting Cast “Supporting cast” is what we call the people who take a part in a Situation who aren’t Reps. We use three kinds of Supporting Cast members, and it’s important to know which players get to control which people.

Supporting cast from the Situation

The Company has complete control over the cast members in the Situation. It’s up to the Company when and if he introduces them. She doesn’t have to introduce any of them if she doesn’t want to, or if she sees the Situation working out in a different way.

None of the supporting cast members start with actual names. It’s the Company player’s job to pick names for them — the easiest way is to take something randomly from the SpamNames list in the Appendix (page 80)

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but if the Company player’s got something else in mind, that’s brilliant.

Part of the reason the supporting cast members listed in the Situations don’t have names is so the players can bring them back in similar roles in later scenes.

The Company can decide that supporting cast members from the Situation are people from the other players’ iHate or iLove lists (but only if the Reps haven’t introduced them already.

Becky, playing the Company in the first round, picks “Kill Fluffy” and decides that the “manager to whom the Reps must report” is in fact Milosz Karadzic’s dreaded wife, Nadja.

Don’t give supporting cast members names until you bring them into play. You’re only allowed to make one of the Reps’ Relationships into a member of supporting cast in a Round if the person hasn’t already come into play this round.

In the second Round, Rob is the Company. He picks “Saint Kurt” and decides that the “copyright lawyer with a gun” is in fact Tara Singh’s brother Rahul. But he can’t do this if Becky [playing Tara] has already intro-duced Rahul into the Situation.

But even if Tara brought Rahul into the Situation this time round, the next player to be the Company can still make Rahul a member of the supporting cast.

The most tricky thing about playing supporting cast members is that they often think different things. Many of them disagree with the Company — yeah, I know, we can’t think why, either. It’s the Company player’s respon-sibility to present the various people as honestly as he can. Besides, it makes it harder for the other players.

The Company should pick one of the supporting cast as the Spokesperson. That’s the cast member who states what the Company wants.

In the first Round, Becky decides that Nadja Karadzic is the Company spokesperson.

One more thing: when you’re using people who came into the story before, it’s important to make sure it makes sense when they arrive. When someone’s role has been defined in the course of the story, it matters to be true to that. If a supporting cast member works as a vicious human resources executive in one Round, there had better be a good reason why she’s being cast as an innocent victim in the next Round.

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Relationships: iLoves and iHates

People on the Reps’ Relationship lists can come into the drama at any time and they can arrive in two ways: either the Company introduces them as members of the Supporting Cast — and we’ve just talked about that — or a player brings the person in as a source of help for her Rep (in the case of iLoves) or a reason for her Rep to get one over on her enemies (in the case of iHates).

You can only introduce someone on your own Rep’s Relationship list, and you can only bring that person into the narrative if the Company hasn’t already introduced her as a member of the supporting cast. And the Company can’t use one of your Relationships this Round if you haven’t yet introduced her into the Situation.

Bringing your Relationships into a Situation is useful for collecting Soap. More on that shortly, but the reason it’s good for the Company to hijack the Reps’ Relationships is because it blocks them from getting Soap. Soap is not good for business.

Extras

Secretaries, passers-by, crossfire victims, death squad members, call centre phone-monkeys, faceless execs in the boardroom... they’re all extras. Anyone can bring extras into the Situation, and you can bring in as many as you want. They don’t serve any purpose other than providing colour to the narrative.

Reaction over actionThe one thing that the Company player needs to know is that, apart from set up the Situation and use his Spokesperson to explain what the Company wants, he really only needs to react to what the Reps want to do, and honestly present the reactions of the supporting cast.

Soap — getting itSo we’re talking about Soap. Like in “soap opera”. As in, the soapy elements of your story Soap is one of the most useful things in the game. As in, it can be the difference between winning and losing.

We’re going to explain this more fully later, but the reason you want Soap is because you can add it to your Resources — or even use it instead of your Resources — when you are taking Risks. And better still, if the Company beats you when you are taking a Risk, the Company only gets back the Resources your Risked, not the Soap.

You only keep Soap until the end of a Situation, so much of gameplay involves gathering it and using it as much as possible.

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Getting Soap from Relationships

Every one of the Relationships, whether an iLove or an iHate, whom you bring into the Situation gets you one point of Soap.

If the Company is using one your iLoves or iHates as a member of supporting cast, you can’t bring that

person in yourself, and so you can’t get Soap from that person being involved in the Situation,

although you can try again next time.

You have to have a rationale for bringing these people into the game, though. It can be far-fetched, but it has to have some sort of consistency with the story. If any of the the other players (any of them at all — Company and Reps) object to you bringing in a Relationship, because they think it’s implau-sible, forced or just stupid, don’t argue — take a vote on it. If you don’t get a straight majority on the vote (draws count as losses), you either have to think of another rationale or you don’t get to bring the Relationship in.

Here’s a rubbish way to introduce a Relationship into a

Situation:

GRAHAM [Playing GREG 21]: I call my sister.

Here’s a good way to do it:

GRAHAM [Playing GREG 21]: I call my sister Janey over, because she’s been working in Mergers and Acquisitions for three years and is the only one who can save us. Also, I cooked a really great dinner for her last week.

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So she kind of owes me one.

BECKY [Playing the COMPANY]: What’s she going to do?

GRAHAM: She’s pulling strings and taking names, baby.

IHates are a bit harder to work in. You have to come up with a reason why what you’re doing will disadvantage your enemies and help you. Like so:

BECKY [Playing TARA SINGH]: I’m going behind Pristeen’s back and — bdeet! — mailing Marketing.

[Pristeen Pyat is one of Becky’s iHates.]

ROB: [Playing MILOSZ KARADZIC]: How does that work?

BECKY: Marketing have expressed an interest in the Ashram’s interesting therapeutic tech-niques. I see T-shirts. I see exercise DVDs. I see recipe books. I see profit.

[Note that Becky made up Marketing’s response on the spot — this is the right way to play.]

ROB: And M&A don’t carpet-bomb the community. And we save all their lives.

BECKY: Yes. But more importantly, it really pisses Pristeen off.

As the game goes on, this should get trickier and trickier, because any facts you attach to your Relationships stay for the rest of the game. So Greg 21’s sister Janey from the example is now an executive working in Mergers and Acquisitions for the rest of the game, or in the earlier example, Tara’s brother Rahul is an armed copyright lawyer.

When you bring in your Relationships, you define them, and give them details, and life. Those lives can’t just change at a moment’s notice. Well, they can. But if they do, it has to be plausible.

Getting Soap from My Secret Tragedy

If you can somehow tie what your Rep does to My Secret Tragedy, you get two more points of Soap.

How do you do that? Does your Rep sympathise with someone else’s plight because he’s been through it himself? Does he get all angry and emo because the situation he’s in brings out issues he’s been failing to work through? Is this a chance to get payback? Be creative. If you think in terms of magazines like

27MSG™

Heat, Bella and Take a Break, you can’t go far wrong.

[The Reps discover that iconic complaint-rock legend William X. Rock faked his suicide, and that the Company wants to make sure that the general public’s belief that he is dead is upheld. By making him dead.]

BECKY [Playing TARA SINGH]: If you ask me, he’s asking for everything he gets. Suicide is a completely unforgivable act. You ruin so many lives.

DAVE [Playing EZRA K]: but he didn’t commit suicide. And his family’s happier now that everyone thinks he’s topped himself.

BECKY: That’s not the POINT. This is about ME.

Getting Soap from your USP

If you can bring your USP into the story we’re telling, you get a point of Soap. You can only do this once in a Situation.

Graham [Playing GREG 21]: I discover a box of CheesyFlakes sitting in the office canteen. Obviously, I’ll snaffle them. CheesyFlakes help me think. Have I mentioned how much I love the cheesy, crunchy goodness?

Rob [Playing MILOSZ KARADZIC]: Once or twice, yes.

Getting Soap from Expertises

Your Rep is supposed to be good at stuff,too. Every time you manage to work one of your Expertises into the Situation, you get a point of Soap.

Brand Values

The Brand values you all worked together to create matter to the Company, but only so much as the Company wants to look like it’s upholding them. What that means is that every time you can make up an argument as to why your Rep is behaving in line with one of the Brand Values, you get a point of Soap.

TLAs

And once a Situation, if you invent a brand-new professional-sounding three-letter-acronym (TLA) on the spot, you get a point of Soap.

28 MSG™

Setting the stakesSo you’ve talked the Situation through for a couple of minutes. We don’t have a time limit. You just have to decide what you’re going to do about it (and hopefully raise a bit of Soap while you’re getting there). And this is where we work out what’s at stake.

We decide stakes at the moment the Reps say they’re doing something and the Company says, no, this is what I want to see happen. Which usually happens when the Reps change the terms of what the Company wants.

The best way to work out how the stakes get worked out is to see what the Company wants. Then you see what the Reps want to do. The disconnect between those two things? There are the stakes.

[The Company wants to build a hotel on the site of an Ashram in New Delhi. The Ashram owners won’t sell up, so the Company tells TARA and MILOSZ to call in the death squad. Tara and Milosz instead exploit company in-fighting to get the another Company subsidiary interested in the Ashram as a new marketing opportunity, which halts the takeover of the Ashram. The stakes, then, revolve around whether the Ashram’s people get killed or not.]

We decide the stakes with Risks. The winner of the Risk describes the conse-quences of what happens next.

And there we go. But before we go on, we need to talk a bit about death.

The lives of othersStakes are often a matter of life and death. Which is pretty powerful, dramati-cally. When We’ve got a couple of ground rules here to avoid confusion.

The lives of extras

The Company is — and we’ll talk about this a lot more in Chapter 2 — completely cavalier with people’s lives. What this means is that a lot of the time people drop like flies.

Now we recognise that every extra is a person, with a family and friends and a life history and stuff, and that ending this life is, symbolically speaking, murder and everything. But the Company pulls crap like this all the time. People die on the Company’s watch, and the Company Does Not Care.

Factory workers fall into vats of acid and get mangled by new sewing equipment. The electrician gets zapped by faulty wiring. The cola-endorsed

29MSG™

GREG21: hey beks, hows the training? heard they tried a new round of brandwashing. not too traumatic i hope :)

BEKI80: this asset is busy unaware of any prior relationship please apply for an appointment before further communication thank you

death squads kill a whole bundle of union workers. Hell, the Reps decide they want to shoot the provincial secretary who’s being unhelpful? They do it.

The point being that the lives of Extras are — in story terms — not important enough to be part of the stakes, unless there are lots and lots of them who might live and die (a whole community in danger of being disemployed or wiped out, which often amounts to the same thing), in which case they should really count as members of supporting cast.

Killing off supporting cast

The lives of supporting cast can — with one exception (see “getting away with murder”, page 56) — only be put on the line as part of the stakes of the Situation. Is there a question of whether a member of supporting cast dies? The question has to be at least part of the Stakes.

Killing off iLoves and iHates

iLoves and iHates are more important still. You can only ask for the lives and deaths of other Reps’ Relationships to be part of the stakes if they’ve been co-opted into the supporting cast by the Company.

If one of your Rep’s iHates or her iLove gets whacked, that’s it for them. Put an RIP (or an RIH) next to their name on the sheet.

If your Rep lost her iLove, add another Secret Tragedy to your Rep’s Relationships based around that person’s death. If an iHate met his maker, though, that’s it. You get nothing except a sense of satisfaction. We hope it keeps you warm at night.

Making new iLoves and iHates

Your Rep can create one new iLove or iHate in any Situation. It works the same as killing an iLove or iHate: you can only make a new one if you win in a Risk. Getting new Relationships is a little bit harder than losing them, though:

• The new iLove or iHate must be a member of the supporting cast. He can be someone else’s iLove or iHate at the same time. You don’t have to have the same kind of relationship with a supporting cast member as the other Reps do: just because this executive is another Rep’s iLove, it doesn’t mean that he can’t become one of your Rep’s iHates. In fact, it’s just better that way for everyone, because Conflict is Good.

• You have to have won the Risk, and you must have used all your Soap in the effort, unless the cast member is already an iLove or iHate of an other Rep.

• You don’t have to declare that you’re making a new Relationship until after you’ve won the Risk (and the right to narrate).

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Killing off a Rep

You can’t. We’re making a story of sorts here, and the Reps are the main char-acters. The death of a Rep can never be part of the stakes.

Bringing down the Company

And you can’t bring down the Company. We’ll go into why that’s the case later on, but really, it boils down to the fact that this isn’t that sort of story.

4. Resolving Situations through taking RisksThis is the part where we go into some detail about those Resources and what you actually do with them.

So now we’ve got the Stakes. The player taking the role of the Company — whom we’ll just call “the Company” from now on, because it’s less rounda-bout — tells one of the other players, who are currently playing Reps — and this player’s going to be called “the Rep” from now on — to take a Risk.

Quickly:

1. Choose whether your Rep is Risking Self or Compassion.

2. Secretly decide how many points you are Risking. Add Soap if you have it. Hide them.

3. Everyone reveals how much they have Risked at the same time.

4. The winner is the player who Risked the most. The winner gets back the amount the other player Risked (although the if the Company wins, he doesn’t get back any Soap the Rep Risked, just the Resources). The winner narrates what happens next. If it’s a draw, the Rep wins the points, but the Company narrates what happens next.

Picking the ResourceHow do we decide which Resource to Risk? In the end, the Rep and the Company should agree on it, but in a disagreement, the Company’s word is final.

Self

If the stakes depend on something that might happen to the Rep, risk Self.

Use Self if your Rep is in danger of being defeated, reassigned, injured, brain-washed, or subjected to any kind of indignity. Use Self if they’re going to make you look like an idiot, or if they’re going to take away your stock options. Use Self if your Rep might lose the girl (or guy).

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Compassion

If the stakes depend on something that might happen to someone else, risk Compassion.

Use Compassion when violence is on the table in any way. Use Compassion if someone may or may not die because of what your Rep does. Use Compassion if you’re going to pauper someone, or if you’re going to take their stuff away. Use Compassion if you desperately need to save someone.

If it’s all gone

If one (or, God help us, both) of your Rep’s Resources get reduced to nothing, don’t panic.

Well, maybe panic a little bit. Thing is, you can still play. If you don’t have any points in your Resource, you obviously don’t have to follow that rule about having to Risk at least a point — but you’d better get as much Soap as you can and use it.

The RiskIf you’re playing the Company, you can Risk any number of points from the Company Resource pool. The Company can choose to bet no points at all.

If you’re playing your Rep, you have to put in at least one point from the Resource you’re using (unless you don’t have to put any points in, in which case you must put in a point of Soap, and if you can’t even do that, you have to put in at least one point from the other Resource. If you can’t do that, you forfeit without having Risked).

If you’re using counters, the Rep takes some of the points from the Resources pool she has to use and hides them in her hand. The Company takes some of his own Resources counters and hides them in his own hand, basing his own assessment of how much he wants to win and how much he thinks the Rep is going to spend. He also hides them.

Soap: use it or lose it, baby

You can add as much Soap as you want to the Risk. You can’t keep your Soap between Situations, so unless you want to lose (and you might, you never know) you need to use it.

If you have lots of Soap and you’re feeling confident or kind-hearted, you can donate Soap to another player. You can also use Soap when you’re helping another player out, and that includes the Company (we talk a bit about helping on p. 32). You can use Soap in bail-outs too (and more on bail-outs later).

Once you’ve used Soap, it’s gone. And if you haven’t used it at the end of the

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Other stuff you can use

You don’t have to use counters. You can write the number of points they want to spend on a properly branded notelet and place it face-down in the middle of the table. And then, you turn them over at the same time.

If you want to be really horrible, ban food from the table and use those addictive stacking potato chips that come in the tubes to represent points of Resources. You can eat them any time you want, but if you do, they’re gone.

Or if you’re a real hipster, you can send each other text messages. Actually, everyone should try that once. It’s brilliant.

The reveal and the resultBoth sides reveal how much they Risked at the same time. Whatever happens, you put aside what you Risked yourself. You’ve

If the Rep has more points in her hand, she wins, and gets to decide what happens next. She gets back a number of points in the Resource equal to what the Company Risked, while the Company loses his.

If the Company has more points, the Rep loses the Risk and loses the points. The Company gets back a number of points equal to those the Rep risked. The Company does not get any points for Soap the Rep Risked.

Rob [Playing MILOSZ] has eight points of Self. He risks six points of Self and two Soap, for a total of eight. Graham [playing the COMPANY] risks seven points from the Company Resources Pool. Rob Risked more, so Rob gets back seven points which go directly back into Self. Which means he ends up with nine points of Self (because he got back one more than he Risked).

Becky [playing TARA SINGH] Risks two points of Compassion and seven Soap. Graham [playing the COMPANY] Risks eight points from the Company Resources pool. Graham wins, but only gets two points back.

If it’s a draw, the Company wins the conflict and gets to narrate what happens next, but the Rep gets the points that the Company Risked.

Helping outYour Rep can help another Rep against the Company, or even help the Company against another Rep. The Company doesn’t help anyone, though. Because it’s the Company. And that’s not what the Company does.

Anyway. It’s easy enough: you just have to take some points from one of your Resources (and as much Soap as you want) and put them in the mix, telling everyone which side you’re helping, and how you’re justifying that. You don’t have to tell the person you’re helping how much you are risking. Everyone

Situation, it’s gone. You have to earn new Soap with every new Situation.

33MSG™

reveals at the same time, same as usual.

• If you’re helping another Rep, you have to take any Resource points you use from the same Resource the other Rep is using. If he’s using Self, you have to help with Self, and if he’s using Compassion, you’ve got to take them from Compassion. You don’t have to use Resource points at all, though. You can just help with Soap if you want.

• You can’t Risk more points in any one Resource than you had at the start of the Situation.

• You can revise the amount you’re Risking if someone weighs in on the other side.

TARA SINGH [as played by Becky] starts a Situation with 11 points in Self and six in Compassion. If she helps Milosz out in a Risk and adds five of those points of Self to his Self Risk, that’s fine, but if she then finds out she has to Risk Self herself, she can’t Risk more than six, since that’s what she had left, no matter whether she wins or loses.

The results work out like this:

• To win against more than one opponent, the other side has to beat the total number of points Risked. But if the players on the side with the advantage win, each player on that side gets what the other player Risked (none of them get the Soap, even the Reps).

In that last example, it turned out that Tara and Milosz Risked a total of 12 points. Which means that the Company would have had to have Risked 13 points or more to win.

But the Company loses. He only risked nine points. So both Tara and Milosz get back nine points in Self, each.

That’s all there is to it. Easy.

BailoutsIt’s not terribly likely, but sometimes, the Company’s Resources run out. If, at the end of a Situation, the Company ends up with fewer than ten points in her Resources pool, the Company has to call for a Bailout.

What this means is:

• Each player can choose one or two more new Brand Values for the Company (and remember, each Brand Value is potentially another point of Soap every

34 MSG™

Round). Every new Brand Value adds three points to the Company’s Resources pool.

• In the next situation, the Company has a cap on spending. Which means that the Company cannot Risk more than 10 points on any one Risk in the next Situation (but only the next Situation).

ConsequencesSo what happens next is up to the winner. The one important thing to bear in mind is that consequences stick around. It’s not just about the numbers, although they matter too — your Rep lost a lot of points of Self? He’s in a bad shape — maybe he’s injured. Maybe he’s got to wear a tracking collar when he’s in the office, or had electric shock therapy. Maybe he’s just started to get used to being treated like crap by his boss.

Did your Rep get a pile of new Compassion points? She feels a bit better about people. She probably goes out and smiles at some kids on the way home. They rip off her car when she’s not looking, but that’s not the point. The dead stay dead. If the business changes, the business stays changed. Once your Relationships are defined, they stay defined. And stuff that happens in previous Situations always has ramifications in the current one.

In the last Situation, Milosz Karadzic lost an arm when a Self Risk involving a Dobermann Pinscher and a nitroglycerine-flavoured dog biscuit went a bit wrong. Rob, playing Milosz, decides that in the meantime, Milosz got a cheap mechanical replacement. It’s cheap, ugly, made in a North Korean sweatshop and prone to freezing up at the worst possible moment.

Meanwhile, Tara’s brother Rahul died (he was standing too close to the dog). Which means that apart from Tara losing an iLove and gaining a Secret Tragedy, the next Situation gets set up at Rahul’s funeral.

How to win with MSG™ • Use your Soap. It’s what it’s for. you don’t get to keep it in the next Situation.

• Try not to overbid. Every player has limited Resources — even the Company. While it’s tempting to pile on vast numbers of points to guarantee a win, what happens when you Risk 20 points and the other player only puts down the one?

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• Be prepared to lose sometimes with a deliberately small Risk, especially when you’re the Company (because the Company doesn’t have to Risk anything). It might not win you the Situation, but it will mean that next time you stand a better chance of winning, because your opponent has to be far more careful.

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36 MSG™

“You slept with my girlfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you. The whole site is automated, and the locals don’t give a flying one what we do to each other.”

“Because I couldn’t help myself.”

“That’s weak. You’re dead.”

“I’m serious. I’ll forward the neuro-behav-ioural study that proves it.”

“What?”

“We were selected for these positions because of a certain behavioural profile, based on low risk aversion and a capacity to work in a group setting while still main-taining a healthy degree of sociopathy. We’re carefully tuned instruments of Brand policy, but unfortunately that means certain of our behaviours are bound into strong sense-memory response triggers. Your girlfriend smelled like oranges. So I nailed her.”

“You complete bastard.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“That’s your excuse? Your brain made you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think I need to have a personal conv-ersation with your brain.”

37MSG™

Options and VariantsSo that’s how to play MSG™. But you don’t have to play MSG™ exactly like that every time. Here are some alternative versions of the game you might have fun with.

Variant: bidding every RoundIt’s a pretty simple alteration. Instead of everyone bidding before Round 1 to be the Company, you can play it so everyone bids before each Round. So you only have the one auction, and the winner pays his Resources to the Company.

This changes things a bit. First, it means that although the game still ends when everyone has been the Company once, there’s the chance to play the Company several times. The benefits of doing that are obvious: you get multiple chances to screw over the other players.

But, on the other hand, you get more chances to screw over the other players. Which means that when you screw up and can’t bid, they’re going to really hate you.

And then in a longer game, you have a higher chance of needing a bail-out. Of course, this might be fun in itself.

Option: keeping Reps between gamesMSG™ works just fine if you play it from start to end in one evening, and make up new Reps every time you play. That’s the default, anyway.

But there’s no reason why you can’t keep Reps from game to game, bringing them back each time with the same Resources, Expertises and Relationships they had at the end of the last game.

The Company starts with the same Brand Values, but starts each game with a pool of Resources equal to the total of all the Reps’ Resource pools added together.

Start each game with a run-down of what happened last time (and who won), re-introduce your Reps and and introduce any players who weren’t there last time (giving them a chance to make new Reps).

And that’s really it. The main changes come in the way that Reps have history, both with each other, and the supporting casts. Imagine each game as being like a few episodes of a TV show about the Reps. As time goes on, their stories become convoluted and interesting. They gain a healthy dose of history.

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Option: fatal endgameIn the basic version of the game, Reps can’t ever die. But what if the stakes of the very last Situation of a game depended on the life or death of one or more of the Reps? There’s not really anything to change here, except to say that if you’re doing this, everyone has to agree that this is the last Situation, and the Company absolutely must declare before the Situation starts that Reps might die in its course.

Variant: no winners, only one Company playerIn this version, one player doesn’t make a Rep — he, and no one else, gets to be the Company. Because it’s the same Company player all the time, and no one else is playing to win (except maybe the Company, although that’s only because his role is oppositional to the other players’), the game becomes a simple, co-operative exercise in storytelling.

This version of the game works best when you combine it with the keeping Reps between games option. It turns MSG into something more closely approximating what people who are into such things consider to be a role-playing game, where the players identify far more strongly with the fictional personae they create.

Option: gambling the MarketThe idea behind this is that we inject a level of chance into the game. The Market is fickle, and it’s the only thing the Company is beholden to. You need three dice for this option, the ordinary dice that you find in board games. You’ll also need a shaker of some kind.

At the start of a Situation, the Company decides what the state of the Market is, whether it’s stable, uncertain or in chaos. If the Market is stable, he secretly takes one of the dice and puts it in the cup. If it’s uncertain, he puts two dice in the cup. If it’s in chaos, he puts three dice into the cup. The important thing is that the Reps don’t know how many dice are in the cup.

Then he shakes the shaker and puts it face-down on the table, so no-one, even the Company, sees what numbers came up. The numbers on the dice are free Resources, and one lucky player can play the Market to get them.

Everyone bids for the Resources under the shaker without seeing them. You do this the same way that the bidding for the Company goes, only without a formal order, and no one has to bid. Someone bids one (and if a Rep is bidding, remember you have to pick one Resource, either Compassion or

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Self, to bid from), and someone else bids more than that, until no one wants to bid any more. And the winner gets to add whatever’s on the dice to his Resources.

If the Company wins, he adds all of the points to the Company Resources pool. If one of the Reps wins, it’s a little bit more complicated, because you’re not allowed to split up the numbers on the dice. What this means is that if there’s one die under the cup, the Rep has to put that die into either Compassion or Self. If two dice are under the cup, the Rep puts the number on one of the dice into one Resource, and the other die into the other Resource. And if there are three dice, the Rep has to put two dice worth into one Resource, and one die into the other Resource. The Rep can choose how the dice split, and where they go.

In one Situation, BECKY [playing TARA SINGH] plays the Market and wins. It turns out that three dice are under the cup, showing four, four and two. Becky puts one of the fours and the two into Tara’s Compassion pool (adding a total of six points to the Resource) and the other four into Self.

In the next Situation, ROB [playing MILOSZ] wins. It turns out that there’s only one die, and it’s a measly two, which is a lot less than he bid. He adds two points to Milosz’ Compassion pool.

In the third Situation, Becky’s playing the Company, and wins the Market auction. She’d put two dice in the cup, and they came up six and three. Becky adds nine points to the Company Resources pool.

And in the last Situation, Graham [playing GREG21] wins, finding two dice under the cup.

The Company’s got a bit of an edge, because he knows how many dice got thrown, but he doesn’t know exactly what’s under there. But the Reps don’t have to stay in the dark. Before the auction, any of them can get insider information about the Market’s state. Every Rep can call one iLove or use one Expertise — and remember, a Rep’s got to justify why he’s using the Relationships. If he uses one of them, he can ask the Company secretly how many dice got thrown. If he uses both of them, he can peek under the cup.

What the Rep does with this information is up to him. He can tell the other players, or use it to influence his bidding, or anything he wants, really. But what he cannot do is use that Relationship or the Expertise to get Soap in the Situation. So think before you use the benefits on your Rep sheet.

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Bidding to be the Company• The first player bids one point from one Resource. Everyone else outbids or concedes until a winner comes out. Repeat auctions until everyone knows what order they’re going to takeover the Company.

• Every winner pays the points they bid into the Company Resource pool.

• The player who goes first puts his Rep to one side and takes over the Company’s Resource pool. He’s now the Company.

• The Company player’s Rep gets back one fifth of the Company player’s winnings in the Situation.

Situations• The Company player names the supporting cast as they’re introduced.

• The Company can introduce Reps’ iLoves and iHates as supporting cast, as long as the Reps’ players haven’t introduced them into the Situation first.

• The Company picks one of the Supporting Cast as Spokesperson.

Gathering Soap• Introducing an iLove or iHate: one point each (but only if the Company hasn’t done it first).

• Tying in My Secret Tragedy: two points.

• Bringing in Expertises: one point each.

• Mentioning a USP: one point.

• Justifying actions according to Brand Values: one point per Brand Value.

• Creating a TLA (once per situation): one point.

Recap

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RisksReps Risk at least one point from either Compassion or Self, plus Soap.

The Company Risks from the Company Resource pool.

Results

• Both sides discard the points they Risked.

• The winner receives back the same number of Resources the loser Risked.

• If the Company wins, he only gets back the Resources the Rep Risked, and not the Soap.

Helping

• Reps who are helping out in a Risk must either take Resource points from the same Resource the main Rep is using, or only use Soap. The two Risks count as one pooled Risk.

• A player can’t Risk more points in any one Resource than she had at the start of the Situation.

• The outnumbered player must beat the total points bid.

• If the teamed-up players win, they all get what the loser bid, but not the Soap.

Bail-Outs

• Call for a Bail-Out when the Company has 10 or fewer Resource points left.

• Each player can choose one or two more new Brand Values for the Company.

• Every new Brand Value adds three points to the Company’s Resources pool.

• In the next situation, the Company cannot use more than 10 points on any one Risk.

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Part 2: MSG™ and youSo that’s how you play. You don’t actually need any more than that. Think of this part as the interesting digest of extra stuff and background. Stuff like that.

What the Brand and the Company wantWe’re going to lose the motivational voice for a while. We’re living in a world where the Brands won. The Market survived the Recession of the early 2010’s and after a short backlash, came back more aggressively than ever. In the second half of the twentieth century, it developed the tools of survival. The Market is everything. The Market rules everything. The Market makes our world what it is.

The Company is not the Brand.

And the Brand isn’t the Company. The Company isn’t actually a single company at all, but a vast hyper-hierarchical tangle of independent contrac-tors, all of whom own some sort of franchise of the Brand. Theoretically, they all work together.

In practice, they’re at each other’s throats. Put it this way: the Brand family includes pharmaceutical companies who have an interest in preserving wetlands and rainforest areas, because they are a valuable source of powerful, profitable, life-saving drugs.

The Brand family also includes logging firms and hamburger companies who really want to chop down the trees and turn the land to pasture for geneti-cally modified longhorn beef cattle.

The Brand family includes any number of private police contractors. It also includes the mob. The Brand has its name on massage parlours (and by “massage parlour” we mean “brothel”, if you hadn’t figured it out) and publishers of children’s books. And each of these corporations include any number of further subsidiaries and contractors, each of whom are, within their field, also at each others’ throats. Some of these further sub-contractors have links with other subsections of the Brand, too.

And the Brand at the top level doesn’t own any of these Companies. They’re all independent contractors, who themselves have maybe one or two full-time employees each. It’s all about rents and leases and short-term contracts. It’s about the flexibility to shed anyone at any time.

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So Here is Barthes Studios. Barthes Studios is a media corporation, which is part of the BAC Brand Family™. Barthes’ Studios’ main selling point is that owns the rights to family favourites like Kim Kangaroo™, Gregory Goat™, and the Grade School Comedy™ franchise.

And so here’s Barthes Studios itself. Its only actual employees are managers and financiers and a CEO. It has a production wing, which in turn is divided into an animation house (the computer animation and script factories are sub-contracted to entirely separate Indian and Korean sweatshops) and a film company, which again has loads of contractors and sub-contractors: the cameramen work through an agency, and their equipment is rented from another contractor; the agents are in, well, an agency. The scripts and special effects are created in several of the same Asset-strewn sweatshops that supply the animation studio.

And then what about the security firms who manage the security in the studio? And the law firms, penal facility management concerns and liquidation contractors who have to be involved in a massively popular show like Kangaroo Court™, where our cuddly marsupial serves as judge, jury and executioner for televised criminal cases?

You wouldn’t believe how many people tune in to that one. Or how many separate corporate concerns have a hand in making it.

The Company in MSG™ is sort of an amalgamation of all these different busi-nesses — in one Situation, the Reps deal with the mob franchise. In another, it’s the music company or the family-values animation studio-cum-merchan-dising juggernaut.

The Brand doesn’t own anything.

Actually, that’s not really true. The Brand doesn’t own any stuff. The Brand owns a lot of things, but the things it owns are both more eternal and ephemeral than factories and offices and stuff.

It’s all about intellectual property. The Brand owns its name and its logo. It owns its slogans and ad catchphrases. It owns names and concepts. It owns trademarks. And it can make anything a trademark. The Brand absorbs and assimilates ideas , turning original concepts into Brand-infected memes.

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You’ve got a car, and the car’s got the Brand on the front grille, right? You might own the car (well, the finance company does, but you will by the time you finish the payments, at which time it’ll be obsolete and you’ll need to trade it for another one) but you don’t own the idea of the car. You don;t have any right to its shape, or its design elements, or its name. That’s still the Company’s.

Sometimes, the Brand owns someone’s name and identity. It happens with celebrities and pop stars. They might use the name and trade off who they are, but if they ever end up in breach of contract, it’s the

People sometimes have brand logos tattooed on their bodies. Assets often have to. Ask yourself what that means.

No one is employed by the Brand.

No one. Not one single person. The last actual employee died in a freak stapler accident or something some years ago and his role was phased out. The Brand just exists as a conceptual entity with a massive bank account, administered on a few hundred automated servers, rented from contractors and administered by other contractors. Everyone who works for the Brand, without exception, is a Freelancer or is employed or rented by a contractor.

It exists in the heads of its Assets and in the Brand’s near-omnipresence in the everyday world. It might wield enormous power, but at its centre is nothing at all.

The Brand has an enormous number of shareholders, but no one owns anything even close to a controlling interest (and systems are in place to ensure — lethally — that no one ever does). The dividends are still amazing, though.

The Company’s only duty is to turn a profit for its shareholders.

The Company has no moral duty whatsoever, except to turn a profit for its shareholders. Actually, “moral duty” is a myth. The Company is an artefact of the freest of free markets, and it’s free of moral expectations. Profit governs everything, and in fact, the Company follows moral guidelines and national and international law only so long as it is less costly to do so than just to break them.

Sure, the Company will come out with lines like “we’re a family” and extol “ethical business”, but it only does so if these lines turn it a profit. It might promote the Brand Values, but only so much as they make the Company money.

The Company is not evil, it’s just absolutely amoral. The Company sometimes does the “right thing” simply because it’s the most profitable course of action. What this does mean is that, if you’ve got the right executive’s ear, it isn’t terribly hard to convince the Company to give up on something, change

45MSG™

course or start something completely new.

All you have to do is to convince the Company that money is to be made.

The Company is inconsistent.

OK. Look. Here are Companies A, B, C and D. All of them are Branded contrac-tors. Company A is a Global Stabilisation Contractor (i.e. it supplies mercenary soldiers for governments, companies and the mob). Company A has created and contracted Company B to do its accounts. Company B only does the accounts for Company A, but this is what you do: you create a department and divest yourself of the responsibility you have for it by making it a separate company. Then you hire it back as a contractor.

So, Company B is the main client of Company C , who are systems and server managers. Company D is in direct — often lethal — competition with Company A. But Company D is also the main supplier of Company C’s security. Meanwhile, Company C also does the systems for Company X, who hire Company A to do their security and assassinations and stuff...

And that’s the simplified version. It’s usually far more complex than that.

The biggest problem with this vast mess of contractors is that no one really knows who they’re really working for. And all of these companies have their own, often conflicting agendas. The mobile phone retailer and the beauty retailer might have very different ideas about who should have that amazing piece of shopfront real estate that just got vacated at the megamall, but even though they both belong to the “Brand family” they probably can’t settle it amicably. Unbeknownst to each other, both companies hire the same Stabilisation Contractor to blow up the real estate brokers hired by their opponents. The contractor doesn’t care — it’s all a paycheque. Hell, their HR manager probably doesn’t care if their men are hired to shoot at each other.

The constant jockeying for profit — combined with the corruption and infighting created by the culture of profit-is-everything — means that the Brand’s representatives are wildly inconsistent.

In a game of MSG™, the Company might aim for one thing in one Situation, and for the opposite in the next. Exploiting the endless, brutal infighting between the Company’s contractors and subcontractors is often a really fantastic way to stop the Company from doing anything.

The Company’s first solution to any problem is extreme.

It’s always about the violence. Back in the twentieth century, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economic theory came up with this idea that in order for the market to really do its work, you need to have a shock, a kind of big bang that clears out all the detritus of government interference and

In active synergy with Brand U.

46 MSG™

pesky on-the-ground resistance all in one go, leaving the ground clear for the system . Sure, it’ll be a bit wonky for a while, but the theory is, it’ll stabilise into a proper, working, absolutely free down-trickly system. And if it doesn’t, well, obviously it wasn’t implemented properly.

When governments attempt it, they usually just do a slash-and-burn on the economy. One second you’ve got health benefits and nationalised indus-tries, you blink and it’s all privatised. Sometimes, there’s a big disaster or a war, and it’s a fabulous excuse for modernisation. Sometimes, though, some authority or another reckons that the only way to do it properly is to shoot or torture people who’ve got a problem with it — Chile did this sort of thing in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. People who work in Central and South American factories run for certain soft drink manufacturers get on the wrong side of death squads if they try to unionise (because unionisation is anti-market, duh).

Our Company took a leaf out of this sort of book. If it’s more profitable to ignore the laws and just shoot the opposition, well, let’s shoot the blighters. What better way to compulsorily purchase land off some villagers than to call in an airstrike and firebomb them off the face of the earth? Yeah!

They only tell you that violence is necessary because they make it necessary.

So suddenly we’re in that endless debate between violent solutions and non-violent solutions. And when the Company gets in with the violence first, they do that thing that American politicians call “framing the debate”. Which means that once the violence comes out, nine times out of ten, the only way you can respond is with more violence.

I mean, sure, you can try diplomacy, but you’re not a diplomat. You’re on the ground. Diplomacy isn’t really your call when you;re the one who’s been doing the ordering people shot and the pressing of the electric shock buttons.

But it can be. Chances are, if you get in with a non-violent solution first and fix it, you get to pre-empt the shooting and the bleeding and the screaming. You have to get in really quick, mind.

The Company only really thinks about the short term.

In a choice between a short-term possible profit and a long-term sure thing, the Company takes the possible. Long-term is bad. Long-term, is, well, long-term, and the Company’s about instant gratification. As in, now. Right now. Money, in our hands. Look. Money.

The only time the Company ever takes the long-term option is when you can guarantee that the short-term option is going to be a flop and you can prove it. The long-term option is the poor relation, the path you take when all else has failed and you want to get a profit out somehow.

47MSG™

This actually makes a kind of sense. The only thing that really offers a challenge to the irresistible self-belief of the Company is the market. The Company is pretty much always at the market’s mercy, even now, and we’ve had crashes in the past. We will do again. The Company learned the hard way that long-term profits, even if they look like the surest of sure things, are always risky. Always. Never put your eggs in a basket and leave them there, because someone could walk along and tip it, right when you thought they were fine.

The Company doesn’t understand people

More than that, the Company is completely incapable of understanding people. The Company views people as statistics, and as consumers. People are revenue. They’re the source of the revenue, and the means of getting it. End. Of.

But people do weird, irrational things. They do these weird, unpredictable things because of loves, and hates, and ideologies. And the Company knows about the loves and the hates and the ideologies, but only in respect of the fact that they’re buttons to press in the marketing process.

So when people do those weird, unpredictable things we were talking about, the Company never gets it: “Why the hell do those workers want to unionise? What’s wrong with having them and their kids working sixteen-hour days for a plate of rice? Scientific studies have proved it’s perfectly possible to survive that as a lifestyle choice.”

Now. Force isn’t the only language that the Company understands. Money is the only language that the Company understands. Force is more a sort of dialect. But anyway, when the Company tries to deal with people, the Company can’t work outside of the language of force and money. If people won’t take the money — some people still have principles, for example — that’s where force comes in.

Because the Company never really gets people and their needs and their unpredictable actions, the people who advance in the Company have always been the people who don’t understand people, because they’re the people who think like the Company. And they perpetuate it, by advancing people just like them.

Result: your boss is a sociopath. Deal with it.

The Company is inefficient

All this inconsistency, infighting, reliance on force and inability to really under-stand people makes the company vastly inefficient.

Seriously. The Company haemorrhages vast profits daily because its contrac-tors are arguing about losses, or because executives are exploiting loopholes, or because contractors’ CEOs have given themselves vast bonuses.

48 MSG™

Or because the Company just called down an air strike on a factory where the workers unionised. Let’s think on that for a moment. The cost of scrambling fighter jets and helicopters is vast. The cost of guided missiles, firebombs, fuel, ground crew, the maintenance of the air base, the command centre and its staff... we’re talking millions of Euros here. In fact, the chances are that the cost of carrying out the air strike, added to the loss of potential revenue from a sweatshop, even one with a union, is so far beyond the loss of profits caused by unionised workers and their pesky anti-market shenanigans that it isn’t even funny.

But calling in airstrikes is what the Company does. And that’s partly because it’s in the interest of the companies who manufacture the jets and munitions, and the companies who refine the fuel, and the agencies who supply the pilots and ground crew to encourage air strikes. And partly because the Company has this doctrine that force is best. And partly because the insane cost of an air strike is mostly hidden. It’s indirect, on another balance sheet. It might affect the bottom line, but that’s about three bottom lines away from the one we’re looking at.

And mainly, the people working for the Company don’t actually think about that stuff. Because air strikes are awesome. They go boom. And make amazing-looking explodey things that you can film and play back in slow motion at the start of the arms manufacturer’s end-of-year shareholder presentation thing.

It’s about shock and awe, baby. Which is, like we said before, sort of important, because the Company buys into the idea that violence is necessary for the creation of unfettered markets.

And finally: energy crisis? What energy crisis?

There is no energy crisis. We are not running out of oil. Also, people who whine about climate change are talking unprofitable nonsense. The world is going along just fine.

The Birmingham coast, for instance, has never looked so lovely and temperate.

Some principles Company executives may quote at you

What does all this mean when you’re the Company and looking the Reps square in the eye?

Well, for one, it means that the Company’s Spokespersons can bring any number of Important and Plausible Business Principles to bear.

Feel free to use these as and when the situation arises. Or make new ones up on the fly. Hell, the execs do all the time. In human terms, the Company is fundamentally sociopathic, concerned with control and obsessed with profit, and any new Business Principles you make up in the course of a Situation should reflect that.

49MSG™

• The company is only accountable to its shareholders.

• The company has no responsibility other than to its shareholders, specifi-cally to turn a profit.

• The company is responsible only to national laws if such recognition aids in its fulfilment of responsibility to its shareholders.

• The Company recognises no responsibility to its Contractors and Freelancers, with whom the Company has no binding contract save that which it creates with the Contractor or Freelancer on a case-by-case basis.

• The Company recognises no respon-sibility to its Assets, who, as leased associates implanted with Company property, may be disposed of in any way at the Company’s discretion.

• The Company may at any time choose to Transfer, Liquidate, Audit, Use Assess or Disemploy its Resources at its discretion.

• The company’s Assets and Freelancers are responsible solely to the Company. In the case of a conflict, personal issues are immaterial.

• A shareholder who fails in his/her responsibility to the Company forfeits those rights and privileges due to a shareholder.

Section 37, Subsection 542: Reminder of Corporate responsibility. It has been stated (see 1.1, 5.43, 25.9, 21.1, 207.1 and 105-206.passim) that BAC™’s sole responsibility is to create profit for its shareholders. Costs reduce profit. Ergo, costs must be minimised. In issues of conflict where costs are inevitable, the operative is required to compare the costs of the alternatives on behalf of BAC™.

Section 37, Subsection 543: Issues of conflict where national law may interfere. The operative is required to compare Cost A against Cost B. Cost A is defined as the cost incurred to BAC™ in said situation should the Company choose to observe the rule of law as defined by the nation in which BAC™ is operating when said issue of conflict arises. Cost B is defined as the cost incurred should BAC™ accept the consequences of ignoring said law. BAC™he rule of law only in those situations where Cost B remains greater than Cost A. There is no obligation to observe the rule of law in said nation should Cost A be greater (or become greater) than Cost B.

Fig. 207: Freelance efficiency matrix

50 MSG™

> WARNING: INSTALLATION OF THIS THIRD PARTY ADD-ON MAY VIOLATE OR INVALIDATE THE TERMS OF YOUR LEASE. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?_

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> Insufficient memory available._

> Clear HeADspace™? _

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> Some mild disorientation and permanent loss of memory may result. Are you sure?_

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> Authorisation will now be confirmed. Please wait_

> Connecting_

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> ERROR 404: Installer cannot locate active CloudLink™. Installation without license confirmation not recommended. Do you wish to continue?_

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> Authorisation will be confirmed with next available CloudLink™ Session_

>Installing_

> <run c://HeADspace/sexXware/authroxxor/roxxx.exe>

>CONGRATULATIONS! You have successfully installed PLAYA-GATOR PRO™ Sexual Confidence Upgrade_

> Would you like to run a simple tutorial?_

51MSG™

Brand U: getting a jobWe live in the best of all possible worlds, but you still have to work. But in this perfect world, you work for yourself. You’ve empowered yourself by letting go of the notion that you’re beholden to an employer. You’ve self-incorporated and become your own Brand. You’re not an employee — you’re a consultant. You’re a service supplier. You are the Chairperson, CEO and Entrepreneur-in-chief of your own firm, leased out to targetable markets with your own set of equities and your own portfolio of braggable achievements.

You are a free agent, a participant in the final end of jobs. We are seeing the free market without suits and ties (except when you have to wear one). You’ve changed your name to make yourself a marketable commodity. You live without limits, work without bosses, score money without a salary. And sure, you’ve got a better chance of deciding who you work for if you’re at the top of the tree. But you don’t get to the top of the tree if you don’t start somewhere.

You’re not a cog in the machine. You’re Brand U.

And so is everyone else.

Brand U is a concept, a service, a practical dream, an urban nightmare. If you’ve ever tried to sell yourself in an interview, if you’ve ever listed your skills on a CV or tried to impress someone at a posh dinner party, you’ll already be familiar — whether you recognise it or not — with self-branding.

Brand U is who you are. Brand U is what you do and. Brand U is the dream of the person you would like others to think you are. You want to write a best-seller? Launch your own fashion line? Invent your own perfume? You can’t do any of these things. Your brand can.

You don’t have to be talented to become famous or rich and successful these days. All you need is a good marketing strategy — and the brand will do the rest. Who cares if the top glamour model-turned-author signing copies of her latest bodice-ripper hasn’t actually read the book? What of it if the actress launching her high-street fashion range wouldn’t be seen dead in the clothes she’s promoting? Who cares if the dependable tough guy movie star is allergic to the salad dressing with his face on it and doesn’t actually sing on his break-through Christmas single? All that matters is that, for a moment at least, the people purchasing this stuff buy into the dream and feel just a little more glamorous by their proximity to fame.

The beauty of the brand is that, with minimal effort and lots of financial backing, anyone at all can succeed. Or, to quote that first king of brand-washing, Walt Disney: All your dreams come true if you have the courage to pursue them. You don’t have to be especially attractive (though it helps if you have a good stylist/hairdresser/surgeon on hand), or intelligent, or supremely talented. In fact, in many cases, it helps if you are none of these things. Self-will and sheer bloody-minded determination is all it takes to succeed.

52 MSG™

Turning yourself into a brand isn’t all upside. The fame game is notoriously fickle and today’s rising star is tomorrow’s Z-list has-been. To maintain brand consciousness, you’ll have to work hard. The odd drugs scandal or relation-ship crisis will help keep you in the public eye, but run off with another starlet’s husband and you run the risk of tarnishing the brand. Remember: At all times, maintaining the brand is more important than personal happiness.

A worse thing than being forgotten: one day, your brand might supersede you, taking on a life of its own. Once people start buying a product for what it is, rather than because your name is attached to it, you run the risk of becoming superfluous.

The best way to avoid this is to sell the rights to your brand, before it has a chance to go out of favour. You can split the brand into different compo-nents, selling each to the highest bidder. One company might own your legs, another your boobs and your face, and another your perfectly formed derrière.

Practices like this sometimes give rise to bitter legal disputes. Who owns the rights to a face or body which is 95 per cent plastic surgery? Can your plastic surgeon sue for the intellectual property rights to your face? Can your corpo-ration demand the removal of your face if you renege upon an advertising deal?

Once the brand is out there, who you are and what you do is largely irrele-vant. So long as the brand continues to shift products and people buy into the dream you have created, so long as the cash registers keep ringing and shares keep rising, you no longer matter. In a sense, you never did.

Optional Rules: Perks and changing statusIf we may get a little rulesy at this point, this is our opportunity to introduce Perks. Perks are little extra things that Freelancers and Assets can do at any time without having to take Risks. We like them because they make the two kinds of job a little bit more unique. Agree at the start of the game whether you’re using them or not.

A Freelancer can become an Asset at any time. Just say between Situations that your Rep is getting the surgery, and it’s done. You lose access to Frelance Perks and get the Asset ones instead. And if you don’t have an Expertise in IT Solutions, you get it on top of the Expertises you have, but at a cost to your memory: you have to delete an iLove. Congratulations. Your heADspace™ is now leased.

Remember that you can’t go back. The surgery doesn’t come out. You can never stop being an Asset.

Seen on the right people... in the right places.

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From: Management

Re: Union membership

Rumours have reached us of late that certain freelancers have been encouraging their colleagues to join the external body Stabilisation Workers Union.

Freelancers working for BAC™ should be aware that member-ship of external bodies remains strictly forbidden. This is for your own benefit, in order to ensure a loyal, dedicated and profitable workforce.

Those contemplating union membership should be reminded of the many benefits that working for BAC™ brings. These include Management’s right to award discretionary pay rises to those whom it feels are fulfilling their potential. Additionally, they should be aware of Management’s right to reassign those whom it feels would be better suited to a less demanding role, and adjust their pay scales accordingly.

We remain, as always, committed to providing a stimulating and rewarding working environment, as evidenced by our introduction of new coffee facilities in the Delta Alpha Block 13/B, and the introduction of lunchtime cake rations for those called to work regular additional overtime shifts.

The Director’s door is always open to those who wish to air any issues relating to company practice or conditions. As a loyal freelancer, for the good of the Brand and in the strictest confi-dence, you may wish to report evidence of unwholesome or destructive activities amongst fellow freelancers. Be assured that the company is keen to reward your dedication and loyalty and this will be reflected at all times in payscales and working conditions.

Regards,

Management.

54 MSG™

FreelancersWelcome to your new life as a Freelancer. Working as a Freelancer means you get to call the shots. You get to decide who you work for, what hours you work, how much holiday you take. You’re the master of your own destiny...well, almost.

Well, okay, so the reality may be that you only have the one client, who demands exclusivity for reasons of corporate security. Being your only client, you’ll have to do whatever it takes to keep in their favour — even if that means working until midnight every day, including Christmas. And yes, being a Freelancer does mean you are not entitled to the benefits permanent staff enjoy, such as, for example, the right to take holidays, sick pay, decent working conditions, or even a proper contract. But that’s the price you pay for being your own boss. Not that there are all that many permanent staff these days. And those that do exist are all in management.

Freelancers have existed since time immemorial and the big companies love them. For one thing, it enables them to escape the unwelcome attentions of c o r p o r a t e a u d i t o r s . “Overstaffing? No, we only have 200 p e r m a n e n t employees.” The fact that Freelancers , in many cases, do the vast majority of the work is of no relevance. In the eyes of

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officialdom, they don’t exist.

For the Company, the difference between their handful of Staff and Freelancers is a little like that between a wife and a high-class escort. Staff demand, within reason, certain loyalties. Sure, they can be laid off, but it’s more complicated. A Freelancer, on the other hand, is paid to do your bidding and can be discarded at a moment’s notice, no questions asked.

Such is the nature of the marketplace that, once hired, Freelancers can normally be persuaded to do whatever the corporation dictates. So, if, for example, the Company wants to make itself look good in the eyes of the public by upping its Corporate Social Responsibility quota, it might demand that each of its Freelancers donates a third of their wages to its chosen charity. The Company gets to boast of the enormous sums its workers generously give away each year. Or, if exceptional working conditions are required — ones which, in normal circumstances, might contravene certain laws on health and safety — well, Freelancers can normally be persuaded to help, and it won’t show up on official records because, after all, they are only Freelancers.

Why anyone would be willing to be treated this way? Duh. It’s just the Freelancer’s lot. If you don’t want the hassle of being tied down perma-nently to a particular company, you have to be willing to take what work you can get — even that means signing away every right you ever had. In theory, of course, you could just cut your losses, walk away. But that would be pro fessional suicide. You need the money and you need the references to get on. It’s a tough market out there, with tens of millions of Freelancers all competing for a finite number of jobs. If you don’t accept their Dickensian working conditions, someone else will. All you’ll be left with is your principles — and an empty wallet. Best knuckle down, then.

But then, there’s the flipside of all that. Resistance is not completely useless. The Company may not care about the Freelancers, but that means that a Freelancer can sometimes get away with murder, literally, as well as figuratively.

Freelancers often get to be a pretty cynical, disaffected bunch, unlikely to be taken in by exhortations to join the “company family” or bribed into submis-sion by promises of power or discretionary payrises. Because no matter how much they sugar the mug full of crap they give you, it’s still a mug full of crap. Only with sugar on it.

As a Freelancer, it’s unlikely you hang out in picket lines waving placards — at least not when anyone important is looking. But behind the scenes you can be an agent of change, or at the very least, small-minded revenge. You listen in carefully to conversations, gather evidence, find ways to subvert the Company’s objectives and, ultimately, bring about its downfall.

Let’s say, for instance, you work as an admini strator for a major fashion chain. What if certain supplies of material went missing in transit and were replaced

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by other — wholly inappropriate — ones? (whoops — how did that happen?) Or what if patterns for next season’s ranges ended up in competitors’ hands. (Me? I’m sorry, I’m just the temp. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about).

Or perhaps you work on the subs desk, editing the Company’s annual report. Wouldn’t it be amusing if the first letters of each line in the CEO’s statement happened to spell out a really rude word? (Coincidence, surely?)

By the time anyone has spotted these errors, you might have long since moved on. You might still be working for the same brand, but the Company is such a labyrinthine mess that it’s easy to start over in a a new town, with a new job description and possibly an entirely new identity, leaving only a (probably fake) forwarding address. Even your closest work colleagues will have forgotten all about you. That’s the beauty of being a Freelance — you’re as good as invisible.

PerksYou want your Rep to try this stuff? Give a point of Compassion to the Company whenever you do.

Get away with murder

You know what we said about Freelancers getting away with murder? Freelancers have the right connections and the survival instinct to know when someone needs to be out of the way, and the means to make sure that no one will ever, ever know. Your Rep can order the instant, consequence-free death of any one member of the supporting cast in a situation. You can do this as many times as you want in the same situation — well, as much as you have points of Compassion to spare — and the only limit is that you can’t do it to any of yours or the other Reps’ iLoves or iHates.

Bluff outrageously

The only way to get hired anywhere is to lie. It’s the only way. As many times as you like, you can give a Compassion point to the Company and let your Rep gain the benefit of an Expertise he doesn’t actually have.

Mill Milosz’ exceptional ability in killing people help him to sell arms to this bunch of straight-laced but hugely wealthy Unificationologists? Well, a little bit. Rob spends a point from Milosz’s Compassion pool, and Milosz pretends with absolute authority that he’s a hotshot Sales executive.

If you try to give your Rep the benefit of an Expertise that isn’t on the list, that’s wholly OK. The whole point of this is the lying, innit? What’s more brilliant than being a world specialist in a field that doesn’t actually exist?

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Welcome to the BAC™ family [smile]. We are pleased that you are joining our organisation at such an exciting time in our development. Barthes™ is the world’s fastest-growing company, and our vision is to become the planet’s premier lifestyle and govern-ment brand.

[optimistic] As a BAC™ Asset, you face an exciting future as part of a Company that operates in a dynamic market, ensuring that your life as a Barthes™ Asset will be highly stimulating. There will be chal-lenges, and to help you make the most of your new role, Barthes LLC™ has formulated a comprehensive Asset Development Programme.

When your HeADspace™ leasing procedure is complete, you will be supplied with a state-of-the-art package of personal enhancements, therapies and software, free of charge. Your Remotivation and psycho-cerebral Optimisation will be supplemented by free installation of the Neuterex™ Hygiene Empowerment System. When your Development has been completed, you will immediately be enabled to operate as a valuable, profitable Asset of a growing global entity.

You should each by now have been given an alpha-numeric designation. When your new designation is called, please follow [name of colleague; indicate colleague] through the door on your left [indicate door] to the Development Centre where Preliminary Optimisation can begin. The guards are here for your protection and are committed to ensuring that your Development will be completed smoothly and efficiently.

We trust that you will be content and productive members of the Barthes family. Please enjoy your Remotivation. Thank you for choosing Barthes LLC™ [smile].

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AssetsSo you wanted some security. So you sold your heADspace™ to the Company. Your Five-Function Branded Lease Unit is now installed, and you’re ready to work in active synergy with one of the fastest-growing lifestyle brands in the world.

Nano-machines, injected into your forebrain, liquidised your frontal lobes in seconds and rebuilt them over the course of the next day around an intricate bio-computer. You’re not the same person you were, but you’re not a machine. You have a full personality, (almost) normal human emotions and a favourite flavour of ice cream. On the other hand, if your lease gets cancelled (according to the terms of the Lease Agreement) and the Company deac-tivates the implant, you lose the bio-computer and your frontal lobes. They’ll probably memorywipe you a few times before it comes to that, though.

You haven’t yet turned into a cyborg sociopath (anything you might hear about the very first Assets going on murderous rampages is just a rumour, and if you do hear any of these stories, contact our Legal Department. Thanks). That’s thanks to the genius of the device: each function of the interface is psycho-logically compartmentalised. You enter a different state of consciousness in each mode, meaning that you don’t — can’t — directly apprehend the consequences of what’s been done to your brain.

It’s possible to live without ever leaving an electronically governed trance — Passive Mode — Attention Mode — Focus Mode — Attention Mode, and back to Passive Mode,

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repeating it daily, never dealing with anyone beyond pre-set pleasantries, talking in the pleased-to-be-of-service tone you use when you’re in Attention Mode, working efficiently and quickly and without ever once thinking of anything other than the job. It’s easy not to think.

It’s not all corporate cyborg slavery, though. You get stuff.

• You always have enough control over your actions to change the mode you’re in at any time (as long as you are not in Install Mode. Then you’re screwed). When you do, you make a little bdeet noise (you might want to make a little bleep noise when you’re playing your Rep — mainly because it’s funny. Also, creepy).

• You have a wireless mail-client, fax, cellphone and PDA installed in your brain. Sending head-to-network texts, faxes or documents takes seconds. And all you have to do to call someone is enter Focus Mode and think the number.

• A little recorder connected to your optic nerve and inner ear records everything you see and hear. You can play it back any time. 24 hours after the fact, your unit automatically transmits the stored audio-video signal back to a server back in one of the offices and erases it from your lease unit (although you still remember it). Once you’ve been online for a day, the transmis-sion’s pretty constant, although if you can’t get a mobile signal, your unit saves the broadcast until the signal starts up again. With a bit of effort (see below) you can access and alter the files any way you want while you have them Once it’s on the server, though, it’s out of your control, and Management can pull up your records any time. They don’t do it often, though — you’re one of tens of thousands of Leased Assets, and the Company’s people don’t have the time to do it. But if something suspicious goes on — it’s one of the first things they look at. Don’t panic. You can edit the footage of what you’ve been doing. Well, you’re not supposed to be able to, but it’s a piece of cake. Obviously, you have to do it within 24 hours of it having happened, but you’ve got all sorts of editing tools installed. It’s one of the cool things about having all this hardware in your head. You can change the details of the film any way you like. You can even reconstruct entirely fake scenes featuring people you saw and heard if you want. The evidence from your head is admissible in courts of law.

• The ability to recall instantly any of the Brand’s business prin-ciples and corporate precepts. It’s part of the conditioning; they run through your head, almost like a mantra. You don’t have to believe them, though (although, why wouldn’t you?) They Brandwashed you a bit, too, so you feel a lovely warm feeling

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inside when you see the brand logo.

• An internal chronometer. You always know what time it is, to one-tenth of a second.

• The means to connect neurally to computer networks and other Assets, both wirelessly and through cables. As well as the wireless connection —built into the back of your skull — you have between four and six NuSB™ sockets implanted around your body, which plug into any compatible hardware — cameras, printers, speakers, scanners, flashdrives, whatever.

• You can download software, too. You might have to give up a bit of your memory to do it, but who needs memories anyway, when you’re potentially the perfect worker?

• And don’t tell anyone, but you can install a whole lot more than just the work stuff. The Company doesn’t admit that Assets engage in software piracy, but when you’re programmed to be able to adjust your own brain, of course you’re going to hack stuff. Into games? World of Heroes™ is absolutely amazing when it’s installed in your brain (so’s MineCell™, for that matter). You’d be astonished at the number of Assets who spend most of their day in the office dedicating half of their brainspace to games while still working. Ultra-Illegal SexxWare™, is far more popular than the Company would like to admit (the legal stuff doesn’t technically exist. It’s a parallel market thing. Given the sort of people who install it in their Assets, you really, really don’t want to be an Asset with legal SexxWare™). Want to grant your partner ultimate satisfaction while handling the end-of year accounts?It only takes a little bit of HeADspace, a little bit of cash, and a mate on the right street corner.

• Software is one thing. But the peripheral hardware choices are vast. Head and throat mounted boomboxes and mic-systems are all the rage in the music industry. Designer body parts can come as standard, depending on the job. Most executives get their secretaries’ breasts enhanced, for example (adjust-able ones are the fashion right now). Input and output sockets for different kinds of hardware — particularly for vehicles and heavy machinery — are pretty common. Less common are the parallel market devices: drug injection systems, body parts that... vibrate... just... so... Loads of stuff exists that doesn’t do much but has really expensive designer labels (a lot of fashion houses do unique eye colours. The right shade, along with a tiny logo branded onto your retina, is the height of cool). Most Assets have at least one corporate logo tattooed somewhere on their bodies.

For the really conscientious (or inattentive) Asset, a reasonable fee will get you a Neuterex™ Hygiene Empowerment System. You’ll never be distracted by sexual urges (or the need to go to the toilet again) again. On the other hand, you’ll have a smooth plastic crotch like a Slutz™ doll and have to remember to change the Toilet Cartridge once a week, but hey. Your work is going to be amazing.

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Anyway. We were talking about modes. You’ll want to know what they are.

Default Mode really isn’t a mode at all. When you’re not working, using software, downloading stuff or being all cyborgy, you’re in Default Mode.

Attention Mode is what most people think of when they think of Assets. You’re being helped by the unit. You smile a lot. You move precisely. You speak with an American accent. An Appropriate Behaviour Filter governs your speech. So you can’t say anything that brings the Brand into disrepute, and you can’t swear, or even hear swearing (it’s wiped from your memory as soon as you hear it). Sometimes, if you’re in Attention Mode, you hear information the Brand has decreed to be highly sensitive, the Interface wipes that too (keeping it might be the part of the stakes for a Risk).

Focus Mode turns you inward. You zone out. You concentrate completely on your connection to the network and your software. You can download new utilities and transfer information in Focus Mode. You’re not completely lost. If someone talks to you or you need to react to something, for example, you go “bdeet” and snap out of into Default Mode or Attention Mode, your choice, any time you want.

Sometimes having access to the net means you have access to more informa-tion than you can imagine. Apart from the fact that the Company controls the net. Anyway, all you have to do is to go into Focus Mode and ask a question. Within seconds, the official, non-controversial — but nonetheless true — answer comes down without any red tape or hanging around, or having to bother Googling it. There it is, whammo, downloaded directly into your brain.

Passive Mode is a sort of programmed sleep-state. You go completely blank. All thought is lost in digital nirvanic bliss: all is blue, all is empty. You’re not supposed to dream. You probably do, though, and unit never picks it up. This is why Passive Mode is better than sleep: two hours in Passive Mode give the same benefit as eight hours’ sleep. You can set the duration of the trance or the conditions that would wake you early (for example, if someone enters the room, or if you get a text) before you enter Passive Mode, and choose whether to wake into Default Mode or Attention Mode.

Install Mode is not a mode you ever want to use. You’re helpless. It’s the mode you were in when all your software was installed, and the Brandwashing and conditioning happened. You can enter Install Mode any time you want, but in this state you cannot act at all until an outside source plugs into your brain and resets you. Anyone who can access your brain can repair it or virus-check it without harming you, but can also wipe your memory or personality, re-program your mind or even destroy the unit, leaving you brain-dead.

Just Eat It.

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PerksYour Asset can do any of these things at any time, but she has to give a point of Self to the Company to do so. Every point of Self you spend like this is a memory erased to make space for software. Say what it is: your first kiss? Your favourite toy as a kid? Your first day on the job? The day you graduated university? Be imaginative.

Edit your memory

You can swap out any Expertise you have for another one at any time (except IT Solutions) . Go into Focus Mode, wipe a bit of memory along with the skill, and learn something new. It takes about thirty seconds, just standing there in a trance, watching that blue bar extend across your vision.

Or you can learn extra ones, but you need to use a lot of space to do that. You have to erase one of your Relationships to give you the space to download another Expertise, which you can then keep. You can swap it later, too. If you take an extra Expertise, you can only use it in Attention Mode.

Change the facts to suit you

Everything is online. The online world is completely fluid. And facts are only really as good as the records. Which are online. Any idiot knows that. Your brain is always online. And you can change history. Did the Company say it was your hated boss who was the exec in charge of the current job?

Ah, no — one quick hack into the records later and it’s clearly this guy here.

What this means is that if you flip into Focus Mode and give a point of Self to the Company, you can tell everyone that one of the Company’s supporting cast is in fact someone else entirely (go look at the SpamNames list on p.80 and make someone up to fill the space). This is really useful if the Company has gone and taken one of your iLoves or iHates (which means you can’t get Soap from adding them to the situation, Remember). Mess with the supporting cast, and you get those valuable iLoves and iHates back.

ROB [playing the COMPANY]: The executive is Tara Singh’s brother, Rahul.

BECKY [playing TARA SINGH]: I’m not sure about that. I’m — bdeet! — entering the system and changing the records. It’s actually a guy who looks a bit like Rahul. Named... Jamil Hywel.

[Becky gives a point from Tara’s Self pool to the Company.]

BECKY: Also, I no longer remember my first day at school.

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Things on your CVSo your Rep has these brilliant Expertises.

But what do they do? What good are they? We’re glad you asked.

They do anything you want. Want to get a bit of Soap with your CV? Make up something on the fly that sounds plausible. A lot of them have very blurry edges, and some of them do a lot of the same things. All you need to get that lovely clean Soap is the right rationale.

Accounts

The accountant is not always the ultimate authority in matters of profit and balance. But a business founded on profit couldn’t exist without him. He knows the spreadsheet and the bottom line. He dazzles you with numbers. And sometimes he knows how to hide numbers, and move money around, and clean it up a bit, and maybe skim a little off the top. Not that you do any of this stuff. We’re just saying.

Business Stabilisation Solutions

The main thing that destabilises a business is the unexpected. The main source of the unexpected is the people. So the best way to stabilise a business is to do something about the people. Get them into line. Maybe get rid of them entirely. Through the stabbing and the shooting, and the strangling. And also through the threatening and the insertion of salted peanuts under fingernails.

Executive Management

You organise. You re-organise. You make decisions. You are really, really important. You are really, really good at making people think you are really, really important.

Finance

If stocks and shares and speculations are darkly magical things, you are the wizard. If mortgages and foreclosures are a science, you’re playing sugges-tively with the test tubes. Pervert.

IT Solutions

Everything’s connected. Everything’s online. And you know what that means? You know how to inundate Flis 27’s Lease Unit with tidal waves of Russian spam and make it look like Tara Singh sent it. You also know how to get your boss’s credit card details, ever since he gave them to that website which sells video files of pretty girls getting pedicures.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

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Healthcare

You know where to get a decent hospital bed for a cut-down fee. You know where to find a doctor. You know how to manage a medical centre budget. You can get amazing drugs. Mostly that last one.

Human Resources

You play with your prey before destroying them. Hire, fire, downsize, right-size, plus-size, fire some more... but make sure you mock a little while you’re doing it.

Law Enforcement

You know the police budget and the murder-solving stats. You know who the usual suspects are and you understand the law. You know what most police authorities want to buy. And most of all, you know the exact loopholes that’ll keep the Company out of trouble.

Legal and Litigation

If that guy looks at you funny, sue him.

Marketing

You know how to look good and make money from that. You know how to make that guy over there look good. You know how to make a lame idea look like something people want. You know how to get a celebrity endorse-ment. You know how make snow look attrac-tive and new and sell it to penguins.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Crush them before you play with them. And then crush them a bit

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more. Because it is fun.

Parallel Markets

Parallel markets are the markets that work parallel to the mainstream ones. You know, the legal ones. But you have to respect the parallel markets, though. Because they have traditions. Family traditions. And really great guns and drugs.

Personal Assistant

No one types and takes calls like you do. No one files (and files nails) like you do. No one knows exactly who your boss is cheating on her husband with this week like you do.

Professional Services

Keep the customer satisfied. Be the point of contact for first-line support. Maintain relations. Manage the Personal Gratification Professionals. Do a bit of it yourself if you have to.

Sales and Business Development

They tell you that you’d sell your own mother given the chance, but it’s not true. She wouldn’t get a good enough price.

Security Solutions

Security is everything. As in, our security at the expense of theirs. Surveillance. Counter-espionage. Intelligence gathering. Getting potential security risks right out of the way.

It does what it says on the tin.

Gigazillions of tiny micro-sats smaller than grains of dust, carbon balloons buoyed with vacuum and interlinked in a diffuse network.

CloudLink mediates signal from satellites, blanketing the ares below in rich creamy bandwidth.

Universal petabit wireless for all!

As a courtesy, here are some messages from our sponsor before we complete your call...

As an entirely unintended side effect the clouds that form around the linksats, as water vapor condenses around the tiny tech, can be shaped by gently nudging the CloudLink station keeping routines to form shapes, messages, brand logos.

“What does that cloud look like to you, son?”

“It looks like the Hiptronic™ Tiger!”

66 MSG™

Wood talks about resistanceYeah, it’s self-indulgent. But it’s worth talking about because this is what I was thinking when I wrote most of this. Look, here’s a quote.

There is no single site of revolt and no dramatic resistance. (Joanne Hill)

Joanne’s not really world-famous or anything. She’s just a friend of mine. She’s doing a PhD on sociology and feminism and transgression and stuff like that. Visionary stuff. I’m not clever enough to understand everything she’s written, but I think she’s on the nail with this.

What she’s saying is sort of based around this: you know how in those Hollywood movies — the corporate-sponsored ones — there’s a lone hero or a plucky band of freedom fighters, and through blowing up the Big Villainous Empire’s central planet-sized base or causing the Man to fall down a mineshaft, everything is changed, and everyone is free and happy?

It doesn’t ever actually happen that way.

What happens when you blow up the Evil Empire’s big central base and maybe depose or execute the Man is that you create a vacuum at the top of a big old edifice of power. Maybe someone from the next tier down steps up and takes the Man’s place. Maybe the whole thing dissolves into a mess. If our plucky heroes take the Man’s place, well, now they’re the Man, and he’s got this whole system to dismantle, which is probably going to be really hard, and might very well mean that he has to do a bunch of really nasty things in order to keep everything ticking over while he gets round to the slow, painful process of fixing things so that society turns into the utopia that our heroes were after in the first place. They might never manage to fix it. And even if they do, they’re still in charge of the screwed-up system that has to somehow run, even while it’s gradually being dismantled.

Freedom doesn’t come quickly.

The point of this is that MSG™ is not really supposed to be a game which is about telling the sort of story where the protagonists are going to change the world. It’s about getting on with surviving in a screwed-up society. It’s about making the decisions that change things in a small way, the tiny private victories that, if won by enough people, might alter society one day. Only not right now.

Mass movements exist. And mass movements change things, sometimes forever. Armies change things. Governments change things. But no mass movement changes things immediately. And not by doing any one action. In the world of MSG™, every mass movement that exists is a corporate commodity, a demographic, a marketing opportunity. The Brands won. The Reps are just part of the system.

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There is no single site of revolt and no dramatic resistance: no one single act is going to change the world, and there is no one single place where it can be achieved. You can’t blow up the Man and take his place. It’s about tiny, personal changes, about making a difference, or not. Because sometimes the best we can hope for is a tiny adjustment to the system. You can make that tiny difference.

But will you?

Why we don`t talk about money so much:

It’s pretty obvious when you think about it: if this game is so obsessed with profit, why don’t I talk about money so much?

Well, in the end, I left it deliberately vague. This is partly because MSG™ is set in a sort of non-future-that’s-really-the-present, and the easiest way to make something date is to talk about sums of money. Right now, we don’t know what stuff is going to be worth next week, let alone in a few years’ time.

And then there’s the fact that when people bandy about corporate sums of money on the news, the numbers are so huge that most of us can’t really comprehend what those sums of money mean. So when you’re playing the game, just chuck around random sums that end with -illion, because that’s what the corporations do.

And finally, the game’s not really about the money. I mean, the Company is obsessed with it, but it could be obsessed with anything. The game’s about keeping your soul. Does it work? I don’t know. Even if it doesn’t, I hope you have fun with it, and don’t take the little page of self-indulgent twaddle at the end too seriously. It’s a way to spend an evening. It’s a game.

That’s all.

MSG™ StuffographyBooks that informed MSG™: Scott Adams, Fugitive from the Cubicle Police (1998); Misha Glenny, McMafia (2008); Oliver James, Affluenza (2007); Naomi Klein, No Logo (2001), The Shock Doctrine (2007); Cable and Wireless Communications plc, Health, Safety and Environment Workbook (1999).

The MSG™ soundtrack: Ladytron, Light and Magic (2002), Witching Hour (2005), Velocifero (2008); Lady Vengeance OST (2004); Janelle Monáe, Metropolis [The Chase Suite] (2008); Swci Boscawen, Couture C’Ching (2007).

Films and TV that influenced MSG™: Aeon Flux (TV series, 1995), Battle Royale (2002), Dante 01 (2008), The Day Today (TV series, 1994), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Hyperdrive (TV series, 2006-7), Nathan Barley (TV series, 2005), Network (1976), The Office (TV series, both versions), Safe (1995), Save the Green Planet (2005)

“These are the headlines. God, I wish they weren’t.”

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Appendix: SituationsYou don’t have to use our Situations. That’s OK. We’re just putting them here so you can if you want to, and maybe to give you a jumping-off point to create your own. Feel free to leave bits out, add bits and change bits however it suits you.

Saint KurtRationale: There’s this popular musician who was something of an icon for a whole generation of disaffected — but let’s face it, conspicuously consuming — youth. He blew his brains out about ten years ago, which was fine for the Company, since he became a massive cash cow in the way that Beautiful Doomed Youth does when it dies young and with a high-quality resaleable back catalogue.

Here’s the thing, though. It turns out that he faked his death — the body was just a hastily assembled clone double (and not even one made by the Company). He’s actually living, alive and well, under an assumed name, in a rural developing-world village, wholly outside of the Company’s Economic Protection Zone.

It’s up to the Reps to find out who he is and do something about the threat he poses to the copyright of his name. Which is owned by the Brand, obviously.

More stuff: He has a wife and kids. Really cute kids.

Even more stuff: He has no intention of ever staging a comeback, or of recording another album. He just wants to be left alone.

Supporting cast: Retired rock star, manager to whom the Reps must report, paranoid music company exec, copyright lawyer with a gun, wife, cute kids.

Extras: Villagers, death squad members, random fans who have just discov-ered the truth, nosy clone rights activists.

What the Company wants: If the Company finds out that is really him, the Reps get direct orders to put a bullet through his brain. And his family. And possibly to call an air-strike down on the village, if they show any sign of knowing the truth.

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Kill FluffyRationale: The Company owns the rights to fifteen separate breeds of dogs. Recently a kid out in the suburbs registered a mongrel of at least two of these breeds. It’s brand dilution. Fluffy has to die.

More stuff: Little Jimmy loves his dog. And Fluffy loves him. The kid’s dad is an executive in one of the more belligerent of the Parallel Market contractors.

Supporting cast: Little Jimmy, Fluffy the dog, the kid’s mum, the kid’s manager to whom the Reps must report, copyright lawyer with a gun.

Extras: Animal rights protestors,

What the Company wants: Duh. Kill Fluffy. And maybe sue the kid.

Names for old starsRationale: A well known screen actor recently lost his contract. Because he got (unconventional) religion and started behaving erratically. And, yeah, his last two or three action blockbusters didn’t bust so many blocks. But anyway. He’s out.

But another Brand is courting him. And he’s going to use his own name. But the Brand still owns the right to his name and face.

More stuff: The film actor has just got married to a starlet half his age who is still contracted to the Brand and he’s got her into his religion. The Company won’t like this.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, copyright lawyer with a gun, film actor, film actor’s creepily brainwashed young starlet wife, legendary chat-show host.

Extras: Hordes of faithful fans, bodyguards, lawyers, press.

What the Company wants: The Company wants the actor dead. Or memory-wiped. Or at the very least minus his name and face. And divorced. It’s the Company’s name and the Company’s face.

Your co-workers aren’t just your colleagues. They’re your audience.

70 MSG™

CollaredRationale: The Company has decided to fit all of its Freelancers with these permanently locked shiny metal collars, which track the Reps’ movements and have flashy red lights on them.

More stuff: They also allow the administration of electric shocks.

Even more stuff: They blow up if you have the access codes. Or if you tamper with them. Like in “Battle Royale”.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, fashion marketing guy, technician with strangely fetishistic attachment to hardware.

Extras: More Freelancers, reality TV crew, security professionals, hot nurse tasked with fitting the collars.

What the Company wants: The Company wants all the Freelancers in collars. Because they’ll be more profitable.

There is no I in teamRationale: The Reps have a team of Freelancers, and a project to manage (it doesn’t matter what sort of project — make one up, and the less sense it makes, the better). Another manager has got a team that is working on an almost identical project. The Company would prefer that there be only one team, with the best workers on it.

The people who get the team (and get in the team), get the money.

More stuff: It’s a scam. The other manager wants to get shot of his deadbeats and whiners, and so he’s deliberately found out what the Reps are doing and has made up a team composed exclusively of losers, malcontents and idiots. He wants the Reps to get his rubbish workers so he doesn’t have to work with them. He wants to lose the team.

Even more stuff: The other manager’s workers have really amazing perform-ance assessments. Because he wants the Reps to get them.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, rival manager, efficient Freelancer, friendly Freelancer, deadbeat Freelancer, stupid Freelancer, whining Freelancer.

Extras: More useless workers, death squad, secretaries.

What the Company wants: One team to rule the mall, one team to get the contract.

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The sweatshop union problemRationale: A garment sweatshop in an Economic Protection Zone is in trouble. It looks like the workers might have unionised, and you know what that means? Yep. It means they’ve got to go, and they’ve got to go with a bang. Like with an airstrike or at the very least, a kick-arse death squad.

More stuff: Yes, they’ve unionised.

Even more stuff: The union leaders, unaware of the full nature of the Reprisals the Company is bringing to bear, are going to ground and are plotting to take direct action. Which means rescuing every man, woman and child from the compound, and blow some things up.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, death squad members, union leader, another union leader, manager of the sweatshop.

Extras: Loads of innocent garment workers, mostly women and children.

What the Company wants: It wants the union proven to not be there or gone. In flames and bombing and stuff.

RealityRationale: A reality TV crew are detailed to start following the team around.

More stuff: The Company — another contractor in the same brand family, anyway — orders the Reps to do some morally appalling things while all this is going on. Stuff that amounts to ordering murders and thefts. Stuff that many Reps would normally weasel out of.

Even more stuff: The director is an Asset, who’s running in Attention Mode the whole time, which means that the lights are on and no one’s home. The director is of course pretty much incorruptible and is recording everything him(or her-)self.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, director Asset, potential victim, another potential victim, manager of media contractor, cameraman, video editor.

Extras: Rubberneckers, camera crew, gentlemen and ladies of the press.

What the Company wants: The Company wants to look good, because looking good is profitable. It does not want the Reps to be disloyal. This will end their careers. If the Reps follow orders and let the appalling things happen, they make the Company look bad. If they avoid doing the stuff they have to, they don’t make the Company look so bad, but they do prove them-selves to be disloyal. This will also end their careers.

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Executive murder mysteryRationale: An executive gets found dead (you choose the means of death, but we quite like the exploded penthouse). Who did it? Well, we don’t know. They might be managing the police team. Either way, they have to get the thing resolved immediately, or they might get it pinned on them.

More stuff: He was embezzling the Company of vast sums of money.

Even more stuff: DNA from one of the Reps is found on the scene of the crime.

Supporting cast: Corporate forensic examiner, nosy detective, police officer, insincerely grieving but actually happy widow(er), resentful Asset secretary, executive who wants now-vacant post, Brand journalist.

Extras: Hordes of police officers,

What the Company wants: Justice! ...no, we’re kidding. The Company wants the whole thing resolved. Pin it on someone. We don’t care who.

Off-message mouseRationale: The Brand has control over a whole stable of your favourite cartoon characters. They appear on lunchboxes, clothing, toys, toothbrushes... pretty much everything, really. Sometimes they even appear in actual animation. And now, through cutting-edge and not wholly ethical cloning technology, one of the most popular and beloved of these anthropomorphic funny animals now exists in the flesh. He appears on TV; he hugs children in appear-ances. He plays comic relief in

More stuff: He just wants to be left alone. Imagine, if you will, a creature as potentially tragic and tortured as Frankenstein’s original monster. Only it’s that anthropomorphic funny animal character whom you loved as a kid and grew out of, a cuddly talking duck/mouse/hare/dog/cat/bear/kangaroo with a silly voice.

Even more stuff: He has no intention of ever staging a comeback, or of recording another album. He just wants to be left alone.

Supporting cast: Legendary anthropomorphic talking animal, manager to whom the Reps must report, trusting little kid, film mogul, the funny animal’s agent, copyright lawyer with a gun.

Extras: Fans, SWAT teams, frenzied mob of urban-dressed middle class consumers, nosy clone rights activists.

What the Company wants: He’s a liability. He’s got to go. Yeah, that’s right. The Reps have to track down and shoot down [insert name of your favourite funny animal cartoon character].

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Ashram buyoutRationale: So there’s this ashram community. Bunch of hippies. Their land is prime real estate. The Company wants it. If the cost of trying to buy it goes above a certain level, it’s air strike time.

More stuff: They don’t want to sell.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, ashram leader.

Extras: Loads of sweet-natured ashram members, sinister Company men with guns.

What the Company wants: The land. It doesn’t care how

OvertimeRationale: The Company has a big project crunch on. In order to get the project finished, mandatory overtime for the Reps and the workers on their office floor now extends to 24 hours. For the forseeable future.

More stuff: It’s not all bad, though. The Reps do get to try out unlimited free supplies of the Company’s new brand of Recaf™ (which is full-caffeine coffee with the extra caffeine that came out of all the decaf put in, along with a designer-drug amphetamine kick). Recaf™ gives you cancer. Also, even with 24 hour overtime, the time allocated for the project’s man-hours isn’t remotely sufficient.

Even more stuff: The project is complicated by competing sales staff. The first sales exec who sold the project wants the project to remain as sold. The second sales exec has seen a commission opportunity idf the project can be subverted in favour of another client.

More stuff than that, even: Plans change at the last minute as a third sales exec sells the product to another customer on condition of an “insignificant” change and then gets it authorised by higher management.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, Recaf™ rep, project manager, rival project manager, whining freelancer, deadbeat freelancer, lazy freelancer, sociopathic HR man, first sales exec, second sales exec, third sales exec.

Extras: Random office workers who drop dead of exhaustion at dramatically appropriate moments, health campaigners leafleting the offices.

What the Company wants: The Company wants the project finished by the deadline. If that means that people work themselves to death, that’s their problem. They probably didn’t have an adequate potential for profit anyway.

74 MSG™

Tangerine republicRationale: The Company has signed an historic agreement with a small independent republic. The state is a kleptocracy (look it up) and its parallel marketeer leaders have essentially gained Brand sponsorship for the state. Which means Brand logos on army uniforms, Brand cola as the definitive beverage in the corridors of power, ads on the sides of tanks and fighter planes, and that sort of thing.

The Reps get to visit the place and sign the deal.

More stuff: The kleptocrats saw the Company coming. The country has nothing. The army is a joke; the police force are a bunch of thugs (not that the Company police aren’t too, but at least they have training); the economy can’t actually support any market that could afford the advertised product, mainly because most of the reserve is inside the forty-foot-high solid gold statue of the kleptocrat-in-chief The place is a sinkhole for money. Move along, no profit here.

Even more stuff: No, wait, you can’t. The agreement’s been signed. The klep-tocrats are not the kind of people who take kindly to being found out, but realise that the Company could bomb them into the stone age.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, ebullient klepto-crat, sleazy kleptocrat, scary kleptocrat, kleptocrat-in-chief.

Extras: Republican army (twelve men, a World War II tank and a donkey), several mean-looking mobsters.

What the Company wants: If the Company finds out what the kleptocrats have done, it’s on the Reps. They carry the can for this one, and they’ll be expected to order the Company’s military might to mobilise and bomb the country — innocent and guilty, it doesn’t matter — into the stone age. And then blame the nation’s destruction on another country whose leaders haven’t signed any Brand agreements. Which will start a war. Wars are good for business.

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ReMotivation for life Rationale: The Company has noticed that many of its Freelancers and Assets complain about not getting enough time to spend with their families. So the Company proposes a solution: divorce your spouses, put your kids up for adoption. Failing that, the Company can always get rid of them for you.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, family members. Note that this Situation could mean the deaths of Reps’ iLoves and iHates.

Extras: Office staff, corporate heavies, happy workers who have already shed their families wheeled out to sell the idea.

What the Company wants: The Reps to get rid of their families. If they won’t do it, the Company might have to do it for them. Assets who don’t have families might have to get Neuterex™ Hygiene Empowerment Systems. Obviously, they want those. Why wouldn’t they?

Next big thingRationale: One of the small Company-sponsored independent gig venues (stay with us: since when has “independent” actually meant “independent”?) has been reporting a swift, huge increase in ticket sales. The house band seems to have hit upon a new sound, a new youth cult and a new buzz. So the Reps have to get down there quicksmart and sign them. Before someone else does. And before the media break the phenomenon and make it public, so it ceases to be cool.

More stuff: Another record company in synergy with the Brand heard about the band and has sent their own A&R team.

Even more stuff: A&R these days involves extraction teams and guns and stuff.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, paranoid music company exec, ruthless music company exec, sociopathic music company exec, vastly influential style blogger, journalist.

Extras: Extraction team members, vast numbers of self-satisfied hipsters.

What the Company wants: The Company wants the band to be theirs and cool, or theirs and dead. Cool and alive is not an option. Unhip was never an option at all.

Selling out is the new black.

76 MSG™

Work like an EgyptianRationale: The Reps have to take part in a new Marketing project. They’re given a golden oppor-tunity to make money by recruiting people, who in turn recruit others. There’s a bit of a buy-in, though. Nothing the Reps can’t afford.

More stuff: Yeah, it’s a pyramid scam. And they’re stuck in the middle tier. Which means they are forcing the people on the tiers below into poverty but not actually getting any richer.

Even more stuff: The pyramid scam is the economic basis that supports the economy of the entire region where the Reps’ offices are situated. Several of the people on the tier below die in a freak gas explosion (sub-standard pipes? Surely not) and the Reps have to find family and friends to take their places.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, sociopathic HR man, friends, family and enemies of the Reps, guerilla economist.

Extras: Disaster victims, disaster victims’ grieving families, endless parades of suckers.

What the Company wants: The Company wants the scam to stay running, and for the Reps to pay more money into it.

Make it a bit more pertRationale: The Reps have to create and research a new product marketing strategy. Except that management are involved in the process, and keep adding different, contradictory and stupid require-ments to the spec.

More stuff: Some of the managers are doing it deliberately in order to undermine each other.

Even more stuff: The product is something vital. Something that will save lives. Like a new design for a stop sign or something like that.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, whining free-lancer, deadbeat freelancer, lazy freelancer, designer, marketing consultant, another marketing consultant, product design consultant.

True story

So for a while, Wood was the in-house writer and publicity designer for this one-horse business software firm.

The Boss calls him in. They’re getting ready the new brochure for the upgrade and he has some ideas for the design. In short, he wants the cover to have a flowchart on it.

Sorry? A flowchart? Are you insane?

And he wants it to look like a breast.

Wood forgets his response, but it went something along the lines of: For a second there, I thought you said you wanted it to look like a breast.

Yes, says the boss, a breast. Like on a lady. With a voluptuous curve here and a fulsome curve here and a pointy bit here. With aspects of the software written on the arrows.

Wood is somewhat direct in my expression of what I think of this.

The boss tells Wood that sex sells. And that he is selling to people who own factories.

Wood spends the next week trying to make the flowchart look artistic and stuff… and not look much like a breast. After about three days of trying to compromise, the Boss (who shall forever after in Wood’s mind be Mr. Breast) comes in and looks over Wood’s shoulder, and says, “Can’t you make it a bit more pert?”

Wood is now freelance.

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Extras: Sundry office workers.

What the Company wants: Something that makes money.

Pretty vacantRationale: A permanent — pension, health benefits, holidays, everything — job opens up when a management stalwart dies of a heart attack. The Reps have to manage the interviews (so they’re unable by contract to apply, dammit). And you know what that means? They have to keep the shortlisted applicants holed up in a safehouse, while they manage the interviews.

More stuff: The Reps have to keep the shortlisted interviewees alive as waves of disgruntled failed applicants try to find them and kill them between interviews.

Even more stuff: They also have to stop the shortlisted applicants killing each other.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, three shortlisted applicants, failed applicant trying to get in and kill the shortlisted applicants disguised as a tea lady.

Extras: Failed applicants with suicide bombs, failed applicants with guns, innocent postal employees.

What the Company wants: Someone to fill the post without having to go to the expense of advertising the position again.

Face offRationale: The Reps appeared, inadvertently, on a commercial for a well-known branded snack food. Without their knowledge or permission, a contractor for the Company now has the rights to their likenesses.

More stuff: The Reps did something off-message. The Company wants the Reps’ faces. Their actual faces. Decapitation works best...

Even more stuff: ...but the Reps have two much commercial potential for simple execution. In fact, if they’re really convincing, the Company might let them have replacements. They won’t be very good replacements. And the joins are pretty hard to hide...

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, copyright lawyer, copyright lawyer with a scalpel, marketing exec for the snack food company, sinister and overly enthusiastic plastic surgeon.

What the Company wants: The Company wants its intellectual property rights protected. No, that’s really it.

78 MSG™

No recallRationale: Here’s a product. The Company put it out on the streets without properly testing it. Turns out it’s lethal. Horribly, painfully so (we don’t know how — maybe it just explodes when you plug it in, or maybe it exudes hyper-toxic nerve gases if you leave it in the sun, or maybe it suffers from digital interference which causes it to inadvertently transmit hypnotic signals that make people kill themselves. Depends on the product, really).

The Reps have to investigate the situation and organise a recall.

More stuff: The time-honoured rules for product recalls depend up on a simple mathematical question. To wit: will the amount of money the Company will have to pay to settle out of court with the families of all those people mangled by the product and to hire assassins to take out whistle-blowers and consumer activists be more than the cost of a recall? If it does cost more, you do a recall. If it doesn’t, you don’t, and you let people die.

So. Will a recall be cost-effective?

Even more stuff: Nope.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, nosy consumer activist, journalist, marketing man, litigation lawyer, product design consultant.

Extras: Families of victims, consumer liaison team (AKA heavily armed death squad).

What the Company wants: The cheapest way out.

Accurate is second to awesomeRationale: The Reps get involved with the business management of a movie. It’s an historical biopic (or maybe a superhero movie), and because of the script-by-committee process, it’s hilariously inaccurate. So far, so Hollywood. So what?

Well, the director and three of the stars have gone rogue, because their “vision is being compromised” and have taken the producer, the executive producer and four of the scriptwriters hostage, at gunpoint.

The Reps had better negotiate the situation, then.

More stuff: The director shoots one of the scriptwriters in the head in plain sight. He means business. Give him art or give him death.

Even more stuff: The executive producer and producer are shareholders.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, film mogul, film

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mogul’s PA, director, male lead, female lead, last year’s best supporting actor, producer, executive producer, scriptwriter, another scriptwriter, yet another scriptwriter.

Extras: Rentapolice besieging the studio lot.

What the Company wants: Who cares about a bunch of scriptwriters? If it was just them, the Company would just bomb the place and be done with it. But the executive producer and the producer are both shareholders, and if they die, the Company’s shares fall in the market. Also, they have a pile of dirt on most of their colleagues which all comes out on the net if they cop it. And there’s the fact that if they die, two permanent posts become vacant and a couple of scummy freelancers will have to fill their positions. No one wants that.

Customer serviceRationale: An outsourced callcentre in some country suitably distant from its market is failing to meet its targets. Not in customer satisfaction, duh — no, in the number of calls taken, call time and

More stuff: The Reps have a number of efficiency consultants with them, each of whom has various ideas about the best way to improve the callcentre’s stats: brainwashing, drugs, electric shocks when calls go too long, implanted catheters to offset toilet breaks, implanted phone mics... Most of these inno-vations could be thought of as human rights violations, but the callcentre’s in an economic protection zone, so anything goes.

Supporting cast: Manager to whom the Reps must report, ice-cold efficiency consultant, chummy yet insincere efficiency consultant, threatening effi-ciency consultant, callcentre manager.

Extras: Hundreds of permatemp callcentre employees who die of exh austion and efficency innovations.

What the Company wants: Make the place efficient. Human rights are not a factor in this .If the callcentre fails, the Company massacres the employees.

80 MSG™

Appendix: SpamNamesYou’re going to work your way through a lot of supporting cast, and sometimes thinking up names for them can be hard work. This is where the magic of the spam folder comes in. Just take a note of the fake sender names you get before you flush out the crap from the folder. Here’s some sender names from Wood’s spam folder, taken from the folder over the space of a couple of weeks, just to keep you going. Some might be more attractive to you than others. It depends on how over-the-top you want your game to be. And yeah, we know that some of these aren’t really names as such. But wouldn’t it be brilliant if they were?

Dante Abbot

Abelard Abner

Bronsard Advantage

Abena Ainsworth

Aldo

Abbey Alvarez

Sammartano Altieri

Hamlet Amar

Foss Ambrose

Ephrem Angus

Clement Anis

Hendrik Ann-Mari

Alicia P. Archenemy

Celeste Ashley

Wilford Ashley

Julia Avery

Abigail Baldwin

Abdullah Ballard

Pia Banartsev

Abe Banks

Salin Bank

Abbey Barker

Alfred Barnes

Adan Bart

Abby Bates

Earnestine Benoit

Donnie Bettie

Jasper Birgetta

Donna Blevins

Allie Bradley

Holden Brent

Monica Brewer

Alasdair Brooks

Aleksandrs Brown

Aisha Brunner

Allan Burgess

Bil Cadweld

Abelard Cain

Aguistin Cain

Hewe Caleb

Freddie J. Carlson

Jesse Cassidy

Farquharson Catalli

Alexander Chambers

Alf Charlott

Soter Cieszynski

Dickie Clancy

Colver Clarisa

Colby Clinton

Trina Coley

Ab Colon

Marge Connolly

Ced Constant

Abran Cooper

Romy Cope

Hamil Corny

Allen Cortez

Norberto Cotton

Carolyn Crandall

Abbey Crenshaw

Valeria H. Cullen

Margery Culver

Jared Cunningham

Alasteir Curtis

Geoff Damian

Alexandre Daniel

Alan Dante

Bela Darren

Abdul Davison

Grandner Delrossi

Dion Dempsey

Arlan Dina

Noreen Eason

Cirilo Eginhard

Dwaine Elmira

Mandy Farr

Myles Faulkner

Sydney Gardy

Jess Garp

Geoffrey George

Jeno Godfrey

Penny Gregg

Darla Haas

Amerigo Harmon

Jeffrey Hatcher

Jorgen Hauhua

Pedro Hicks

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Howard Hill

Donal Hillary

Garrard Hoang

Lorrie R. Hope

Depoyster Houlton

Edmund Hubbard

Frank Humph

Etta Hurd

Jamil Hywel

Jeth Ishmael

Bengt Jarvis

Jacques Je

Simoni Jeroen

Dennie Jianwen

Jose Jiann-Yi

Jere Juliana

Jonathan Kelsey

Cosimo Kenneth

Sasha Kerr

Elwin Khayroll

Daniel Kimberley

Robers Konicek

Abbye Kramer

Early Kwang

Lonnie Laban

Diana Lake

Miss Leitten

Ronnie Lindsey

Jocelyn Lockwood

Randy Lopez

Garvy Loretta

Tameka Madrid

Baxie Marc-Pau

Lee Marge

Fraser Marius

Booth Mazin

Shawna Messer

Cam Mihail

Lois Milham

Ferd Ming-Tzo

Zogopoulos Mongeon

Jimmy Morris

Harold Morse

Hiram Moses

Massouma Al Mubarak

Selena Munson

Chaddy Narendra

Graham Nikhil

Cecilius Nobuko

Alfredo Oscar

Mable Parrish

Ryan Pharmacy

Dame Poh

Suzette Pendleton

Reuben Perdue

Delores Pugh

Daffy Rachol

Kraig Raghu

Farley Ramaswami

Isidro Randolph

Sunday Richart

Blanca Richter

Aharon Rivi

Abbye Robles

William X. Rock

Geordie Rod

Terra Romero

Hanna Roth

Baxy Ruth

Basil Sammy

David Samuels

Sherman A. Santos

Giacomo Schroede

Jonah Sea

Javier Seals

Marian Shelton

Chanel Shoes

Giffard Shun

Wilson Simms

Oleta Shields

Aaren Smart

Muggeo Spanski

Collin Spence

Earl Spiros

Althea Stahl

Bartholomew Stamos

Reed Story

Alana Swift

Dina Sylvester

Deck Tahashi

Alexander Technique

Cesar Thierry

Hartley Timothy

Baxy Ting-Tin

Flinn Tjahjadi

Gaston Tod

Jeremie Troy

Tequilla 25

Christine Velazquez

Burlie Venkates

Rosanna Vickers

Julia Walter

Joachin Warren

Srivatsan Wells

Alair Whey

Brooks Whitney

Edwardo Wynn

Lenci Xueqing

Bartnett Zellmer

82 MSG™

MSG™ for dummiesMaking Reps (page 7)Name your Rep (page 7)Decide how old she is, and where she comes from.

Choose your Rep’s Status (page 8)

Asset (Expertise in IT Solutions) or Freelancer (Expertise in Marketing)

Choose two more Expertises (page 9)

Accounts, Business Stabilisation Solutions , Executive Management, Finance, IT Solutions, Healthcare, HR, Law Enforcement, Legal and Litigation, Marketing, Mergers and Acquisitions, Parallel Markets, Personal Assistant, Professional Services, Sales and Business Development, Security Solutions, or something else.

Create Relationships (page 9)

one iLove, two iHates, one Secret Tragedy.

Add a USP (page 11)

Assign Points (page 13)

11, 15, or 19 points in Compassion and Self.

Making the Brand (page14)Decide on a Brand name and identity (page 15)

Each player picks one Brand Value (page 15)

Affluence, Comfort, Creativity, Edginess, Efficiency, Excellence, Family, The Future, Growth, Hipness, Hope, Hygiene, Maturity, Nostalgia, Passion, Romance, Sex Appeal, Simplicity, Speed, Success, Trust, Winning, Value, Youth, something else.

Assign a Company Resource Pool (page 16)

The Company gets points equal to the total of all Reps’ Resource pools.

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Bidding to be the Company (page 18)• The first player bids one point from one Resource. Everyone else outbids or concedes until a winner comes out. Repeat auctions until everyone knows what order they’re going to takeover the Company.

• Every winner pays the points they bid into the Company Resource pool. The player who goes first puts his Rep to one side and takes over the Company’s Resource pool. He’s now the Company.

• The Company gets back one-fifth of all winnings (page 20).

Situations (page 21)• The Company player names the supporting cast as they’re introduced.

• The Company can introduce Reps’ iLoves and iHates as supporting cast, but only if the Reps’ players haven’t intro-duced them into the Situation first.

• The Company picks one of the Supporting Cast as Spokesperson.

Gathering Soap (page 24)• Introducing an iLove or iHate: one point each (but only if the Company hasn’t done it first).

• Tying in My Secret Tragedy: two points.

• Bringing in Expertises: one point each.

• Mentioning a USP: one point.

• Justifying actions according to Brand Values: one point per Brand Value.

• Creating a TLA (once per situation): one point.

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Extras and supporting cast (page 28)• Extras can die at any time without consequence (page 28).

• Supporting cast can only be Risked as part of the stakes of the Situation (page 29, exception: “getting away with murder”, page 56).

• The lives of iLoves and iHates can only be risked if the Company has co-opted them into the supporting cast (page 29).

• If your Rep loses an iLove, you get a new Secret Tragedy (page 29).

• Making new iLoves and iHates from supporting cast is possible with a Risk in which you use all Soap gained in the course of the Situation (page 29).

Risks (page 29)Reps Risk at least one point from either Compassion or Self, plus Soap.

The Company Risks from the Company Resource pool.

Results (page 32)

• Both sides discard the points they Risked.

• The winner receives back the same number of Resources the loser Risked.

• If the Company wins, he only gets back the Resources the Rep Risked, and not the Soap.

Helping (page 32)

• Reps who are helping out in a Risk must either take Resource points from the same Resource the main Rep is using, or only use Soap. The two Risks count as one pooled Risk.

• A player can’t Risk more points in any one Resource than she had at the start of the Situation.

• The outnumbered player must beat the total points bid.

• If the teamed-up players win, they all get what the loser bid, but not the Soap.

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Bail-Outs (page 33)

• Call for a Bail-Out when the Company has 10 or fewer Resource points left.

• Each player can choose one or two more new Brand Values for the Company.

• Every new Brand Value adds three points to the Company’s Resources pool.

• In the next situation, the Company cannot use more than 10 points on any one Risk.

Optional RulesGambling the Market (page 38)

• The Company secretly chooses one to three dice, and rolls them blind.

• The Company and the Reps bid Resources to win bonus Resources shown on the dice.

• If the Company wins, the total points go into the Company Resource pool.

• If a Rep wins, whole dice must be assigned to Resource pools: one die to one Resource, one die to either Resource, or two dice in one Resource and one in the other.

• A Rep can use one iLove or one Expertise to find out how many dice were rolled, or both to peek under the cup.

Freelance Perks (page 56)

• Cheat outrageously, get away with murder

• Cost one point from Compassion to use.

Asset Perks (page 62)

• Edit your memory, change the facts to suit you

• Cost one point from Self to use.

MSG™ Official Rep Record

Compassion

Representative Name

Freelancer/Asset (delete as applicable)

Expertises:

USP:

Relationships

(iLoves) (Notes)

(iHates) (Notes)

(My Secret Tragedy)

Player

MSG™ ©2008,2009 Howard David Ingham. Permission given to photocopy for personal use only.

Self

MSG™ Company Record

Brand Values

Supporting Cast

(Name) (Notes)

Resources

Brand Name

MSG™ ©2008,2009 Howard David Ingham. Permission given to photocopy for personal use only.

88 MSG™

Wood Ingham is a freelance writer, illustrator and editor. He writes for The Big Issue

and is editor of SCM’s Movement magazine. In the games industry, his work has appeared in The Black Seal, Worlds of Cthulhu, and over thirty titles for White Wolf.

Becky Lowe is an activist and journalist working in local

media.

Benjamin Baugh is the mind behind Monsters and other

Childish Things, The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor,

and Don’t Lose Your Mind. His work has also appeared in several supplements for White Wolf’s Vampire: the Requiem

role-playing game.