Working it in space
Hanging out with Citizen Sleeper
Sometimes I pick a song because it fits a mood or theme for the post. This time I picked a video because I like boygenius. And they look like they’re having fun. It’s like a little injection of goodness; and who doesn’t need that?
I have to be honest, I have never been terribly inured to conversations about “late stage capitalism”. It’s not for me. I know that it’s unfair and shallow to argue that socialism simply has not worked, but I am not convinced by the argument that it hasn’t been tried, either.
What I’m saying is, Stalinism is not socialism, but I’m not convinced we have iPhones in a socialist state. And although that could theoretically be a good thing, I only ever saw “late stage capitalism” discussed in any detail on twitter… which a lot of people use on their smartphones. It’s a bit like people with well formed opinions on justice in the labor market taking an Uber. At the same time, socialism in its broader sense is the reason my nine year old is at school as I write this, instead of on a factory floor making an honest wage. So, socialism has won in a lot of ways, and basic fundamental socialist concepts (as opposed to Socialist concepts) are pretty mainstream regardless of what some of the more important minds of our age might say.
Maybe I should open all of these posts with a brief rumination on socialism. Maybe not. Let’s face it, I’m clearly in the mood. Blame Citizen Sleeper for putting me there.
In Citizen Sleeper you play as a “sleeper”, a discarded piece of corporate property that has escaped but must now find a way to exist outside of the planned obsolescence built into its systems. It’s all very Blade Runner without being derivative, which is a neat trick to pull successfully. Citizen Sleeper is full of neat tricks.
Like the way it uses dice. I have trouble, if I’m honest, with games that work directly to bring a non-diegetic tactile “feel” of tabletop gaming to video game spaces. I want to like them, but much like actual board games and tabletop gaming, that desire might take me far enough to buy things but never seems to push me to actually play things. Which is an issue. In Citizen Sleeper dice are at the center of the gameplay, but although the game very much does rely quite significantly on dice rolls, I myself - the player - am not doing any of the rolling. I am more reacting to the rolling. Which happens in lots and lots of games, I just don’t get to see the dice. On one level, Citizen Sleeper is a “dice placement” game, but I like that the game somehow does not feel like that even as the graphic design of the dice creep into so many aspects of the game’s presentation. I particularly like how they implemented them into the logo.
It was not always this way. My struggles with the visual language of dice, dice everywhere created an initial block with Citizen Sleeper. That, plus its graphical framing and use of text, was putting me in visual novel territory. Which, again, is perfectly fine territory for something to be in, but, well… it’s not typically for me.
I am glad I persisted with Citizen Sleeper (well, returned to it, truthfully) because I was completely wrong about the type of game that it is. I was also completely wrong about how it plays; I first saw the gameplay as something to endure but now, particularly on mouse and keyboard, playing the game has a flow that simulates travel around a deeply realized and tactile fictional world.
That world is roiled by the inefficiencies of capitalism and the trials of its victims. The victors are nowhere to be seen but lord over you from a distance. This manifests most directly in the game’s mechanic tied to your character’s challenges in simply staying alive. It’s also notable that The Eye, the station on which the game is set, is something of a collateral victim of broader intergalactic corporate, economic and social conflicts. You spend the game working, talking and sometimes cheating your way around a station full of people simply trying to survive in the wake of “the collapse”, an event that has completely shaped the societies you move through but that is more an indirect result of broader problems and conflicts in the universe it inhabits than anything else.
I was recently at the Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association and American Cultural Association - more of that to come in future posts - and saw an excellent talk on Citizen Sleeper by Pearson Bolt, an instructor and graduate student at Florida State University. Pearson talked specifically about how the game envisages alternative social structures and imagines a socialist-inspired (if not outright Socialist) utopia. I actually have not got to the part of The Eye that served as the main focus for Pearson’s arguments, but already having played a significant chunk of the game I find myself associating with, avoiding and enduring a vast array of people, all of whom are trying to find their way through some kind of social organization that makes sense.
I credit Pearson actually with finally getting me to revisit the game - now that I’ve played a significant amount of it, I can see that it’s a game designed for multiple playthroughs, and that it takes narrative seriously. That’s hard for me honestly when I’m working to try and help a man with a little girl close in age to my own daughter: I want to just easily move through the most direct route to solving the game but that’s now that Citizen Sleeper wants its players to do. I find it invigorating as well; history is messy and everything on The Eye is a bit of mess. Your player-character is in a specific predicament as things begin, but the people you meet have their own struggles too. Things do not work out simply very often, and outcomes depend on a mix of player actions and the prevailing contexts in the game’s world.
Gareth Damian Martin has talked explicitly about the inspirations of early twenty-first century capitalism in their creation of the game. I particularly like their point that in a lot of science fiction the corporate overlords grind through the regular folk with frightening efficiency, but in practice the losers in capitalism tend to lose, or lose out, despite a distinct inefficiency in the systems we all have to manage. That echoes through a lot of historical conversations for me, and it is what simultaneously makes history so interesting and so difficult. I am sure I’ll talk about Citizen Sleeper on an episode of History Respawned soon; I cannot stop thinking about the game’s successes in evoking key aspects of historical theory as part of its gameplay. When I teach students about history and video games, we talk a lot about agency: an individual’s ability or capacity to affect things around them, including major historical dynamics; and contingency: the fact that although it can feel as if things were meant to happen a certain way, in the moment anything actually can happen, and understanding that uncertainty is key to learning from history. A lot of games incorporate these ideas and incorporate them well, but Citizen Sleeper relies on these concepts as a core part of its identity.