Bad Decisions by Design

Alien: Earth Shows How Corporate Incentives Turn SOP Into Horror

I was thinking about something the other day, while I watched Alien: Earth. Not about the creatures, but about the operating system that brings humans into repeated contact with them. The Alien franchise has always been space horror. It is also cyberpunk fiction in a vacuum suit. Alien: Earth owns that lineage. It makes procurement the priority and quarantine the afterthought. The monster may have ignited the blaze, but the company laid the fuel.

Ridley Scott has floated the idea that Blade Runner and Alien might share a universe. Whether that was originally intended doesn’t matter as much as what the pairing clarifies. Blade Runner has thusfar stayed groundside as it drills into questions of real and synthetic, personhood and identity, memory real or imagined. Alien places that corporate layer as an external influence affecting away missions (initially) and runs it against first contact with something that does not negotiate. What happens when extraction logic meets an organism that treats people like food or an incubator? (Or both?) What happens when liability management sits between a crew and the correct call? 

The crews of many of these ships are little more than long-haul truckers in space, and I think it’s important to understand how these particular stories tick to recognize this is altogether intentional. Space Marines might fight harder but in the end, they’re also imminently expendable. 

A central pattern follows from that setup. People make “bad” choices. Crews cut corners. Scientists break protocol. Executives issue directives that make local sense for the corporation and global nonsense for everyone else. The gains are short and narrow. The losses are long and carried by whoever happens to be near the airlock. This is not a morality play about idiots in space so much as it is a system story about incentives that look rational from one angle and suicidal from another, combined with a natural order that for the most part eats or is eaten.

There is usually one character who refuses the script. Often a woman. She respects the direct and immediate risks these creatures pose. She reads the memo without wishful thinking. She does not confuse compliance with safety. 

Generally, in the end she pays anyway. Even if she survives, the structure around her collapses. The system turns competence into witness and then isolates the witness.

For a long time I filed all of this under genre assumption. We accept detectives who find the key clue. We accept wizards who have the right spell prepared. (Or an embedded reason for why they don’t). We accept that trained professionals in Alien stories will do something fatally shortsighted. It worked, but if I looked too closely I could see the seam. It seemed an occasionally immersion-threatening contrivance in the service of theme, like the person who goes into the abandoned basement in a slasher film, or who insists on playing with the magical murder puzzle-box in Hellraiser. 

The last few years changed the lens for me a bit. Watching us go from “we’re in this together” to “return to normal” at a pace that did not track with best practice for a novel pathogen. The pivot hinged on profit. Airlines and other corporate actors needed capacity and revenue. Mandates softened and risk was reframed. Messaging moved to normalcy long before the long tail was understood or acknowledged in policy. A virus with real risks of lasting disability and organ damage did not become less novel when it became less immediately lethal. But the incentives around it shifted, and the pandemic is now a distant memory. (...right?)

The analogy to Alien is not subtle. Procedure, PR, and balance sheets bent the response until opening the metaphorical door looked responsible, even necessary, because the cost model pushed that way, at least for some of the characters.

Now it doesn’t seem so contrived to me. In Alien the company embeds an android whose priorities put the specimen above the crew. We see much the same dynamic so far as that goes with Morrow in Alien: Earth, although the extended format allows his motivations and backstory to be much better developed and explored. (Although technically a cyborg rather than an android.) 

In our world the mechanisms are typically more mundane. Scheduling systems. Ventilation claims. Work from home policies and paid sick leave. Refund policies tuned to push bodies back into seats. HR memos that wrap staffing projections in public health language. Local rationality, global harm. 

Seen that way, so-called bad decisions look like outputs, not lapses. The crew doesn’t just die because they are foolish in a vacuum. They die because the procedures around them aren’t optimized for their survival. Call it moral hazard. Call it a metric problem. The label is less important than the pipeline. 

The scientist opens the door because “verification” has been defined to privilege speed and specimen integrity over containment. The captain keeps the sample because compensation ties reward to possession, not prevention. The executive instructs the android to be objective, which in practice means indifferent to human cost because the spreadsheet is blind to it.

This is also why Alien belongs beside cyberpunk despite some differences in surface aesthetics. The critique is not “technology is scary.” It is “governance is throughput.” Policy becomes diegetic machinery. 

Alien: Earth plays that honestly. Contact with the inhuman is always mediated by corporate constraint. Break protocol and there is a paper trail. Follow protocol and there is a body count. Those options are not equal. One is sanctioned until the optics change. The other is punished even when it is correct. The dread lives in that asymmetry. You can be right and still be expendable.

Once you notice the structure, the trope reads as process, not plot convenience. It is a system that converts caution into delay, delay into escalation, escalation into catastrophe, while preserving plausible deniability at every step. The tension no longer comes from “Why would anyone do that?” 

The answer is obvious: because that is what the SOP rewards. Because time is money. Because the evac window closes in twenty minutes and the bonus clause only triggers with a live sample. Because someone upstream needs a number to look different by the end of the quarter.

Rightly recognizing the cyberpunk roots in these tropes, Alien: Earth adds a new layer through the synth / android / cyborg / human plotlines that can begin to tease out some of the horrors that can lurk in transhumanist themes. But underneath it all, corporations’ behavior is all too familiar. It is based on the priorities of extraction. 

Translating Alien’s corporate horror into RPG play

Players often default to conservation: they protect their characters, bank resources, and wait for better odds.

The deeper the investment, the harder they lean on systems to keep outcomes favorable—even though if the first person to see xenomorph eggs simply turned back, the story (or session) would be very short.

In many genres that instinct is fine; in Alien it blunts the theme. The fiction needs choices that are rational inside the institutional frame yet ruinous in aggregate. 

However, forcing “dumb” moves will likely provoke a revolt. Instead, use incentives: make the payout matrix, liability exposure, and quarantine clock visible. When the ledger is on the table, players are more likely to take those risks because they make sense—and they will feel clever, at least until cleverness meets cost.

The goal is not to trick anyone into mistakes. It is to make the risky move rewarding in its own right. When the obvious answer carries a poor downstream tradeoff, players will still choose it if the incentives say it pays today.

We can think of this as four dials that you have to play with as a GM—incentives, constraints, information, time. Obviously there could be more, or less, or different knobs, but for the sake of the model let’s say there are four. Turn them a little and the world makes the case for you.

Incentives. Offer near-term, concrete upside. Run two reward tracks: say that survival pays in resupply and evac priority while exposure pays in hard intel and leverage. Post the payouts where everyone can see them. 

If an intact sample unlocks better kit today while a broadcast unlocks sanctuary tomorrow, the choice gains weight. You aren’t forcing a door open. You are showing why someone might make that decision. Either/Ors where there’s an upside and downside on both ends can create useful funnels. 

Constraints. “Turtling” is cheap and internally optimal in many systems. Make it costly. Track air, coolant, medfoam, clean suits. Resting creates noise. Stabilizing burns fuel and time. If the “safe” plan eats the window before lockdown, waiting is no longer neutral. 

Orders also need teeth. Refusing a directive adds liability: dock denials, throttled engines, insurance flags. Procedure matters, especially when it shouldn’t.

Information. Knowledge should risk exposure. To learn the vector or lifecycle, someone runs a loud scan or takes a live sample. Opening a redacted memo early grants clarity at the price of stress and corporate trace. Walking in blind preserves appearances while feeding the threat. Either path is rational. Neither is comfortable.

Time. Decision lagoons invite bunkers. Use decision windows. Orbital alignment in eighteen minutes. One shuttle burn. A front that will close the bay in six ticks. Waiting advances complication and mutation. The unknown gets worse when ignored.

Once those dials are live, “bad decisions” stop feeling contrived. The table sees the ledger. They make the call because the world priced it that way.

This sits on top of table culture. You don’t need to bully anyone into heroics. Give permission instead. Name the mode. A Cinematic session is a closed arc where injury or death can be an endpoint and the reward is revelation. A Campaign session values continuity but pays exposure with durable gains—contacts, docking rights, reputational cover. In both modes, adopt a failure-forward stance. Misses create new problems instead of stalls. 

You can do this with tools you already know. The following are sample ideas to illustrate what I’m talking about. Try them, or try something else. 

Stress that sharpens until it breaks. ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game tries to manage this with Stress dice. The more you push—rush protocol, pry open redactions, ignore a soft order— the more likely you are to panic. This can also create a sense of real urgency in the player despite the artifice of game mechanics, although if pushed too far it tends to flip in the other direction. 

If you’re running Mothership, tie Stress to the same “push” behaviors and let Panic drive escalation. It explains why “verify in situ” can be tactically smart and still carry a real cost.

Face-up agendas with real payouts. ALIEN already uses Personal Agendas, especially in Cinematic mode. Make them mechanical and mutually exclusive.

• Company Asset pays in resupply and evac priority if you deliver an intact sample or pristine logs.

• Humanitarian pays in reputation and an ally if you keep civilians alive and broadcast warnings.

• Crew First pays in debt relief or lower upkeep if everyone exfiltrates, mission outcome aside.
  In Blades in the Dark, maybe treat the Company as a Tiered Faction. Deliver the sample to gain a Patron claim or broadcast the truth to gain Status with citizens and Heat with authority.

The Clock Is Ticking. Blades already utilizes clocks. PbtA gives you countdowns on a Front. Mothership can tie the clock to room states and motion noise. Delay now has a visible price. These can also be utilized (in slightly different ways) in Storyteller or Storypath systems. Typically successes are used on extended actions as ticks on the PC-driven clocks, but for Story Clocks, these can either be simple narrative measures, or hinge on failures, particular actions (or inactions), and so on. 

Quarantine breach. Put quarantine and seal protocols on a shared clock: Open → Yellow → Red → Black. It only pauses if someone sits in Control. At Red, doors auto-lock and each override becomes its own mini-scene. At Black, purge zones go lethal. 

The crew reaches a sealed med bay. Quarantine is already at five. A survivor is inside with key intel. Opening now ticks the clock to seven and risks contamination, but secures a witness who can cancel a future ambush. Waiting for clearance pushes the clock to Red and locks the door. The company directive favors specimen integrity. Agenda payouts pull in different directions. No force required. The trade off is clear, depending on the player’s priorities.

Orders with consequences. Track liability as a number the crew cannot ignore. At one, insurance flags and resupply costs rise. At two, docking rights sit “under review.” At three and above, throttles and legal holds arrive. In Blades, maybe convert it to Heat and Entanglements flavored as corporate pressure. 

Knowledge requires exposure. Make the risk tempting. Success grants hard intel that cancels a future ambush. The price is stress and a contamination check. In ALIEN, gate key Comtech or Science Officer benefits behind field exposure. In Mothership, require analysis in the hot zone if you want the best dice.

If you prefer fewer mechanics, change your framing. Open in medias res with quarantine already at two. Put a priority directive on the comms. Systems can help navigate stakes and probability of success but these are also a part of unstructured decisions and statements during a session. 

Maybe offer two real branches each scene: safer now and worse later, or risky now and safer later. Avoid the neutral third option that permits drift when you’re looking to increase the pressure. 

Remember to Breathe

It’s important to mention that as is often the case, the opposite is also sometimes true. While this style of space horror + cyberpunk demands a certain amount of external pressure, it also requires space for breathing, planning, even the discussion that seems to go nowhere but helps establish important points about character and where their head is at. Relentlessly applying pressure can paradoxically make players disengage.

Much of this is based on context. If the PCs have been redlining for a long scene, relaxing on the gas might be exactly what’s needed. In some cases, even that may have a downstream cost, but not always. 

It’s worth noting how much breathing room there is in Alien, Aliens, and Alien:Earth. In the first movie the alien doesn’t show up for like the first hour of the movie.  There are scenes where everything happens and scenes where, at least on the surface, very little happens. Both are actually serving a purpose.

You don’t need neon and chrome to make cyberpunk. You don’t even need to punish caution. Show the math. Once the ledger is visible—payouts, clocks, liability—some players will choose actions that look reckless from outside and rational from within the frame. Ideally, that is ALIEN in play. Locally contingent logic that often adds up to bad decisions and catastrophic outcomes.