Citizen Sleeper is an object lesson in making magic with limited means. The game assets essentially consist of a single 3D model of a space station, two and a half dozen beautifully hand-drawn character portraits, an evocative soundtrack, and lots and lots of text. Yet I found myself gripped by and emotionally invested in this story, this world, and these characters. This is the second time in my life I've ever teared up while playing a game (the first being Disco Elysium).
But in spite of falling completely in love with this game, there is one thing that keeps nagging at me after finishing it. Citizen Sleeper is also an object lesson in something else: ludo-narrative dissonance.
Rather than add on to the heaps of praise this game has gotten (with which I wholeheartedly agree but to which I have little new to add), I want to take the space of this review to dig into what I see as its one primary shortcoming. Not because this shortcoming diminishes my enthusiasm for the game in any significant way (I still recommend it without reservation), but because it illuminates for me a potential shortcoming of the genre (or even medium) as a whole, and has spurred me to reflect on its limitations and possibilities.
Here's the long and short of it: Despite its overt anti-capitalist themes—evil multi-planetary megacorporations, neo-slavery, anarcho-communist self-organization, refugee solidarity, the trials & tribulations of the gig economy—I began to realize about halfway through playing it that the game ends up being one of the most effective pieces of capitalist propaganda I've ever encountered. The inevitable trajectory the player ends up taking is from a destitute and precarious escaped slave living on borrowed time—their very body a piece of corporate property and their labor their only means for survival—to a secure, stable, and potentially prosperous member of the petit-bourgeosie.
In other words, this is a quintessential "rags to riches" story. Whatever its apparent radicalism, at the end of the day Citizen Sleeper is Horatio Alger in Space.
In his book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, game designer and theorist Patrick Jagoda writes about the neoliberal value of "entrepreneurship of the self" enacted by Stardew Valley (a more short form articulation of his thesis can be found in this essay). Citizen Sleeper very much exists in this same mode. The only way to progress is by pulling yourself up by your cybernetic, ceramic-plated bootstraps, cycle by cycle, gig by gig, sidequest by sidequest, until you eventually find yourself the sole proprietor of a bar & restaurant, owner of 5 different homes, awash in cryptocurrency, with multiple means to counteract the ticking timebomb in your body that keeps you tethered to your corporate owners: precarity successfully overcome.
At one point, you're given the opportunity to ingratiate yourself with an agrarian commune. Put in enough volunteer hours on the communal farm or canteen and you're offered a coveted spot in the commune itself, triggering the "COMMUNIST" achievement. I had to laugh. Despite some flavor text about commune members being expected to work recurring shifts in exchange for meals, practically speaking these shifts function hardly any differently from many of the other possible gigs one can pick up around the station, and there is no consequence whatsoever for shirking your comradely duties entirely. For a game otherwise so inventive, a world otherwise so vividly realized, and a story so otherwise fervently critical of capitalism, it seems to run out of imagination the moment it runs up against the challenge of even hinting at a mode of existence beyond either wage labor or entrepreneurship.
Is the role-playing genre, with its inherently quantified and optimized vision of selfhood and impetus toward endless resource accumulation, doomed to not only convey a fundamentally capitalist worldview, but actually help inculcate a fundamentally neoliberal form of subjectivity through its behavioral reward circuits? Or is it possible to design an RPG whose vision of the self and mode of being is not inherently "entrepreneurial"? What would such a game look like? I'm not quite sure. But imagining all the possible ways that Citizen Sleeper's Hypha Commune might have been implemented differently feels like a good place to start.
But in spite of falling completely in love with this game, there is one thing that keeps nagging at me after finishing it. Citizen Sleeper is also an object lesson in something else: ludo-narrative dissonance.
Rather than add on to the heaps of praise this game has gotten (with which I wholeheartedly agree but to which I have little new to add), I want to take the space of this review to dig into what I see as its one primary shortcoming. Not because this shortcoming diminishes my enthusiasm for the game in any significant way (I still recommend it without reservation), but because it illuminates for me a potential shortcoming of the genre (or even medium) as a whole, and has spurred me to reflect on its limitations and possibilities.
Here's the long and short of it: Despite its overt anti-capitalist themes—evil multi-planetary megacorporations, neo-slavery, anarcho-communist self-organization, refugee solidarity, the trials & tribulations of the gig economy—I began to realize about halfway through playing it that the game ends up being one of the most effective pieces of capitalist propaganda I've ever encountered. The inevitable trajectory the player ends up taking is from a destitute and precarious escaped slave living on borrowed time—their very body a piece of corporate property and their labor their only means for survival—to a secure, stable, and potentially prosperous member of the petit-bourgeosie.
In other words, this is a quintessential "rags to riches" story. Whatever its apparent radicalism, at the end of the day Citizen Sleeper is Horatio Alger in Space.
In his book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, game designer and theorist Patrick Jagoda writes about the neoliberal value of "entrepreneurship of the self" enacted by Stardew Valley (a more short form articulation of his thesis can be found in this essay). Citizen Sleeper very much exists in this same mode. The only way to progress is by pulling yourself up by your cybernetic, ceramic-plated bootstraps, cycle by cycle, gig by gig, sidequest by sidequest, until you eventually find yourself the sole proprietor of a bar & restaurant, owner of 5 different homes, awash in cryptocurrency, with multiple means to counteract the ticking timebomb in your body that keeps you tethered to your corporate owners: precarity successfully overcome.
At one point, you're given the opportunity to ingratiate yourself with an agrarian commune. Put in enough volunteer hours on the communal farm or canteen and you're offered a coveted spot in the commune itself, triggering the "COMMUNIST" achievement. I had to laugh. Despite some flavor text about commune members being expected to work recurring shifts in exchange for meals, practically speaking these shifts function hardly any differently from many of the other possible gigs one can pick up around the station, and there is no consequence whatsoever for shirking your comradely duties entirely. For a game otherwise so inventive, a world otherwise so vividly realized, and a story so otherwise fervently critical of capitalism, it seems to run out of imagination the moment it runs up against the challenge of even hinting at a mode of existence beyond either wage labor or entrepreneurship.
Is the role-playing genre, with its inherently quantified and optimized vision of selfhood and impetus toward endless resource accumulation, doomed to not only convey a fundamentally capitalist worldview, but actually help inculcate a fundamentally neoliberal form of subjectivity through its behavioral reward circuits? Or is it possible to design an RPG whose vision of the self and mode of being is not inherently "entrepreneurial"? What would such a game look like? I'm not quite sure. But imagining all the possible ways that Citizen Sleeper's Hypha Commune might have been implemented differently feels like a good place to start.
5 Comments
been a minute since i played but i do think the commune is marginally different from most other things on the station in that you get the same outcome from work there regardless of whether you get a success/partial success/failure. whether that's a meaningful difference can be discussed, but it's at least a procedural difference and not just flavor text
(checked a wiki, this is only for the "work assignment" action after you've become a member)
@jakobvongunten That is true. It still definitely felt like a marginal difference to me. There's also the fact that the game disincentivizes you from replenishing your energy via using up dice rolls rather than via spending Cryo, simply because dice rolls are so precious whereas Cryo ceases to be especially scarce by the time you're able to join the commune. It makes perfect sense that the "work assignment" action would function this way. But by the time you gain access to it there's little reason to use it. And so the commune itself felt incidental to both the narrative and the game loop. Gaining the trust of the community in the Lowend or the Shipyard opens up new quests, plotlines, and characters. Gaining membership in the commune didn't have anything close to the same feeling of revealing a new aspect of the game's world. It felt like a bit of a tacked on afterthought to me.
tendog
9 months ago