I chat to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Citizen Sleeper developer Gareth Damian Martin over a video call, but it feels more like we&rsquo🎶;re tucked in a small corner of a bustling cafe. It’s less of an interview and more of a philosophical ꦓdiscussion, and Damian Martin is a talker, answering questions with digressive tangents and discursive ideas - fitting, for the range of life experience they bring to Citizen Sleeper’s team.
Damian Martin is a trained puppeteer. They edit a zine about video game a𓆏rchitecture, and taught on the same subject at a university level. They’ve been a games tester and a critic, and sum up this vast span of knowledge by paraphrasing controversial artist Francis Bacon: “he describes himself as a pulverising machine, and his artwork was like he took all of the world and everything that he thought in his brain, crushed it all up, and spat it out onto the canvas.&rdq𝔍uo;
They want Citizen Sleeper to “drag the definition of RPG to be wider,” hence they reject the categorisation as a visual novel (would it still be thought of as a visual novel without the character portraits, they ask?). Citizen Sleeper takes inspiration from TTRPGs but, crucially, rejects the D&D model of RPG that the most popular modern video game RPGs are ba🎐sed on. The fact it doesn’t play like Skyrim or Final Fantasy does make it more difficult to pin into a single genre, but that’s a good thing in Damian Martin’s eyes. “I would like there to be more small RPGs. I would like there to be more RPGs about real people. I love bigger opportunities, I just want the genre to be wider.”
That’s why Citizen Sleeper eschews many of the systems that are a given in the genre. It makes the oft-hidden dice rolls that dictate whether your actions are successful or failures visible and important – they’re the core mechanic. You’re not the moral compass of the game, and there are plenty of things that you can’t actually affect or change. Your choices inform which ending you see – the norm for RPGs – but you can simply load back in and play out the alternatives afterwards. Citizen Sleeper is 💮as varied in its iterations on established mechanics as Damian 🌠Martin’s is in their inspirations.
“When I complete a game and there's a choice at the end, I will go to YouTube immediately and watch all the other endings,” they tell me. That’s why they didn’t want to lock players out of experiencing any of them. No Citizen Sleeper ending is more canon than another, but, coming up to the third DLC for the game, they’ve had to give it some sense of finality.
“The final DLC has a final choice and it has potential final endings,” they explain without delving into spoiler territory. “There's two-ish main ones, but the ending’s very affected by what you've done.” However, they see the DLC as separate to the base game, and want to respect players’ personal canons in the decisions you’ve made. “If somebody's Sleeper left on the colony ship, and never got to see the refugee flotilla arriving, I think that's fine. That's an ending. And I want that to be a valid ending.”
This thought process seems to come from Damian Martin’s background in playing TTRPGs – as so much of Citizen Sleeper does. The game, like a GM, is adaptable, and contorts itself to the player’s needs and experiences. If your Sleeper left on the colony ship and you go on to play the DLC, that’s just you (the player) seeing what happens on The Eye after your character has gone. Another of the ways that Damian Martin pulls from TTRPGs is giving the players choices, and choiꦯces that don’t necessarily result in fundamentally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ endings.
“Bad choices often make things more interesting,” they say, but everything toes a tightrope. They don’t want to lecture players on whether the choice they made was good or bad, they want both choices to have different repercussions. However, they tell me that this has led to some players suggesting they're pushing a political agenda, because they can’t turn away refugees or become a fascist overlord of The Eye.
“I'm making intentional political choices all the time with what I'm doing,” they explain, “but I'm also trying to make characters with agency. You can't just shove them around.” They reference the false dichotomies in many RPGs where you may be able to side with a group of refugees and ruin the town, or side with the town and ruin life for the refugees. That’s something Damian Martin specifically avoided in Citizen Sleeper, as they didn’t want to give the player the power to be any kind of moral arbiter. You’re trying to survive this world, not police it.
If there’s any political message in the game, Damian Martin believes it to be one of anarchism, which they describe as the belief in people over systems. “I tried to think about all the different ways in which anarchism can exist, or how a belief in people can be political,” they explain. “But also the ways in which that can be real or part of people's lives, and the weight and the tensions that creates.”
I hadn’t considered the anarchism of Citizen Sleeper before Damian Martin mentioned it, but it quickly becomes clear when you think about the game and its characters through that critical lens. Every character, from the Emphis making his soup to Hardin executing his control of The Eye, are trying to survive in this world. Some perpetuate the systems in play – Damian Martin notes that even Hardin has his moment to state his (rather fascist) case for a utopian existence on The Eye – but mostly, Citizen Sleeper is about people, especially the kind who aren’t usually the focus of RPGs like this. “The kind of science fiction I want to tell, and I hope people want to hear, is this urban, human thing that's more about the guy making the noodles and it's about Deckard at the bar,” they say.
With this in mind, the game has many parallels to modern day problems that regular people encounter. The refugee flotilla arriving is obvious, but even the Sleeper trying to keep their disabled body functional in a world of gang-based private healthcare has its obvious roots in reality. This is why Damian Martin sees Citizen Sleeper as neither utopian nor dystopian, simply modern. “Science fiction isn't that interesting,” they say, “unless it's trying to engage with something in the moment [of its creation].”
Damian Martin has a “whole string” of announcements coming this year, starting with the arrival of DLC 3: Purge, and its final ending to Citizen Sleeper 1.5, as they refer to the tril𒈔ogy of free add-ons. They are vague in their plans, but it’s safe to say we’ll be heading back to the Citizen Sleeper universe before too long. We may not see our Sleeper again, we may move ♓far away from The Eye, but we’ll return. Unless a classic tabletop problem rears its head, of course.
“I have plans in my mind for characters turning up again, and some things that exist in [Citizen Sleeper] might exist in the future,” they say. “But also, like any GM, I make plans, and those plans sometimes don't happen.” They’re also exploring new dice mechanics for future games, working with them differently or having them represent different things. Most importantly, they’re building on this universe that has resonated with so many people.
I jest that we could be getting an MCU-style cinematic universe for the game, with NeoVend origin stories and East♑er Eggs for fa🌌ns to spot, and Damian Martin jokingly agrees. However, as usual, they bring even the silliest questions back around to a serious discussion about game design.
“Collectively, a group of people can create a little world that they feel represents things about them,” they explain. “And nobody else gets to own that apart from those people, but also all those people can have a different opinion about what might happen in that world. And so what we're heading towards [with Citizen Sleeper] is hopefully something more like that.”
Much like a game of D&D where the players craft their own procedural story, exploring places that the GM never expected, the future of Citizen Sleeper will hopefully mean something different to everyone who has played. Whether you escaped on the colony ship or, like me, merged with the AI in the Greenways, the future of Citizen Sleeper will be for you. How will Damian Martin, the GM of this metaphor but also the author of theཧ video game which will soon have an actual, tangible ending, manage this? They’ll go back to TTRPGs, of course.
“There's so many fascinating things in Heart [a popular TTRPG] that I really love design wise,” they tell me. “And none of those things are in Citizen Sleeper. So I think there's an entire smorgasbord of design ideas that I can borrow and steal from other people, and just see if I can adapt those in a way that might work for a video game. That's part of the premise of Citizen Sleeper at heart, it's not about one system. It's about exploring these ideas.”
Citizen Sleeper is a trial, a test run to see if people would play a less traditional RPG, one that Damian Martin described many times during our conversation as an “ongoing experiment.” They were blown away with the reception it received, considering the risks involved, but with four BAFTA nominations and TheGamer’s prestigious Game of the Year🌞 title under its belt, it’s safe to say t🐻hose risks paid off.
Much as Damian Martin descri𝓡bed their inspirations with a Francis Bacon ꧑quote, another comes to my mind as I browse the transcript of our conversation. “The important thing for a painter is to paint and nothing else. Most important is to look at the paint, to read the poetry, or to listen to the music. Not to understand it or to know it, but to feel something.”
I haven’t played most of the TTRPGs that inspired Citizen Sꦡleeper, I haven’t had the same experienc﷽es as Damian Martin that informed their view of the world. But Citizen Sleeper still makes me feel something, and that’s why I can’t wait to jump back into its world as long as Damian Martin wants to keep expanding it. Luckily, they’re keen to keep dipping into that pool until the stories have dried up: “I have so much left to say in this world.”