Date of Award

7-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Game Design

Department

Game Design

First Advisor

Ben Fulcher

Second Advisor

Daniel Plate

Third Advisor

Geremy Carnes

Abstract

This thesis develops and tests a repair-centered framework for relationship mechanics in narrative games, positioned as an alternative to the affection-meter model that reduces relationships to a single accumulating score. Drawing on eudaimonic media research, relational repair theory, and interpretive-attribution research, the framework argues that meaningful relationship play depends on tracking multiple, potentially divergent relational dimensions; distinguishing repair attempts from repair outcomes; modeling interpretation of player actions rather than fixed action-to-effect mappings; and treating stable, non-restorative endings as legitimate outcomes rather than failure states. A comparative survey of five commercial games, Fallout 4, Tell Me Why, Life is Strange Remastered, Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut, and This War of Mine, tests these commitments against existing design practice and refines the framework around a concentrated, mostly linear structure supported by keyed variants and foldback rather than unconstrained branching. The framework was implemented as What We Left There, a complete Ren’Py narrative prototype that tracks five relationship axes, trust, warmth, boundary respect, motive intelligibility, and shared reality, resolving into one of four authored, non-hierarchical outcomes. A branch simulation across 200,000 playthroughs shows the resulting system to be reachable, distributionally sound, and sensitive to late-game choices without collapsing into a single approval score. The prototype’s claims are structural, grounded in the implemented build, script analysis, and simulation output rather than in player-experience data, which remains an open direction for future work. Taken together, the case-study survey and completed prototype show that a repair-centered relationship framework can be implemented as a complete, bounded narrative game whose mechanics support ambiguity, accountability, and trajectory without relying on affection-meter design.

Research Highlights

  • The Problem: Conventional video game relationship systems rely on affection meters that reduce social dynamics to a single approval score, forcing players to approach relationships as optimization puzzles rather than negotiations defined by accountability and consequence.

  • The Method: The researcher established a repair-centered framework based on eudaimonic media research and relational repair theory, evaluated existing design practices across five commercial games, and built a narrative prototype in Ren'Py titled What We Left There to run algorithmic branch testing.

  • Quantitative Finding: A simulation of 200,000 playthroughs demonstrated pairwise axis correlations between .41 and .80; a principal component analysis showed the first component accounted for 70.5% of variance and the second component accounted for 13.5% of variance; and a follow-up simulation yielded aggregate outcome frequencies of 60.4% for functional cooperation, 29.0% for cautious trust, 5.6% for distance, and 5.0% for renewed trust.

  • Qualitative Finding: Relational tracking evaluates five distinct axes consisting of trust, warmth, boundary respect, motive intelligibility, and shared reality; player choices resolve into four persistent, non-hierarchical outcomes; and authorial scaling is managed through a linear macro-structure with foldback and keyed variants rather than unconstrained branching narrative paths.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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