Becoming the Sleeper
You cannot make me ill enough to not think about a video game.
At the first full week of June, I called out of work thinking I'd gotten a head cold. Two days later, I was settling in for a week's stay in a hospital bed.
I'm not super interested in broadcasting a lot of the details so publicly because such things are my business, not yours. Suffice to say that a week of constant treatment that persists beyond discharge isn't something that happens when you have a head cold. Being sick is never a pleasant experience, so much less so when you can't even bring yourself to keep playing Tears of the Kingdom. Sorry, it's a bit hard to not reach for a bit of levity in this situation. The nerves that come from seeing the American health care system move quickly are practically eldritch in nature, so it's easier to make a joke about having a ER visit punch card than fathom how fraught your spouse must be.
For myself, the real unsettling stuff happened when I closed my eyes.
If you recall my games of 2022 list, you'll know of Citizen Sleeper, the narrative RPG by Jump Over the Age that puts players in the shoes of a "sleeper” - a mechanical body containing a digitized human mind. At the game's beginning, your Sleeper has abandoned the indentured servitude that brought it into existence and each in-game day first focuses on securing a way to keep the Sleeper's body functioning. See, a failsafe was built in by the corporate overlords - without a specific space substance, the Sleeper's body will simply cease working.
After a while, Citizen Sleeper adds an element to the game that allows the Sleeper to connect to the lingering network of the space station they are hiding out on. The way Jump Over The Age chose to depict this via an ethereal fog filled with nodes to interact with.
In this fog, the Sleeper may find important data or a lingering fragment of a resident long gone.At the same time, the network is stalked by manticore-esque creatures representing the security system. Spend too long and the Sleeper runs the risk of harm. Altogether, the network space manages to capture the sense of being out of one's own body; a feat given the game uses the same map and cursor layout the whole time.
The connection is obvious. I've now spent countless anxious minutes, hours, days, connected up to a tube as life-saving medication drips into my blood while I muster the strength to send the necessary emails and forms to protect my job. Something else was happening at the same time, though. Everytime I closed my eyes, even to blink, images would flood my vision. Images that didn't feel like they were conjured from my own brain: faces I couldn't place, shapes that warped in front of me, dreams that felt placed there by someone else. As this went on, my thoughts kept coming back to Citizen Sleeper and the ways the Sleeper becomes disconnected from their body.
Meanwhile, unknown to me, Jump Over The Age was revealing a sequel - saying the theme would be "precurity and crisis." The kind of crisis like a sudden hospital admission, perhaps?
Now, I'm not so cocky as to think I figured out the secret sauce here. Citizen Sleeper has a lot on its mind and plenty of interpretations: the inherent genderfuck of transhuman stories and how we trade ourselves to our employers for little more than broken bodies, to name a couple. However, this is what Citizen Sleeper has ultimately become to me personally. A cold comfort admittedly, but knowing that my scary experience wasn't unique is still a comfort.
Sure, spending an entire piece talking more about a video game than a hospital visit isn’t exactly how one would normally expect someone to process such a thing. To me, being able to connect my own experiences to the ones in a game enhances the game side of things while helping to better understand my side. That’s a part of what takes games from empty entertainment to something truly fulfilling.
Healing, even.
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