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Brinkmanship and the process of narrative design

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Brinkmanship and the process of narrative design

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Content BRINKMANSHIP
and the Process of Narrative Design
by James Stine
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA)
May 2024
Copyright © 2024 James Stine

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my incredible team, Grace Mei Ng, Shannon Kilbride, Yuhao
Chen, Chuke Zhao, Sadhana Ramani, Xander Beaky, Dora Tsai, Jason Le, Milo
Gorry-Hines, Steven Goehrig, Molly Mullen, Jackson Lao, Celine Tang, Helena Chung,
Samhi Mitra, Megan Chow, Z Luo, Brendan Julian, Tomas Ortola, Anna Cooley, and
above all my partner in crime and in life, Fiona Gorry-Hines.
In addition to those fine developers, I have to thank our voice actors, Ryan X.
Messcher, Christopher Bowels, Henry Masin, Carolyn Graber, Bea Barett, and Kathy
Zerlin for their incredible performances.
I would also like to thank Sean Bouchard for his ability to find the signal in the
noise of my ramblings over the past year. Thank you to TreaAndrea Russworm for
helping me understand the broader concepts in Brinkmanship that even I was unaware
of. A huge thank you to Laird Malamed and especially Martzi Campos for their
guidance through this complicated, emotional process.
Thank you above all to my parents, Robert and Sharon Stine, for encouraging
and enabling me to make and study video games.
And thank you to all of my fellow classmates, without you I would not only be
very alone, but very lost indeed.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................ ii
List of Figures................................................................................................................ iv
Abstract........................................................................................................................... v
1. Introduction................................................................................................................. 1
2. Conceptual Scope...................................................................................................... 2
3. Genre........................................................................................................................... 4
3.1. First-Person.......................................................................................................... 4
3.2. Science-Fiction Mystery-Thriller...........................................................................8
4. Plot Summary.............................................................................................................. 9
5. Process...................................................................................................................... 11
5.1. Prior Art.............................................................................................................. 11
5.2. The Void and What Follows................................................................................ 14
5.3. Designing the Confrontation on the Bridge........................................................16
6. Conclusion.................................................................................................................24
6.1. Exploration of Themes....................................................................................... 24
6.2. Next Time........................................................................................................... 25
Bibliography.................................................................................................................. 27
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List of Figures
1. Drawing the gun for the first time.......................................................................... 6
2. The “void space”................................................................................................. 14
3. The bridge of The Brink....................................................................................... 16
4. The argument/tension matrix............................................................................... 18
5. The bridge scene’s high-level flow chart............................................................. 19
6. The bridge scene’s first question........................................................................ 20
7. The midpoint node along the blackmail track..................................................... 21
8. Excerpt from the game’s script........................................................................... 22
9. The story graph for Brinkmanship’s final scene................................................... 23
iv

Abstract
In this paper, I will discuss the development process of my MFA thesis project, a
video game called Brinkmanship. Brinkmanship is a first-person, science-fiction,
mystery-thriller. In detail, I will break down exactly how each of those descriptors
affected our development approach, one that leaned into genre conventions in order to
find more room for developing novel mechanics narrative design mechanics. The core
development conflict I unpack is that between creating engaging gameplay and telling
a compelling story.
I will then walk through my narrative design process for tackling the game’s big
finale, a confrontation with the ship’s captain on the bridge. In this section I will cover
the challenges inherent in writing branching dialogue and how I dealt with them in the
game. Alongside balancing the dialogue itself, I will discuss how we integrate gameplay
into this sequence.
In my conclusion I will discuss the overall success of the game itself and how I
might adapt my strategies on future projects.
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1. Introduction
Making a video game is a very difficult thing to do. The name of the medium
alone requires one to create something that only moves, but that is a game as
well—something that can be played, touched, changed by someone who had nothing
to do with how the game was made. While there are genres, conventions, shorthands,
and so on, the way in which we make games, the very tools themselves, change year
over year, month over month, sometimes even day over day. My time in games
education has reflected that dynamism; every program I’ve been a student or educator
in has changed dramatically while I’ve been there. Courses, and sometimes entire
degree programs, come and go at an alarming rate, and even then it’s impossible to
keep up with this art form.
Telling a compelling story, as it turns out, is also very challenging. In contrast
with video games, storytelling is among the oldest art forms, but despite its age it
continues to change and evolve today. The history of the form brings to bear
innumerable considerations when it comes to crafting something interesting, unique, or
even simply entertaining for an audience spoiled for choice. To be so bold, then, as to
attempt to not only make an engaging video game, but to tell a compelling story at the
same time? Well you’d be asking for trouble, and indeed I have found plenty during the
development of my master’s thesis, Brinkmanship. With this paper, however, my aim is
to dissect the narrative design process with regard to Brinkmanship and cover some of
the broader concepts that helped guide me along the way and how successful their
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guidance ended up being. Two of those concepts are conceptual scope and genre. By
leveraging each, I feel we’ve made something we can be proud of.
Broadly speaking, the story of Brinkmanship is about a colony ship on its way to
develop a planet that gets hijacked by its own captain to benefit a massive corporation.
To break it down further, the game is a first-person science-fiction mystery-thriller—and
yes, each of those classifications is important to the game’s identity. By limiting the
conceptual scope of the game as much as possible, and relying on genre conventions
(as described by the hyphens), my theory was that we would have more time to focus
on the task of fusing gameplay and storytelling. Our first tool, one that we need to use
when we first begin to daydream about what we might make, is something I call
“conceptual scope”.
2. Conceptual Scope
Conceptual scope essentially relates to how novel a game is. I’m sure there are
many other names for this relationship, but for my purposes as a designer, I find it
crucial to keep in mind how much additional work (scope) is required to execute on an
idea (concept) that has never been done before, and so the phrase is one I keep handy.
Given the difficulty of making a game and telling a story at the same time, one must be
very deliberate with how much additional work they take on. To provide a couple
examples, an annualized sports game, such as the Madden NFL franchise, has a very
tight conceptual scope because the game is not only the next in a long line of similar
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games but of course is based on a sport with which the game’s audience will be very
familiar. Keeping conceptual scope small for these games is crucial because they must
be made very quickly and require a high production value on par with previous entries.
On the other hand, a game like Hempuli Oy’s Baba Is You, has a relatively large
conceptual scope because it’s a puzzle game with unique mechanics; not only do the
designers have to figure out how to design and develop something new, but they have
to consider how to teach players to wrap their heads around it. To counter that scope,
the game has a very simple art style and input mechanics. Put another way, the more
unknown quantities a game idea has, the larger its conceptual scope.
As a more personal example, the idea of conceptual scope itself became clear
to me while trying to figure out why making my undergraduate thesis, Jimi Stine’s
Zapper, was taking so much longer than expected. Zapper is a self-proclaimed
“post-post-modern” game. If games like The Beginner’s Guide are reacting to the idea
of making games, Zapper is reacting to that reaction. It seemed like a fun idea for a
game, but what we didn’t consider was that the conceptual scope for that kind of
piece was substantial; we had very little to base our work on, and finding answers to
our design problems was very difficult (not to mention that our game development
skills were themselves very limited). Because of those challenges, while the game was
published, it was never quite as finished as we would have liked. If there’s one thing to
remember about conceptual scope, it’s that as it gets bigger, the workload required to
handle it grows exponentially. With that experience in mind, Brinkmanship has the
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smallest conceptual scope I feel we could get away with by relying heavily on genre
conventions to lay the foundation for the game’s world and gameplay.
3. Genre
3.1. First-Person
As mentioned earlier, Brinkmanship is a first-person science-fiction
mystery-thriller. If we are to make informed decisions about the mechanics of the
game, we need to understand the type of story we’re trying to tell, and the ludic
context in which that story exists. Each of these genres is doing a lot of heavy lifting, so
let's break each of them down a bit. One of the decisions that narrowed down the
conceptual scope of Brinkmanship the most was making it a first-person game. Don’t
get me wrong, there are plenty of first-person games with massive conceptual scope
(Portal, The Witness, etc.), but for our purposes, going first-person allowed us to create
a game with input controls many gamers are already very familiar with. What’s more,
our game engine, Unity, has a very robust first-person character controller template
that we have taken full advantage of. On the other hand, overcoming some of the
assumptions players make about Brinkmanship when they realize it’s a first-person
shooter (FPS) is one of the biggest additions to our conceptual scope.
The way we decided to integrate first-person, and specifically first-person
shooter, mechanics into Brinkmanship took advantage of both story and gameplay. To
take a brief step back, I’d like to acknowledge the emotional and cognitive exercise
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many gamers perform when playing violent games, and especially those that involve
firearms. While I abhor gun violence in the real world, shooter games nevertheless are
my most played genre by a fair margin. I think it’s safe to say that most other people
who play these games find themselves in a similar situation. So when setting out to
develop a game that I myself would play (which is not something that can be said for
many other games I’ve made), I knew gunplay would be an element that would surely
draw me in. The challenge then became figuring out how to make a game that involves
guns and shooting while acknowledging the seriousness of those elements. To do so I
wanted to tell a very specific story, one in which the gun itself is a character. This is not
a game about war—there is, in fact, just one gun in the game, and that gun will only
ever have as many as six bullets in it. When incorporating the gun into the game
mechanically, the narrative team and I were focused on making it feel scary and
powerful and the use of the firearm deliberate.
In most games, it’s typical to have a weapon ready at all times, even when
conversing in otherwise totally benign situations. Mechanically, there might be a
difference between having a weapon drawn or keeping it holstered, but it’s typically
quite easy to keep a weapon out and forget about it. In games that are a bit more
sensitive to the presence of a weapon, they’ll prevent you from using it at all in certain
situations, or at least make sure that you have it put away when entering a given space
in order to have its reveal carry a certain amount of narrative weight. CD Projekt Red’s
Cyberpunk 2077, for example, features five “tiers” of gameplay where the first tier is the
most weapons free and gameplay-oriented, and the fifth is the most restrictive and
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cutscene-oriented (Story Mode, 24:20). Tiers in between can be used to allow player
agency while preventing them from performing certain actions like shooting a major
character. In Brinkmanship, we have just one tier of gameplay, and you can draw your
weapon whenever you want. However, doing so will always elicit a reaction from
anyone who can see you. Again, there are no other firearms on the ship, and at every
step of development we tried to remind ourselves just how scary it would be to see
someone pull a gun at all, let alone fire it aboard a pressurized metal vessel. In order to
make sure players felt that they were using the gun deliberately, we decided that if you
want to keep the gun drawn, you have to keep your finger on the key or mouse button
you used to draw it. If they let go of that key, after a brief moment, Kase will lower the
gun. In this way, players are always physically reminded of the gun’s presence in a
scene, and just like the player character, must exert physical effort in order to keep the
gun raised.
Figure 1. Drawing the gun for the first time
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Our gun draw mechanic is probably where we take the biggest leap with regard
to conceptual scope. But using this mechanic was integral to telling the story properly,
so the additional work needed to develop and teach it felt more than worthwhile. Part
of that teaching process was to find additional ways to eschew traditional FPS
mechanics. In early playtests we experienced an understandable phenomenon where
players would immediately use all the ammo in the gun as soon as they got it. In a
game where each bullet is a precious and very limited resource (not to mention that
discharging the gun is intended to be a very important moment whenever it happens),
we had to make sure players thought twice before squeezing off a round. To achieve
this, in addition to the gun draw mechanic, we have dialed up the intensity of firing the
gun as much as we reasonably can. In most games with guns, you’ll be shooting them
a lot, and because of that frequency, the designers have to restrain the sounds, visuals,
and so on of the gunfire lest it completely overwhelm the player. In Brinkmanship we
have no such worry, so whenever you shoot the gun, it is loud—loud enough to cause
ringing in the player character’s ears for several seconds. Combined with screenshake,
visual effects, and an aside by the player character himself, we’ve been able to more
effectively communicate the gravity of using a deadly weapon in an enclosed space.
Back on the story side, your parents, who give you the gun, go to great lengths
to emphasize its danger and how it ought to be used. By reinforcing the game’s
mechanics with its story, the process becomes cyclical, where we further enhance the
story every time the player engages with that mechanic. Every time you shoot the gun
in Brinkmanship you are reminded that what you’ve done is something serious in the
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story-world we’ve created. The foundations for that story world are in three genres,
science-fiction, mysteries, and thrillers.
3.2. Science-Fiction Mystery-Thriller
In The Anatomy of Genres, John Truby describes science-fiction as a genre
“concerned with how to create society, and in particular, how to create a better
society.” (Truby, 201) Later, as he begins to describe the crime genres (including
mysteries and thrillers), he explains that the reason crime follows or builds on
science-fiction is that, “If Science Fiction is about creating society, Crime is about
upholding laws upon which the society is based.” (Truby, 249) Brinkmanship is a game
about a colony ship on its way to establish a new society that gets hijacked by its own
captain to benefit a corporation. The human race is not on the brink of destruction, the
galaxy isn’t under threat of an alien incursion or fascist takeover. If you fail, it’s not the
end of the world, but rather the prevention of a world’s beginning. Situating the game in
this interstitial space between the world you left behind and the world you’ve yet to
create means that the nature of what a crime could be is pretty flexible because the
laws in play would be only those on the ship itself. While on a larger scale than a film
like Alien, with Brinkmanship I am similarly interested in the ways in which corporations
might take advantage of that gray area along with the distances and dangers space
travel entails. Of course, while I knew I wanted to operate within these genres, the ways
in which the game manifests the themes inherent to them did not come into focus right
away. Before we dive into the details of the game’s themes, it will be helpful to provide
a summary of Brinkmanship’s plot as well as some of its inspirations.
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4. Plot Summary
In Brinkmanship, the player takes on the role of a Navigational Assistant in
Training (NAT), a twenty year old named Kase Rego who was born on the ship—The
Brink—in its first year of travel. In the game’s opening moments, Kase discovers that
the ship has mysteriously and covertly changed course, and is no longer heading to its
original destination, the undeveloped exoplanet of Soldacia. Instead, the ship is bound
for an unknown region not on any maps Kase has access to. What’s more, the ship is
about to perform a gravity slingshot around a star, and its approach angle will
dramatically affect its course. If he can’t update the heading before it's too late, the
ship will never be able to go back to Soldacia. The goal of the game, then, is to figure
out who changed the heading and why. As you begin talking to various characters, you
discover that it is almost certainly the captain that is behind everything, additional
digging will uncover how and why he was convinced to alter the ship’s course. This is
where we see the weight of interstellar corporations being thrown around. The
captain’s sister, Sone, is the head of recruitment for a rival exoplanet development firm,
and she’s in a tough situation. The planet her firm owns, Trado, is not as interesting a
prospect as initial surveys suggested, and they’re having a hard time persuading
colonists to settle there. With a planet-sized investment on the line, Sone forges
reports that make it seem like Soldacia was hit by a meteor, covering the planet in ash
and fire. Conveniently, The Brink’s scanning equipment was damaged years ago, and
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the meteor made impact not long after. Over a year of back and forth, she’s able to
manipulate the captain into thinking that taking your ship to Trado is the right thing to
do. Oh, and not that the captain really cares about this, but the settlement agreement
on Trado also compensates captains much more agreeably, especially when it comes
to their personal land allotment. As the captain’s sister, Sone knows all too well that
Cyrus will want to do what’s best for the ship, and that if he’s able to rebuild their family
name through terraforming at the same time, even better. Cyrus and Sone’s family, the
Typhes, were big agricultural developers in Kase’s system of origin, and they played a
substantial part in lobbying for monocrops. These crops then failed so spectacularly
that many people thought traveling to a planet twenty years away would be a better
fate than staying put. With all or a portion of this information in hand, the player then
confronts Captain Typhe on the bridge of The Brink, using words and/or violence to get
their desired outcome.
It was important to us that our arch villain really felt like they were doing the right
thing…as long as they didn’t think about the facts of the situation too closely. Anything
less and it would be hard to believe that he would sell out not just his people, but
twenty years of his own life. The player may learn all, or almost none of the above. It all
depends on how they want to play the game. Because of this, the game can end in one
of three ways: the ship does not change its heading and goes to Trado, the ship does
change its heading and goes to Soldacia, or you begin the turning process too close to
the star, succumb to its gravity, and die along with everyone else onboard. On top of
these core endings, the state of the world can be different in many ways depending on
10

how you achieved, or didn’t achieve, your goal. Kase is armed, and there are ways to
turn the ship purely by waving the gun, or even shooting it, without killing people in
order to convince the captain or pilot to do as you say. Or perhaps you decide to get
brought in on the deal and force the captain to provide you half of his land allotment on
Trado… We then tie up these loose ends with a coda describing the outcomes via text.
The total number of permutations of that coda number in the dozens. While telling a
unified story end to end has plenty of merits, we wanted to reward players for as many
actions as possible, good or bad. Giving the player the option to make morally dubious
(or outright selfish) decisions means that Kase himself can be many different people
depending on how players resolve the game’s conflict. This freedom allows us to pull
on many different sources of inspiration from all across science fiction and crime
stories.
5. Process
5.1. Prior Art
The inspirations for this game reach across galaxies and wend through millenia.
The first note I have for Brinkmanship was written over two years ago and was just the
old title, “Ship of Fools” (which of course is now taken). I just thought it sounded cool.
About a year later are notes from a thought experiment that was something like
“combine the last two games you played, what’s the result?” Those two games were
Disco Elysium and Destiny 2—more on those two in a moment. Also around this time
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I’d just listened to an episode of the podcast Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford about
the Dunning Kruger effect in which the host uses the example of a plane hijacking gone
wrong. The hijackers wanted the plane to fly somewhere that it literally did not have the
fuel to go. But as the Dunning Kruger effect goes, the less intelligent you are, the less
aware you are of your own stupidity. These hijackers simply didn’t believe, or didn’t
want to believe, that the pilot was telling the truth. Thankfully, they were able to land
the plane safely somewhere else. Also around this time I’d just read Record of a
Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, which is all about life aboard a ship on which
thousands of people have lived for generations.
Putting all of those inspirations together creates the base of Brinkmanship’s
setting, central conflict, and gameplay. If a game is going to be mechanically
interesting on the gameplay side, as well as narratively interesting on the story side, the
two elements need to be designed alongside one another. Combining Disco Elysium
and Destiny 2 surfaces mostly in the overall gameplay. Destiny, an FPS, is the kind of
game I play, and Disco is the kind of game I find interesting. How then to make
something interesting that I actually want to play? I wanted to create a context in which
the player has free control to move and interact with things in space in an embodied
way (as opposed to being purely textual), while still telling an interesting story. Weaving
in gameplay, I also wanted to allow the player to radically change the way things
unfold, giving them the freedom to resolve the game’s conflict in as many ways as
possible.
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In addition to Record of a Spaceborn Few, the best comparison here on the
story-side is probably Alien. Alien is a very grounded sci-fi story that doesn’t need to
be about the end of the world to tell an interesting tale in a well-realized world. It
features a large corporation that puts profits above people; however, the traitor aboard
turns out to be programmed from the jump to prioritize capturing the alien over the
safety of the crew. While this reveal is incredible in the film, it wouldn’t really do to have
the captain of the ship in Brinkmanship be some kind of android—after all, it’s been
done before. Here we need someone competent and respected enough to helm this
massive ship, who somehow loses sight of things and genuinely thinks the right thing
to do is divert the ship to another planet. However, greed works as a motivation in Alien
in part because the timeline is such that a corporation stands to benefit from the job
within the span of a few months, but in Brinkmanship, the timeline spans decades. This
scale fundamentally contradicts the tendency of capitalist entities to focus on the short
term at the expense of the long. Alien helped me realize that we needed the overall
timeline of the conspiracy to be much shorter than the entire trip, and so the captain’s
sister reaching out late in the journey became the crux of the crime. Discovering this
information in the first two acts of the game is what I consider to be the mystery
portion of the game, and developing the gameplay while also trying to lay out a
sufficiently complicated conspiracy brought with it plenty of narrative design
challenges.
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5.2. The Void and What Follows
The investigative part of the game takes place in what we call the void
space—an abstract, almost dream-like rendition of The Brink’s interior. The star you’re
approaching looms large to serve as a reminder of the coming threat, as well as to
anchor the player in space. We don’t need to explain much of this because the game’s
title screen shows a ship in space, and most players have engaged with enough sci-fi
material to fill in the gaps on their own. In a similar fashion, the void’s dark tone and
lack of visual information suggests a certain seriousness that we’d like to elicit to
enhance the mystery aspect of the game. Again, by letting players bring their own
assumptions to bear, we can suggest a bigger, more complicated story world than
what we would otherwise have the time to create.
Figure 2. The “void space”
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The main reason for this direction, though it works well thematically, is to reduce
production scope. There would never have been enough time to create the inside of
this massive ship in any way that felt remotely believable. The void, then, serves to
abbreviate the spaces between points of interest where the player talks to various
characters. We underscore this idea by creating ambient audio layers that change
depending on who you’re close to, suggesting that not only are you outside someone’s
door, but potentially on a totally different deck of the ship; the engines are louder, the
reverb suggests a smaller space, there’s music playing from somewhere. To give the
player some frame of reference spatially, we add the star you’re approaching,
Surator-9, to the skybox. Surator additionally functions as a timer: the more time you
spend investigating, the bigger it gets, and the less time you’ll have on the bridge.
Again we find that a production constraint helps us further our narrative goals, as long
as we keep those goals in mind. When we then transition to the end of the game, on
the bridge of The Brink, we ditch the abstract qualities and make everything very real.
At this point the game shifts from mystery to thriller, and the overall intensity of the
experience reflects that. You see other people for the first time, the captain and pilot,
and Surator goes from a dim crimson to an incredibly bright orange-white.
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Figure 3. The bridge of The Brink
Your actions here carry much more immediate consequences. Because of the dramatic
difference between these two sections of the game, the overall writing style and
conversational mechanics in play change as well. That is to say, where the void is filled
with many small conversations and leads to pull on, the bridge scene is one big,
sprawling argument that can go in many different directions. Writing this argument was
one of the biggest challenges I faced during production, but it taught me a lot about
narrative design and writing branching dialogue.
5.3. Designing the Confrontation on the Bridge
The bridge sequence is Brinkmanship’s grand finale, the climax, and it embodies
much of what I set out to accomplish with the game overall. It’s in this moment where I
feel we best bring gameplay and story together. If there’s one regret I have when it
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comes to structure and scope, it’s not making this sequence the entirety (or
substantially more) of the game. The bridge is meant to be as rich and dynamic as
possible, with the scene breaking any number of ways depending on what you say and
do. The foundation supporting all that potential gameplay is the dialogue. Several key
challenges stood in the way of writing this scene: not knowing the details of what
comes before, trying to pay off any lead you might have been following, and my
resistance to giving it an obvious structure. I wanted this scene to be seamless,
organic, for players to be able to do whatever they want and have characters react
accordingly, changing the direction of the conversation at will.
Initial attempts at writing this sequence did not go well. Allowing the
conversation to balloon at an exponential pace simply wasn’t scalable, and to top it off,
we needed to be able to interrupt the flow of the conversation when the player draws
the gun, shoots it, kills someone, and so on, while still being able to have some control
over the flow of information. After a few months of circling around the problem I
admitted that some amount of structure was needed. In the end, I devised three
general strategies one might take to get their desired outcome in this scene: convincing
the captain and/or pilot that you must turn the ship through evidence, blackmailing the
captain and/or pilot into turning the ship or letting you in on their dealings (and thus not
turning the ship), or muscling your way through with threats and/or acts of violence. I
then compared these strategies against three possible levels of tension in the scene
which are triggered as follows: tier one is the base, tier two is activated when the gun is
drawn, and tier three is activated when the gun is fired. The result of this breakdown,
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and thinking the intersections through to their conclusions in this scene, looked like
this.
Figure 4. The argument/tension matrix
Once I began writing the scene, I realized that as soon as a character is killed,
we have to abandon the rest of the dialogue and follow a unique flow as it would
otherwise be difficult to make sure a character wasn’t speaking from beyond the grave
(something that happened a lot before adding this structure). The result is that there are
really two levels of tension, one at the start, and the second when the gun has been
pulled or shot non-lethally. Being able to understand the dynamics of the conversation
18

based on this matrix made formatting the conversation flowchart much easier, the only
two overall strategies that don’t work are to threaten violence without proving your
capacity to enact it, and enacting violence too readily before trying to win over your
opponents with logic. Mapping this out to a flowchart was the next step, and that chart
can be seen here.
Figure 5. The bridge scene’s high-level flow chart
In Figure 5, one can easily see three options after the first black node, these light blue,
green, and orange nodes represent the convince, blackmail, and violence tracks
respectively. Now, this kind of structure might seem to come across very clearly
in-game were we to label the options in the same manner, but thanks to the abstraction
of dialogue, that structure disappears. Below is the first question the player answers in
the bridge scene, and indeed each of those options begins the player down the
convince, blackmail, or violence track.
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Figure 6. The bridge scene’s first question
However, we wanted to make sure that players had plenty of opportunities to change
tactics mid scene, and we also wanted to make sure that the scene increased in
tension over time. We were able to achieve both of these goals by routing all
conversations back to one of three midpoint nodes which themselves might be
different depending on the tension level of the scene when the player gets there.
Because we know the player will always hit one of these nodes, we can pace the scene
accordingly by ramping up the intensity of the argument from that node on. In addition,
from each of these nodes the player has the option to swap tactics and begin pursuing
another tactic. Those options can be seen here and similarly represent the convince,
blackmail, and violence tracks in that order.
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Figure 7. The midpoint node along the blackmail track.
On a similar note to the matrix in Figure 4, we’ve largely abandoned nodes for
tension level three (seen in red in Figure 5) in the final game. The difference in tension
between pulling the gun and firing it without hitting anyone, though substantial, didn’t
really feel like it warranted writing up to three versions of the same beat in the
conversation. In the end, even the tension level two conditions are only really used in
situations where it felt like the presence of the gun couldn’t be ignored, as in the
following instance. Here we see the player taking the option of accusing the pilot and
captain of stealing meal rations. There is no evidence in the game supporting this
accusation, and if you haven't pulled the gun at this point, the jig is up. If you have
pulled the gun, however, the captain does not take action against you, and instead we
move the conversation along a little further.
21

Figure 8. Excerpt from the game’s script
In the end, despite all the structure I just outlined, the conversation still seems to flow
organically, moving from topic to topic until things come to a head. The resulting conversation
tree is annotated below.
22

Figure 9. The story graph for Brinkmanship’s final scene
In the above figure we see three sections. The first is similar to what we outlined
in the original flowchart with our three tactics through the conversation. The middle
section are the interruption nodes; these are the nodes, or dialogue, that play when the
player performs certain actions, be that raising, lowering, or shooting the gun. After
playing those nodes, the dialogue will flow back into the main nodes, potentially
altering the conversation depending on the action taken. At the top we then see the
character death nodes. These nodes play, surprise surprise, when you kill someone.
From these nodes we never resume the original flow because we’re now down a
character and the core nodes simply were not written in a way that could sustain
removing a third of the characters from the scene. Additionally, killing a character will
always up the tension of the scene to the extent that we have to wrap things up rather
23

quickly thereafter or risk coming too far down in intensity before the actual ending of
the scene. Putting this all together, while difficult, was still at least possible because of
the understanding of the game that we had come to later in production.
6. Conclusion
6.1. Exploration of Themes
Looking back at how the plot and world of the game came together I’ve realized
that what I’m really writing about is a lack of trust in those who are supposed to be
looking out for the wellbeing of everyone. This work is indeed very much about “how to
create a better society.” (Truby, 201) In a smaller society like that aboard The Brink,
where one might actually get to know the powers that be, it should be easier to have
more trust in leadership. What’s more, everyone aboard has the same goals, no one
could up and leave, and certainly no one would want the ship to hurtle into a star. As a
more down-to-earth example, when we get on a plane, we trust that it’s in the captain’s
best interest to get us to where we’re going. In most cases, we don’t even think twice
about it. The difference with Brinkmanship, and where it begins to align more closely
with my own experience, is that our protagonist, Kase, was born into a situation where
his life depended on the leadership of a handful of people he didn’t know, and who
certainly didn’t know about him. Our protagonist is trapped onboard a vessel as if on
an island with no hope of rescue. He has no choice but to trust that everything is going
according to plan and that the lessons he’s been taught about the ship’s journey, its
24

purpose, and its destination, are all true. As soon as the game begins, however, we see
that trust shattered, a wave of confusion and despair comes over him, and we launch
into the investigative portion of the game. To reflect this despair and dissolution of
trust, we create a stark contrast between the beginning of the game, the mystery, and
the scene on the bridge, the thriller.
6.2. Next Time
To lead the development of a game with either its mechanics or story runs the
risk of doing a disservice to whatever follows. In some cases that imbalance is totally
fine as a given game might prioritize one over the other. For my part, I would be remiss
to say we struck that balance 100% correctly. Overall, while Brinkmanship tells a
compelling narrative, I don’t know if I can say that it has totally gripping gameplay all
the way through. Nor am I sure that we take the story itself to the greatest genre
heights we could have taken it. To some extent, trying to tell a story and make a game
at the same time means you’re making two things at once, and if you’re working on a
tight schedule, the scope of the project itself should reflect that. While I intended to
keep our scope under control by relying on genre conventions in both the gameplay
and storytelling, we could have been more extreme on both of those fronts. When it
comes to doing something interesting by bucking those conventions, I should mention
here that our gun draw mechanic was originally meant to be representative of a more
cohesive design philosophy. That philosophy was to focus on mirroring the player
character’s actions with the player’s physical actions as with the gun draw. This
25

philosophy is an interesting one to explore, but we ultimately found it difficult to
incorporate additional mechanics in that vein in a timely fashion.
All that being said, as of this writing the game is not yet complete. While we are
quite close to finishing the experience, it is often in the last few weeks of a project at
this scale that the true image of what a game is comes into focus. Regardless of what
that image ends up being, I am still immensely proud of the game that my team and I
have put together. The learnings and processes described here will always remain
influential in my future work, enabling me to discover yet more challenges in the realm
of narrative design.
26

Bibliography
Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott, 20th Century-Fox, 1979.
Baba is You. Directed by Arvi Teikari, Hempuli, 2019. Microsoft Windows game.
Chambers, Becky. Record of a Spaceborn Few. Hodderscape, 2018.
Cyberpunk 2077. Directed by Adam Badowski, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and Gabriel
Amatangelo, CD Projekt Red / CD Projekt, 2020. Sony PlayStation 5 game.
Destiny 2. Bungie / Activision, 2017. Microsoft Windows game.
Disco Elysium. Directed by Robert Kurvitz, ZA/UM, 2019. Microsoft Windows game.
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating
Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2014.
Gee, James Paul. "Video Games and Embodiment." Games and Culture 3.3-4 (2008):
253-263.
Jimi Stine’s Zapper. Directed by Jimi Stine, 2018. WebGL game.
Madden NFL. EA Sports, 1988-2023.
Portal. Valve, 2007. Microsoft Windows game.
Story Mode. “Cyberpunk 2077 Devs Break Down First-Person Storytelling.” YouTube, 3
Dec. 2021, https://youtu.be/4cagVACQpf4?si=Uu5pDrfpKxlNUQqa
The Beginner’s Guide. Directed by Davey Wreden, Everything Unlimited, 2015.
Microsoft Windows game.
“The Dunning Kruger Hijack (and Other Criminally Stupid Acts).” Cautionary Tales with
Tim Harford from Pushkin Industries, 25 Mar. 2021,
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-dunning-kruger-hijack-andother-criminally-stupid-acts
27

The Witness. Directed by Jonathan Blow, Thekla, Inc, 2016. Microsoft Windows game.
Truby, John. The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World
Works. Picador, 2022.
28

Abstract (if available)

Abstract In this paper, I will discuss the development process of my MFA thesis project, a video game called Brinkmanship. Brinkmanship is a first-person, science-fiction, mystery-thriller. In detail, I will break down exactly how each of those descriptors affected our development approach, one that leaned into genre conventions in order to find more room for developing novel mechanics narrative design mechanics. The core development conflict I unpack is that between creating engaging gameplay and telling a compelling story.

I will then walk through my narrative design process for tackling the game’s big finale, a confrontation with the ship’s captain on the bridge. In this section I will cover the challenges inherent in writing branching dialogue and how I dealt with them in the game. Alongside balancing the dialogue itself, I will discuss how we integrate gameplay into this sequence.

In my conclusion I will discuss the overall success of the game itself and how I might adapt my strategies on future projects.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Stine, James Robert (author)

Core Title Brinkmanship and the process of narrative design

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 05/09/2024

Defense Date 05/07/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag branching narrative,game development,games,interactive,interactive fiction,interactivity,mystery,narrative design,OAI-PMH Harvest,science-fiction,Video,video games

Format theses (aat)

Language English

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Advisor Russworm, TreaAndrea (committee chair), Bouchard, Sean (committee member)

Creator Email jrstine@me.com,jstine@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113925211

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