“It’s at worst when waking, when your self has spent many dark hours recalling what it felt like to be real, to be a person, to be in a body that was indisputably yours,” so reads the introduction of Citizen Sleeper, one of the most popular indie games of last year. The opening lines of dialogue were one of the first things written by solo developer Gareth Damian Martin, drawing on their own personal experiences as a non-binary person who’s battled depression and depersonalisation. Though the latter can be useful, they quip.
Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi narrative game that tells the story of a sleeper, a robotic body that contains an emulated human mind copied from a living person. These beings are used by corporations as cheap labour, without rights and unable to escape. It’s been speculated that sleepers are inspired by the trans experience, though Martin says their inspirations were more complex than that.
“When I came up with the idea of sleepers, initially, one of the first things I was thinking about was how gig economies trap people in kinds of weird situations. Uber drivers often rent their car from Uber, and then that rental comes out of their wages, and the way this exerts a terribly tight control over their lives that then if they get fired from Uber, they then continue to have to pay rental back for their own car,” explained.
Martin continued, “As I wrote it, I felt like I was drawing more on my experience than I realised, because I was really writing about a character who number one has a previous self that they have to contend with, who has in a way committed a horrible moral thing against them, which is that they’ve sold themselves. But they’ve not had to deal with that, the future version of them or the kind of copy of them has had to deal with that.”
“Writing Citizen Sleeper was about engaging with my own experience and that includes some aspects of trans experience and not other aspects of trans experience, it includes aspects of chronic illness, of mental health, of things like this that relate to other people, and how those things are sort of divided up in society,” the developer concluded.
Of course, Citizen Sleeper explores more themes than just its protagonist. The player exists within an extreme late-stage capitalistic society, and people are struggling, to put it lightly. Citizen Sleeper intentionally reflects the real-world struggles and crises of normal people, which was entirely the point for Martin.
“I am someone, who, when I’m watching like a Star Wars film, or TV show, I’m always looking in the background to see the characters running the bar. I love real stories of people’s lives, and I really wanted to make a science-fiction game with an urban setting that would have real people in it, people that I felt experienced similar things to me, similar struggles in life, similar concerns, similar rhythms, people that I knew.”
Martin isn’t interested in the traditional way of treating non-player characters. To them, NPCs aren’t just plot devices to be pushed around freely by the player, they’re characters with their own agency and personal struggles separate from the player.
As a long-time fan of science fiction, Gareth became bored with the same-old storytelling tropes of the genre, “I really like the idea of science fiction but I’m just constantly seeing stories that if they weren’t in science fiction, I would hate these stories. These are stories about policemen coming and deciding who should live and who should die. Stories about bounty hunters which fundamentally, a bounty hunter is a pretty fucked up thing to be. But bounty hunters are cool, right? I was thinking about how I would feel if a ‘spectre’ existed in my world, and yeah I wouldn’t think that person is a hero, Commander Shepard is a fucking nightmare.”
Martin cites Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor as the biggest gaming influence on Citizen Sleeper, because it showed them you can make a sci-fi game that’s “actually human and relatable.” However, the core inspiration for Citizen Sleeper is ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. This book explores the supply chain of matsutake mushrooms, a rare fungus that’s enjoyed as a delicacy in Japanese cuisine, and uses this as a vehicle for capitalist critique.
Martin did not expect Citizen Sleeper to be the hit it is. Their previous title, In Other Waters, enjoyed modest success and their prior work was more palatable than Citizen Sleeper, which they described as “experimental.”
“I didn’t know Citizen Sleeper would work. It’s weird when you say this from the other side of having a popular game. I thought during the months before Citizen Sleeper came out, this is a very niche game, probably less people would like it than In Other Waters, it will not get nominated for any awards because it’s too particular in being its science fiction thing, it will not be critically lauded because people will feel its too obtuse, but I was totally wrong on all accounts. The game has been way more successful than In Other Waters, people really related to it.”
A bonus of having a successful game is that you get to see how people experience it through their own lenses. Martin is buoyed by the personal conversations they’ve had in interviews and podcasts, where people have told them just how much they related to different aspects of Citizen Sleeper. They describes watching Let’s Plays a month or so after the game was released, saying that they discover more and more of what they were trying to say with the game through the reactions of others.
Citizen Sleeper will be concluding with the release of Purge on March 30. In a rare move, Martin decided to release all three of the game’s episodic DLC for free, explaining “If materially, I needed to make a season pass, to do an experiment I wanted to do, I would be okay with that. But I would have to think carefully how I implemented that. For me, I’m most interested in telling the stories I want to tell and making that work, the material side of that is the necessity behind that. Citizen Sleeper is more than successful enough to fund those episodes.”
The first episode, Flux, introduced the player to a flotilla of refugee ships seeking entry to Erlin’s Eye. This story was continued with Refuge and will conclude with Purge. As you may be able to tell, this story stems from real-world refugee crises. Martin saw this as a good opportunity to explore the theme of home and introduce the player to some of the wider elements at play in the solar system at large.
“Seeing as the question of home is a big part of the main game of Citizen Sleeper, and seeing as the world citizen is in the title, which is a kind of purposeful thing I wanted to think about. What does it mean when we say we’re a citizen? I felt like refugees were the most interesting way. A refugee flotilla would be the most interesting way to explore those ideas. Especially for a late-game player, who might’ve already established themselves as ‘this is my home’. What happens when there is a nebulous threat to that home? I wanted to ask those questions and get involved in that kind of story.”
They continued, “Also I really like the theme of crisis, the theme of Citizen Sleeper is really about personal precarity but in the episodes, I tried to move to think about crisis more generally, and how crises can be both personal and political, how they can be huge things and small things, so I tried to think about in the episodes a lot. I was really interested in exploring crisis, which seems to be a big theme in our lives, we are constantly aware of crises all the time, we also experience our own crises. That was a thematic way I wanted to explore those ideas.”
Citizen Sleeper was always intended to be a two-year streamlined development cycle for Martin. They didn’t want to spend “seven years of their life” on an experiment that may not have necessarily found success. Due to their background in theatre and exhibition, where ‘the show must go on’ as it were, Martin does their absolute best to stick to a pre-determined plan to avoid delays. They resent the common conception that indie games have to be a “nightmare” to produce.
“One thing I resent is that often, and I understand why, lots of indie developers talk about making games as an absolute nightmare. But as someone… and perhaps it’s because I came to games a bit later in my life, having had a career in other fields, especially working in theatre, working in exhibitions and design work in those fields, I don’t think it has to be. I don’t think it has to be a nightmare or I don’t think you have to suffer to make a video game, I think you can like people make all kinds of other things, they plan them and they do them, sometimes things go wrong, whatever, but it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. I don’t think it’s necessarily productive all the time to give people this idea, 'indie games always have to be hard to make.’”
After the launch of such a meaningful game, people are always going to be curious about what the creator has in store for the future. Martin coyly responds that they are “working on a lot of things simultaneously” but Citizen Sleeper will certainly be explored further in their future works. Excitingly, there’ll be some Citizen Sleeper news on the way “sooner than people may think.”
Citizen Sleeper: Purge releases on March 30.