Citizen Sleeper – Kindness at the edge of the void

#SF #videogames

It has been a long time since a game has made me cry.

Towards one of the endings of Citizen Sleeper, there is a choice. It is not the common type of ‘moral’ videogame choice that is as subtle as being hit in the head by a careening trolley. It is not a choice about acting, but about being. About what it means to live, to connect, to relate. It does not have a right or wrong answer. It offers a beautiful gift and a profound loss either way you choose. It is a choice that makes the player think, and even now I still don’t know if I chose wisely.

Citizen Sleeper is a game set on Erlin’s Eye, a decrepit and gradually decaying orbital space station, abandoned by its corporate owners and left to fend for itself. You are a Sleeper; a copy of a human mind imprisoned in a cybernetic body. You are not human, because you are an artificial creation. You are not AI, because your mind is a human intelligence. Where you come from, you were property. Where you’ve arrived, you are a fugitive.

Arriving at the Eye you have no money, no home, and no community. Your legal status is precarious at best. And on top of that, your previous owners built two fail-safes into you: a tracker, and a chronic dependency on medication called ‘stabiliser’ to keep your body from falling apart. By any means you need to find a way to rid yourself of the former, and obtain the latter, to stay alive.

The gameplay loop of Citizen Sleeper is elegant yet brutal: Each ‘cycle’ you start with up to five rolled dice you need to spend to perform actions. Higher rolls grant a greater chance of success or a bonus outcome. Lower rolls a greater chance of failure, and possibly damage. If your condition degrades, your number of available dice goes down.

Five dice, and so much to do. You need to ditch your tracker. You need food, medicine, shelter, and work. You need to understand this new place you don’t even dare call ‘home’. Especially in the early part of the game, all you can do is survive, and a bad roll at the start of your cycle can set you back immensely, hammering home the precarity of your situation.

As you find your footing, you become capable of small acts of kindness. These start as ways of getting something you want: stabilizer, food, a friendly conversation. Often the game rewards you for ‘completing’ a quest, but not always, and even where you do pursue a storyline, it isn’t at all clear that the investment in terms of dice and time spent was worth the return in terms of pure resources. The real prize is the relationships you forge: helping a bartender build a still, swapping stories with a streetfood vendor, being taught by a robot how to love.

All residents you encounter on the Eye have a richness you rarely experience in a video game, despite only being represented by dialogue text and a single image. Citizen Sleeper manages to say a lot even when it doesn’t talk much, and each conversation sublimely conveys how the people you meet have their own lives, worries, hopes and motivations. They are not NPC #6768, existing only for the player’s satisfaction. There is a true and distinct authorial style to Citizen Sleeper, which tends to be lacking from large studio productions, quite possibly because it is one person’s labour of love.

Ultimately, Citizen Sleeper is about community and connection. The game doesn’t really have an end, nor are you intended to ‘win’ it in the usual sense of the word. Of course it is also an anti-capitalist critique, and its dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic is now fairly familiar. But the real power lies in its contention that we are not defined by who we are, but by the relationships we form, and the communities we become a part of. Citizen Sleeper contends that even in the ruins of late stage interstellar capitalism, people will still be kind to one another. That communities will form and flourish. That solidarity and comradeship is possible, even in the face of countervailing systemic forces.

If I had one critique to make of the game, it is that the Sleeper’s actions remain confined to the level of direct interpersonal interactions. There is never a sense that the cumulative impact of your actions shifts the background environment on the Eye, if even by a little. Mutual aid and solidarity are prevalent, but collective action is absent. I imagine, however, that it would be a difficult mechanic for a game to express.

That is a very minor gripe though, and does not detract from Citizen Sleeper’s powerful reflections on friendship, community, and the power we have to shape the world around us. Play this game, then log off, and see if you can take its sense of wonder into the real world.

Wake up, Sleeper.

Notes & Suggestions