Skip to content
← The Workbook

No. 38 · 2026Concept

Doublespeak

A role-playing game where the dungeon is your office. Pick a map (Creative Industry, HR, Sales, Tech, Finance), start at 0 HP and 0 XP, and try to survive the corporate manipulation game by leveling up Buzzword Resistance, Meeting Stamina, Side-Project Capital, Allies, and Receipts. Real-life-ish scenarios. Real-life damage types. Three endings. The discipline of not caring anymore as a permanent buff.

Status
Concept
Year
2026
Stack
Game · RPG · Career · Satire · Education · Interactive

The Idea

The corporate manipulation experience is already a game. People who can see it clearly are running a constant simulation in their head, calculating who said what, who's deflecting blame, who's stealing credit, who's setting them up for the post-mortem. Players who CAN'T see it just take damage and don't know why their HP is at zero by Friday.

Doublespeak makes the game explicit. RPG mechanics, real-life-ish scenarios, multiple maps. Start at 0 HP and 0 XP. Pick your industry. Survive long enough to find the exit you want.

Pick A Map

Each industry has its own dialect, its own NPC types, its own damage profile. v1 ships with a few maps; players can mod or contribute new ones over time.

  • Creative Industry, the home turf. Buzzword density very high. Currency is "vision." NPCs include the meeting-deck guy, the alignment driver, the senior creative who never opens a file, the producer who "circles back." Loot tier: portfolio pieces, name-drop credits, freelance leads.
  • HR / People Ops, fluent in coded language. Damage type: ambient. Boss fights are PIPs and reorgs. Allies are rare and high-leverage.
  • Sales, high HP regen, low real-work cost. Players coming from this map have an easier time on every other map. Performers' home turf.
  • Tech, split landscape. The IC track has different mechanics than the management track. Same buzzwords, different stakes.
  • Finance, pure number theater. The deck IS the work. Buzzword Resistance leveling is critical here.
  • Healthcare / Bio / Pharma, coded language about patients and outcomes; the political game runs underneath. Specialty damage: the "for the patients" gaslight.

Pick wrong and the difficulty curve is wrong. Most players don't realize they were on the wrong map until they switched.

The Stats

Starting values: 0 HP, 0 XP, 0 in everything. Day-one player. Earnest.

  • HP, morale, capacity to keep showing up. Drained by gaslighting, credit theft, blame deflection. Restored by sleep, real work shipped, time on a map you chose.
  • XP, time served + insight gained. Levels you up, unlocks moves.
  • Buzzword Resistance, how much "synergy" you can hear before you start losing HP. Trains by exposure plus reflection.
  • Meeting Stamina, capacity to sit in unwinnable meetings without bleeding HP. Most players burn this stat fast.
  • Side-Project Capital, public, mobile, durable proof of work that exists outside the company. Doubles as armor: high SPC means the political game has less hold on you.
  • Allies (count), known witnesses who can read your work clearly. Quality matters more than count. One real one beats six lukewarm ones.
  • Receipts, your log of who said what, when. Quietly accumulated. Activates as a defensive weapon when someone tries to rewrite history.

Damage Types

The catalog. Each named, each modeled, each with real-life-ish examples in the game.

  • Gaslighting damage ("I never said that," "you must be misremembering")
  • Credit theft damage (your work, their slide deck, their promotion)
  • Scope creep damage (the request that grows by 40% between meetings)
  • Blame deflection damage (the postmortem that ends pointed at you)
  • "Per our last conversation" damage (the cold-open passive-aggressive setup)
  • "Just to clarify" damage (the corrective framing in front of an audience)
  • "Let's take this offline" damage (the silencing move)
  • "Help me understand" damage (faux-curious setup before a hit)
  • Quarterly review damage (boss fight, recurring)
  • Layoff-season damage (random encounter, area-of-effect, ignores armor)

XP Sources

How you actually level up.

  • Insight XP, recognizing a manipulation tactic in real time. (Big multiplier for naming it correctly in your head before reacting.)
  • Receipts XP, sending the post-meeting summary email. Logging the decision. Time-stamping the agreement.
  • Leverage XP, negotiating an offer. The only window with actual leverage; players who skip it are leaving stat points on the table forever.
  • Witness XP, getting a one-line acknowledgment from a senior IC, architect, or former-engineer director. One per map is usually enough.
  • Real Work XP, shipping something objectively measurable. Hours saved, bugs killed, revenue moved, work that has a number on it.

Real-Life Boss Fights

The recurring scenarios. Each modeled as a dungeon with named NPCs and known mechanics.

  • The Quarterly Review. Boss has stacked deck advantage. Counter: months of weekly summary emails on file. Player who didn't log loses by default.
  • The Reorg. Random encounter. Map shifts under your feet. Players with high Side-Project Capital take less damage; players with no SPC sometimes take fatal damage.
  • The Promotion Cycle. Hidden mechanic: the decision was made before the calibration meeting. Counter: a year of receipts plus one ally in the room.
  • The Credit-Steal Boss. Specific NPC, varies by map. They take your work and bring it to senior leadership as theirs. Counter: the work was already legible to people who matter, with a paper trail. Damage absorbed before the fight starts.
  • The "Help Me Understand" Setup. Mid-meeting. Public framing. Counter: don't take the bait, send a written follow-up the same day. Refuses the audience, keeps the record.

The Three Endings

You don't beat the game. You exit it.

Ending A: The Cleric. Master enough of the language to be illegible-protected. You stay inside the system. You wear a pelt of titles. You survive indefinitely. The cost is you become part of the thing, measurable by the buzzwords you no longer notice using. Boring but effective. Most common ending.

Ending B: The Indie. Side-Project Capital matures. You go small. Five-person team or solo. The game becomes optional. Boss fights are project deadlines, not office politics. Income variance is higher. Sleep is better. Most builders who get out end up here.

Ending C: The Discipline. "I don't care anymore" reaches stat-cap. Permanent buff. The performers don't leave. You stop registering them. They orbit a center that is no longer you. This isn't an exit so much as a phase change. Rare. Possible.

A bad fourth ending exists: stay on the map, don't level up, don't exit. The game just keeps running. HP regen comes from weekend recovery only. Most players are in this loop and don't know it has the other three endings.

Why The Form

The lecture version of this exists everywhere. Books, blog posts, LinkedIn carousels written by performers selling performer-coaching with a softer cover. Engineers and designers don't read the lecture version. They build things. They play games.

The RPG framing makes the structural facts portable. Naming damage types makes them recognizable in the moment. Stats give players something to invest in that isn't titles. The map metaphor lets players see they were on the wrong map without having to call themselves wrong about anything.

The game is also funny. The rage is in there. The discipline is in there. Both stay where they belong.

Status

Concept. Could ship as:

  • A point-and-click web game with branching dialog (Twine-style, but better-looking)
  • A text-based scenario engine with the tactic catalog as the core dataset
  • A printable card game / boardgame
  • All three over time

The hard part is the writing, the scenarios, the tactic catalog, the per-map buzzword library, the named NPCs. None of it is technically blocking. A v1 with one map (Creative Industry) and twenty scenarios is a long-weekend build if the writing is ready.