It’s not every year that you come across a game that has the innate ability to command your thoughts for weeks, even after completion. My mind rifles through the Rolodex of past experiences, rummaging for those few that have a file a little deeper than the rest. The heaviest, most dense reports number fewer than seven, surely. Splinter Cell: Conviction is the easiest to find. A reimagination of a beloved formula, an old dog given fresh and violent new tricks. There are updates to the report dating 2011, ‘13, ‘15, ‘17, ‘19, ‘20, and ‘22. I set it aside. Skyrim inevitably has a thick file, the game saved my life after all. A world so deep and full of opportunity that I forgot my own sad existence for just long enough. I stack it atop Conviction. Next is a dual function report detailing the overlap of Outer Wilds and Thank You Scientist’s third album Terraformer. As art is want to do, Outer Wilds and Terraformer created a video/audio palette for a 5 month period of 2019 that proved to be so impactful that a single song playing through my headphones or car speakers prompts a backdraft of emotions flavored like existential dread and the fear I won’t have enough time to do all that I want. I stack the third. Mass Effect 2 and Halo: ODST have their files, quintessentials from an earlier time. Four and five are added to the stack.

It’s around here I start to struggle to find further entries. Perhaps it is the high bar that I am using as a filter. I’m sure there are other games I found a peculiar liking for, but the upper echelon is saved for these few and far between experiences. Each has bundled with it, particular and easily recallable sensations. The smell of a dorm room, the sound of an Xbox 360 powering on, a musical note that raises the skin in myriad bumps, the taste of breast milk spit-up from that one time your daughter had unfortunately good aim. What I seek to elucidate here is perhaps obvious, still, there are only a few games that elicit a deep emotional response from me. I can list those games on one hand. I have been playing games for twenty-three years. I have been writing about games for twelve years. It is even rarer when a game vaults itself all the way to the top of said list. Citizen Sleeper, the newest game by solo-developer Jump Over The Age, Gareth Damian (dam-yan) Martin, slipped past every defense, cleared every checkpoint, and within days caught me a-broadsides, laying me out completely. In the final moments of my playthrough, blinking through watery eyes, a familiar but distant thought sounded in my head: This is it. This is my favorite game of all time. Four and a half months later, the place it occupies in my mind has neither shrunk, nor has the sound of its song grown quieter.

In Citizen Sleeper you play as a Sleeper. A corporate shell architecture, an android body with pseudo-organs and a sensor suite made to mimic the five senses. You see, because you are not, in fact, an android. Instead, you, at some earlier and undisclosed date, sold your consciousness to a company. They took that consciousness and uploaded it to a mechanized facsimile of a brain, and that computer, embedded in this humanoid frame’s cranium, is emulating your consciousness. So your body can breathe, but it doesn’t need to. It can feel, but it doesn’t need to. It can taste, but it doesn’t need to. You see, an emulated brain in a robotic body, unlike a learning machine, has memory of its own skin and lungs and tongue. So the Sleeper can feel, breathe, and taste, else the emulated mind in its metal tomb dissociate completely, removed of its means of establishing itself. It’s a fucking grim picture. I am immediately reminded of one of my favorite pieces of art: Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion. The 210 year old oil painting depicts a man, presumably Sadak, clinging perilously to a cliff edge, with looming mountains before him. His journey has obviously been arduous to this point, but the road ahead shows no signs of easement. John Martin’s arguably most famous work rests next to Gareth Damian Martin’s in my mind. And yes, it is only just now that I realized they both share the name Martin. Ah, the universe and its coincidental curiosities.

As the Sleeper you have a slight and foggy recollection of your previous life. Flashes of memory come back sporadically, and you can choose whether or not you want to lean into them and remember or push them away. Your life of work, as a Sleeper, is also suppressed. The manufacturer of your frame, Essen-Arp, rarely spoken of in any manner demeaning good standing, is presumably a monstrous entity, both in size and morality. After all, who would allow people to sell their minds to them so that they may work endlessly in robotic bodies? You, just as I, may have a few companies come to mind. I believe that is on purpose. Within moments of starting the game you are painted a picture of capitalism run rampant. Already the unwanted recipients of a capitalist system in entropy, perhaps imagining the worst isn’t as difficult as we might hope it would be. Citizen Sleeper’s universe is much like our own, save for the fact that capitalism, here, continued to grow, twisted and deformed, and its ability to subjugate its adherents only grew with it, subsuming lives in frightful new ways.

After choosing one of three classes, The Extractor, The Operator, or The Machinist (each have a single point buff to a particular skill), you are thrust into the dark and introduced to Erlin’s Eye. At some point in your contract to Essen-Arp you realized how you were forced to exist was no way to exist at all, so you stowed away in a subsection of some ship or freighter. Perhaps it was luck on your side, but the same ship managed to be dragged in for salvage at the Eye and upon being discovered by meeting a man named Dragos you are given a place to stay and some immediate work as a means to make a few bucks.

Immediately two things are apparent. First, and most important, Damian Martin is one of the most talented UI/UX designers in the indie space. Hell in the games space. Their first title, In Other Waters, a game where you, an AI, interact with a xenobiologist exclusively through the UI of their suit and craft, is an incredible exploration of “menus as game spaces.” Oftentimes UI is a means to allow players to manipulate inventory, check a map, note progress, and stands on its own. Sometimes those menus and submenus are administered diegetically, working with the world building of the game to implement menu systems into the game world. Isaac Clarke’s suit in the Dead Space series had a health bar that ran along his spine. When you opened menus his helmet projected them in front of him. As an engineer in a mining rig, all of these things made solid, in-world, sense. You would need to know the physical state of fellow miners from a glance, and projecting a readout of your current inventory would be extremely helpful with coworkers in a mining space. Death Stranding also stands out. When a game itself is built into menus and the gameplay loop is tied in a bow around the navigation, manipulation, understanding, and implementation of the UI, crafting a smart, minimalist UI is no easy task. Games like Duskers and Highfleet come to mind. There is a degree of skeuomorphism that lends to the believability of design in this spaces. That is to say, when the UI of the game mimics the properties of the UI we interact with in day-to-day life, we find ourselves more familiar with the space, or at the very least how the space intends for us to interact with it. Sadly, I haven’t played In Other Waters all the way through, though it sits atop my list for must plays. Citizen Sleeper is built upon this framework of diegesis and skeuomorphism, and Damian Martin’s talent shines through from the first moment. This game is gorgeous, minimal, and direct. Sacrificing no space or effort on systems that fluff out extraneously. Everything you see is important, informative, utilitarian, and for those reasons, downright beautiful.

— — —

In 2012 I stopped playing baseball. It would take nearly a full decade to come to grips with why I quit. I had been a good player, above average even and I had big dreams and even bigger eyes about it. The kind of dreaming that growing into an adult generally beats out of most kids. I gained weight my freshman year of college, got out of shape, then I discovered some pretty fundamental differences between the way my mind and my coach’s mind operated. Spring of 2012 I just decided I was done. It’s hard now to be too upset about it. The odds of making a career out of playing baseball are pretty dismally low, and retrospectively I can acknowledge that my chances were pretty slim.

That departure would fuel two changes in the way I lived. Aside from enjoying my first spring break, free of ball, since I was nine, I spent that first spring break in Seattle on a trip with my college paper, The Rambler. It was this specific trip that confirmed that my newly discovered love of writing about entertainment wasn’t just an infatuation. The Journalism Conference we attended that spring sparked a lot of ideas in my brain that tumble around to this day.

The second change was far quieter, and far more tricky to spot. Baseball had been my outlet for more than a decade, and while I continued to play in the summer for the next few years, it never stood at the top of my priorities again. As a twenty year old that was a drastic change. Baseball had been with me through, well kinda everything. High school, dating, puberty, physical and emotional abuse and oppression, my internal conflict with religion. For lack of a better set of defining terms, baseball had always been my truest Mass, my cathedral. Nothing else mattered when I played. Stresses melted away, my fraught home life was held at bay, my questions about God could wait.

Within six months I slipped into my first depressive bout. It was a strange and dark and cold place that I had no idea how to escape. I was lucky enough to be aware of the importance of socializing and its impact on my brain. I made myself a regular of a phenomenon my dorm building called Cig Bridge. Every night, for an entire school year, from 7pm to 2am there was a small gathering of folks just outside the basement door. The basement opened on ground level on this side of the building and an iron staircase hung over the entryway. Rain or shine, for hours, Cig Bridge would populate and depopulate. Some folks would hang for hours, some would step out for a smoke and a chat and go back in, some would stop by in passing. It was weird and magical. We talked about everything: from quantum mechanics to film and TV tropes, from aliens to military history. All disciplines and backgrounds melted into this huddle of young minds. Young, depressed Caleb quickly found a home there, our little subculture of thinkers and smokers and guitar players and artists. Thinking back we were all little cast-offs. People who hadn’t fit into many places, but fit here. I picked up smoking within a few weeks. I would scrounge quarters from the laundry room and cafeteria and walk down to a little drop-shack smoke shop to buy Newports and Pall Malls. Somehow, unwittingly, in near complete mental darkness, I had found community.

— — —

Working for Dragos, the salvager who finds you, gets the gears turning in your sleeper’s first moments. Early in Citizen Sleeper, you are desperately trying to clear the fog that all games start with. What do I do? What can I do? Where do I go? Where can I go? For all of its narrative complexities, Citizen Sleeper is gracefully simple. You wake each morning with a bar denoting your condition and a bar denoting your energy. Simple enough to understand. The condition of your body deteriorates daily, as does your energy (albeit the latter is a bit faster). Allow your energy to deplete completely you move into starving, and as a result your condition drops at a doubled pace. Between these bars rests five slots for dice, with the condition bar fixed above and broken into twenty segments. Full condition equals a full set of five dice. Should you drop to sixteen you will get four dice. The system built here is sympathetic to life in a way that made immediate sense to me. The better you feel the more you can do, right? The worse shape you’re in the less you can do. But it becomes deeper than that when you think about the fact each day is a fresh roll of those dice. Some days you will have all five of your dice but have a collection of ones and twos. Like sleeping well, but still feeling mental fog. Like trying to sleep off a depressive bout and waking up energetic but entirely unmotivated.

As someone who worked for themself during 2020 and 2021 I felt the familiar sting of early-COVID malaise. Waking up each day with my wife and kids at home, a severe lack of outdoor entertainment options, and an itch to be doing something. That often culminated in a grand procrastination. Constantly waiting for more favorable conditions. In Citizen Sleeper those conditions aren’t going to come, you have to make do with what you have, feast or famine. I’m not sure I had played anything that, on a mechanical level, understood the day to day process of waking up as a person with chronic depression. It’s a constant role of the dice. Am I going to wake up and have the drive to do anything? If I do have the drive, will I have the mental and physical resources? Condition and Dice Slots recreate this predicament with startling simplicity.

Starting out your options are limited, so I spent my larger dice working with Dragos, hoping to make some progress in understanding this reclusive scrapper. In the downtime (any time after my big dice had been spent) I would explore other parts of the Eye, familiarizing myself with neighborhoods and locations. Pretty early on you are able to start piecing together the hierarchy, or at the very least the function of the Eye. There are a couple ships that come into dock on a cycle rotation, they each offer work offloading materials or scrap. There is a little bar called the Overlook and a noodle stall run by a large but quiet man named Emphis. Both of these places allow me to eat, which is essential, but they both also prompt drives. Drives are Citizen Sleepers quests. They are story based threads that ask for your time and resources to complete. Once you gather your first couple drives and you start to grok the mechanics and workings of the Eye, those drives start to pile up. Progressing for me was about focusing down on the few I wanted to pursue based on appeal.

I played Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for roughly 115 hours. I didn’t come close to clearing the map or getting 100% completion. I distinctly remember the moment I was trying to complete a rock stacking challenge and I realized I fucking hated it. I know some that drew no small amount of pleasure organizing the stones and I am happy for them. Myself, I couldn’t manage to get through one without getting angrier. It was in this specific moment that I realized, oh! I don’t have to do everything on this map. It has a multitude of experiences for all types of people. I knew that rock stacking wasn't for me. In a round-about way I used the same approach for Citizen Sleeper. A few hours and a dozen drives in I took a breath, read through my list of drives, and picked the few that appealed to me immediately. I would love to say that I discovered this process for singling out quests early in my game playing career. Valhalla came out when I was 29. I’m glad to say that I have fully incorporated the practice now.

— — —

What was so important to me in finding the community that Cig Bridge provided, beyond making friends of course, was the reality that outside of my safest space - in fact after that space had be taken from me almost entirely - I was still able to find somewhere that I felt safe. As an aside, its quite interesting to me now, knowing that at least two of the frequent attendees fell down Alt-Right rabbit holes, that I couldn’t pick it up then. Most of the others I have kept in touch with said they were able to recognize it then. My only conclusion has been that I must have been so starved for camaraderie that I overlooked their leanings then. Though I do starkly remember catching one of these people at The Grill, our schools on campus fast food shop, watching the Boston Marathon Bombing aftermath and biting back at him when he said it was all fabricated hysteria. Despite that encounter, I missed the other signs. Oh well.

It is important for me to point these things out, not because I have some fashion of regret that I wasn't vocal back then, but because in retrospect I can see the dangerous gamble of being desperate for connection. It has shaped my caution since those days. I’m not sure the desire for acceptance and safety ever goes away. In fact I am quite convinced that it is intrinsic to all people in differing degrees. We all want to feel safe. Safe with backup is the ideal. The more desperate anyone is for that sense of security, I fear, is opening themselves to the potential for radicalization. I can’t say, despite my avoiding the Alt-Right wind tunnel, I avoided radicalization entirely. I went to school a deeply Protestant, Christian, seeking approval from both my family and my on campus bible study leader. On my way out of college and since, I have all but placed my organized faith on a canoe and pushed it out towards the falls, wreaths and flowers adorning a fractured image of what it meant to be a good Christian, a flaming arrow entombed in the center. I went into college a midwestern, Christian, capitalist, and returned four years later a displaced, agnostic, communist.

Still, finding that safe space, or rather understanding safe spaces were discoverable, is what led me to where I am. The most concrete and consistent of those safe spaces materialized in the form of video games. I have written about how games have literally saved my life before, and I don’t think the first occurrence was the last. Each of the games I listed previously happened to come around in a specific moment. Moments I would later look back on and realize were deep and dark places for my mind. Each found a way to crack through the facade I had erected and helped me confront a feeling in my chest, rational or otherwise. So often the fear enclosed in my chest is irrational. But when irrationality is common for your brain, your pathways to suss out that irrationality becomes monumentally obstructed.

— — —

The first main drive that I dove into was tied to Feng, a tech specialist/hacker that works at Havenage, one of the Eye’s larger corporate presences. Feng is played out to be the quirky, fastidious type and he promises early on that he has a way for you to ditch your tracker. Check box one of two. Now I just need to find a way to get some Stabilizer so I don’t go into obsolescence. Feng, aside from starting you down the path to getting away from Essen-Arp, also introduces you to the sub-world map of hacking nodes. Beneath the surface of the Eye there is a series of completable objectives that, rather than ask for your higher rolling dice for better probabilities of success, simply requests specific numbers. A large portion of these numbers lie between one and four. Suddenly the lower dice that you have been receiving hold more value. Again the balancing act complexifies. Before I was doing tasks for Dragos and spending the last few dice I had making marginal progress exploring the Eye. Now I have nodes to hack, ever more work to do, and an expansive ring to explore.

This is one of the places that Citizen Sleeper really thrives. There is always something to do, in fact there is often too much to do. You have five dice to work with, at the most. Finding a way to balance progress in each aspect is a tricky struggle that often can feel as rewarding as it feels overwhelming. Again, parallels of life trickle in. Waking up, feeling that I can get a lot accomplished today, then realizing there is a lot to get accomplished, making completing everything on my list not only improbable but nearly impossible. I began to separate drives even more, instead of focusing on three or four I pared it down to one or two. Pretty quickly it becomes apparent that Dragos isn’t exactly keen with my continued assistance at the scrap yard, something about raising suspicions of potential clients. It's all very dismissive and shallow. Not sure I had Dragos painted as a steadfast supporter, but the introduction of a tracker ticking up every time I work for him leads me to start looking elsewhere, confident that eventually he will ask me to leave. Better to let a sleeping dog lie, or whatever the quote is.

Feng’ s quest line is briefly involved and then sporadic indefinitely. You help him hack some Havenage sites for information on a person that, for all intents and purposes shouldn’t still be on the Eye, and after gaining that data he disappears for a bit. This serves as a consistent reminder that gig work is inconsistent. You get a few jobs, make some money, and then those jobs slip away, or go on a hiatus, and you have to find other work.

The first drives I glued myself to, in those moments, were those of Tala, the barkeep at the Overlook, and Emphis, the noodle stall chef. I have been a barista on numerous occasions, for long stints, and as such the bartender life has always intrigued me. Having two children I haven’t been able to make that curiosity a reality simply because I don’t want to work at night and miss my time with them. So I followed Tala’s drive as closely as I could. Emphis’s drive spoke to me on a deeply personal level.

— — —

Often when I write about my personal life I feel like a broken record. There are a couple of reasons for that, not the least of which is the fact that I have written about the same four or five events in my life several times. A part of me understands stories aren’t so simple as to tell them completely in the first go around. I will likely be able to talk about my grandfather’s death for the rest of my life. First, because the memory is fractured, as trauma is wont to do. Second, because as I age I will inevitably take liberties in the retelling of that trauma, as memory is wont to do. Still, I wrote this piece for the better part of four months largely because I would get another 500 words in and realize I’ve written this before and ask myself who the fuck cares? I’m not sure I care about those thoughts anymore. So here we are.

As if losing a parent, grand- or otherwise, isn’t bad enough, it is made significantly harder when a shared love with the deceased is also lost. If you lose your father, but are still able to frequent the place you used to fish together, there is a level of comfort, even closure you can draw by revisiting that place. If that fishing spot was bought by some company and turned into a marina, you would feel personally assaulted. My family has always loved food. All families love food, I understand this. But the place my family held, and very much still holds for food, borders on the sacred. My grandfather was an excellent cook and an unimpeachable badass. All of us took those traits from him, to varying degrees. It would make a lot of sense then to know we would watch Anthony Bourdain as a family. Bourdain had an air about him, wafting both a devil may care attitude and a deep knowledge of the subject he focused on. Those subjects were almost always food, trauma, and their intersection. This isn’t a treatise to why you should like Bourdain. You can hold him in your memory how you like, but from what I saw in my grandfather’s face while he watched Parts Unknown, or No Reservations, or The Layover, Bourdain spoke with a level of honest authority. When Bourdain took his own life, a few weeks after my grandfather’s passing, it hit like a kick to the diaphragm.

I am fortunate in one way. I can still go back and watch old episodes of Bourdain when I need to ground myself, or come down from a particularly sad bout of emergent grief. Unlike the metaphor of the fishing spot, I can still revisit this place I shared with my family. This has led to a specific effect though. Now, when encountering Bourdain footage, or even excerpts of his voice (something that I can do in my head while reading any of his writing, on account of his written and spoken voice being so congruous and distinct), I am spirited to this calm and comfortable safe space in my mind. One where my grandpa’s gravelly chuckle rumbles in my ears from the chair next to mine. As a result, stories that are reminiscent of Bourdain will whisk me away similarly. First to spring to mind is Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. In the film, which is comprised of a collection of stories set to be featured in the last issue of a peculiar magazine, a food writer (played marvelously by Jeffrey Wright) is prompted to speak to why he writes about food. His response is as follows:

“There is a particular sad beauty... well-known to the companionless foreigner as he walks the streets of his adopted preferably moonlit, city. In my case, Ennui, France. I have so often... I have so often shared the day's glittering discoveries with no one at all. But always, somewhere along the avenue or the boulevard there was a table set for me. A cook, a waiter, a bottle, a glass, a fire. I chose this life. It is the solitary feast that has been very much like a comrade... my great comfort and fortification.”

I see Bourdain in that scene. I hear my grandfather. It makes me feel a very specific, very sorrowful flavor of safe. It’s a bittersweet flavor, sure. But what memory of one lost isn’t? What’s most important is the safety.

— — —

When Tala solicited my help in getting her distillery established I was already reaching for the button to say yes. Working at the bar paid meagerly, but I liked Tala. As someone who has always toyed with the idea of starting some food related business endeavor, I gravitated towards her puckish smile. To this point my sleeper had hardly found a reason to call this place home, so helping the neighborhood barkeep expand her bar felt, well, right. Simultaneously I am interacting with Emphis, a large, muscular man with circular scars lining his arms and chest. He makes noodles at his stall, which I immediately imagine are ramen-adjacent. There are few things closer to my heart than a hot bowl of ramen. Beyond the payment needed to buy a bowl of Emphis’s noodles, when the other patrons leave and it’s just you and Emphis before close (a happenstance I am deeply familiar with) Emphis prompts you to tell him a story. Outside of being a great way to allow the player to learn more about their own character, these stories play out so vividly in my brain. The smell of the stall, the noise of people walking in the street behind me as I eat, the sweaty, friendly face of the chef in front of me. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen this before. My mind flips through the common camera shots used for a street vender meal on Parts Unknown, but this time it’s my sleeper, huddled over a bowl, slurping in warm mushroomy goodness, talking to a stranger about their life. Being honest, vulnerable even. Emphis nods, takes my now empty bowl and washes it out, I wipe my greasy lips with a paper napkin, finish my glass of water, and thank him just as he starts turning lights out and sliding down a slotted metal partition.

What Gareth Damian Martin has done with their writing for this game is what I imagine most writers wish. Seemingly without effort, though I am sure a great deal of effort went into writing this, Damian Martin elicits simultaneously broad and specific imagery. Each conversation I have I can see where I am, hear the world around me, smell the vendors and the trash and the concrete and the clothing. I visit Emphis and Tala as much as I possibly can. Early in my playthrough those visits are a bit further in-between. Making money on the Eye is a complicated process, and often isn’t the kind of money that you can spend frivolously. After meeting Sabine, the Doc that sells me stabilizer, that takes precedence over a good bowl of soup. But as soon as I start to come into my own on the Eye, Emphis and his noodles become a nearly nightly occurrence, regardless of my sleeper’s need for food.

This wrinkle isn’t scarce in Citizen Sleeper. These little, affecting minuets of worldbuilding are strewn all about the Eye and discovering each one is a delightful experience. I worked as a delivery driver for a takeout, helped garden for the Hypha Commune, took on small jobs for the passing freighters. Each instance carried me further into the community of Erlin’s Eye. Each instance building out a safe space for my sleeper. For me.

As you would assume, this safe space isn’t without its conflicts. While Feng promised to help me get rid of my tracker, the tasks that I help him with take him out of action for long periods of time. Long enough periods of time that eventually a timer appears. A timer warning of the inevitable arrival of a bounty hunter, employed by Essen-Arp, surely tasked with bringing me back. Not knowing if the bounty wants my sleeper dead or alive is no small discomfort. Try as I did to get my tracker taken care of, I wasn't successful before Ethan showed up. A scruffy, blonde bounty hunter who reeked of alcohol and disregard for life. I wasn't fully sure in those first moments if that disregard was reserved for my life or included his own. Over time I would come to know. All I knew when he arrived on the Eye was that I needed to survive a little bit longer. Maybe I could get my tracker removed under his nose, hide in the lower parts of the Eye until he left. I wasn't sure how I would get away but I knew that the first step was making sure he was off my back. We struck a deal. He tendered an offer. I pay his bar tab for a few weeks and he would leave me alone.

— — —

When I was nine years old my mother got married to a man she had been dating for four months. I was nine, still becoming familiar with my own mind and body as it grew and developed. In hindsight, perhaps I should have said something, but then my family surely had tried to say something, right? It’s rare that a person comes into your life and immediately shows their hand, and narrativizing my own childhood affords me the presence of mind to notice things I couldn’t have seen fully in my youth. The first time I knew something was off was Thanksgiving, my soon to be father (though he is a step-father, my having never met my real father colored the moniker) wanted me to go to the parade with him and his sons. As extroverted as I am now, I had a lot of difficulty as a kid, doing anything away from home. Especially with people I hardly knew. I did not want to go. I remember the first friend’s house I went to spend the night at. I called my mom from the house phone at midnight, unable to sleep, demanding she come get me and bring me home. When my mom told my future dad that I didn’t want to go, he assumed she was speaking for me, rather than on my behalf. Unwilling to accept a then eight year old boy didn’t want to go to his house 40 minutes away, to go to a parade I had no attachment to, wasn't something he was willing to recognize. The argument terrified me. I snuck downstairs and interjected that I would go. In a single night I learned that if I just did what he wanted I could avoid his anger. Later I would learn the process is far more complicated than just acquiescing to his wishes. What he expected was convoluted, masked by questions without answers. Questions that, should you be asked one and be unsure of how to answer, incurred further anger. Still. I learned that appeasing him meant avoiding his wrath, in a way. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Right?

Over time, after my small family of my mom, myself, and a foster kid was upgraded to a family with two parents and four sons in the span of months, signs of cracks made themselves more clear. I remember the oldest of my now three younger brothers trying to punch me into doing what he wanted me to do. I was much bigger than him, but I remember being very confused someone so young could be so angry. I wish I could go back and talk to younger me. We probably all have that desire in some form or fashion.

As a small aside I’d like to add here that I fully and completely love my wife. Not just because she is a good wife, or mother, or partner, though those things aren’t unseen. Rather, it’s for all the things I understand are deeply specific to our situation. The things that cannot, perhaps even should not, be added to a bullet list titled “Expectations.” It’s the way she sees through the sideways smirk following the response, “I’m ok.” As if she’s seen the hand I’ve been dealt through the reflection of my sunglasses. It’s the way she wades through my attempts at obfuscating the truth with the prowess of a droopy-eared, sad-eyed basset hound. I struggled to write this piece for months. The moment I finally broke through, my joy was coupled with the mention that I would be writing about my relationship with my father to some degree. She laughed softly and turned around, leaning the small of her back against the kitchen counter, drying a bottle of milk for my son. She looked me dead in the eyes, compassionately, but with this…kind omniscience…and said, “probably why you put off writing it for so long.” Fully and completely.

It took years, nearly two decades to distance, recover, and salvage my relationship with my father. Since those early years he has atoned for a lot, but there is still a caution that precedes family events and gatherings that feels at once instinctual and learned. I know, as an adult, that I’m not the only one who battens down the hatches in preparation for Thanksgiving dinner. Ironically enough, I now deeply enjoy the parade.

— — —

I paid Ethan’s tab twice. The first time I had no trouble. I had been saving for my next dose of Stabilizer, so I could sacrifice the excess. The second time I missed the expected deadline. I remember bracing for a negative outcome, but instead the timer transitioned from a yellow count up into a red countdown. I had a few days to come up with the cash. Every other pursuit I followed took a back seat. A couple days of using my best cards to earn cash and I was able to pay off the debt. There was a brief moment of satisfaction, knowing that I had effectively done what I needed to, but that reprieve was wrenched away in a confrontation, following my settling his last tab. It was obvious from the introduction of Ethan that he was a drunk, and the last time I saw him in the Kompressor he was slouched deeply over the bar. I remembered teenage me and mustered the courage I didn’t have then to call a stop to this. Ethan laughs, drops his gun on the floor, and you're given an option: retrieve it and return it to him, or aim it at him. I hesitated less than I thought I would. Playing a game affords you the freedom to act in ways that you, in reality, often can’t. As scattered, repressed memories flew through my mind I pulled the trigger, deciding then and there that I would dictate the end of this thread. Of course the gun was empty. It’s moments like these that give Citizen Sleeper the edge. I assumed, in that moment, that my mistake was going to cost me my playthrough, but it was a risk I was fully willing to take. But instead of events turning even worse, the bartender at the Kompressor stepped in and in moments Ethan was the one on the retreat. It was one of the first moments the people of the Eye stuck up for me. It triggered something.

As this drive was reaching its conclusion I had also overstayed my welcome at Dragos’ shipyard. A job had come in for a derelict ship called the Winter Light. Something had happened to the ship, that much was made clear, and upon studying the wreckage you discover that it was attacked. But not in the bombastic way that you would assume comes with space pirates or military action. Instead it was surgically dismantled by a precision attack. Culling the details you intuit that there was a Sleeper on board and something, someone, had eliminated their target. In those last moments in the Kompressor, Ethan had found out that his contract to retrieve you had been canceled. Had I not completed the Winter Light I would have been confused, but relieved. Knowing that someone else was out there, that relief never came. Now I knew that someone else was after me, and that they were far more willing to hurt others to accomplish their task. Would my insistence to survive hurt people on the Eye?

For the next dozen cycles I carried on with my tasks, dreading what might be coming next, occasionally distracted by story moments. I helped free an AI trapped in a vending machine, confronted a malicious program living in the Eye’s network, and encountered an enigmatic being called the Gardener. My connection to Stabilizer went into the wind, as a Yatagan enforcer named Rabiah informed me that Sabine (my supplier) was up to no good. A mercenary named Ankhita requested help fixing her ship and helping her find the former crew member responsible. Compounding stresses in every direction. Simulating the gig economy, Citizen Sleeper does a tremendous job of pulling you in a half dozen directions at once. Very rarely did I start a cycle with a single objective. Every day was a game of choosing what needed my attention, what I could afford to focus on, and what I would be able to do with any efficiency. There are rhythms that you discover in this process, and as those rhythms would rise and fall, stories would trickle through the mechanics, coloring the Eye in different ways. You start, or at the very least I started to feel more and more welcome in this place. The perfect storm of love came together when I helped Tala finish the distillery at the Overlook.

I've mentioned my connection to food already. What I didn't plan on encountering was, as I completed the work needed to finish the distillery, Tala included something else with that work. A kitchen. The game does little to narrativize, at least specifically, whether or not the kitchen is for the bar proper or just more my sleeper to use. I immediately saw it as both. A place for me to cook and a place for the Overlook to have special nights that dinner is also served. Like a pop-up restaurant. In the moment that it is revealed to you exactly what she has done I remember catching my breath. I have always toyed with the idea of having a restaurant in real life, and here in this little simulation I was being gifted what I’ve kinda always wanted. My sleeper and I both responded in shock. Tala and I tested the hooch that we had made, soldiered through the powerful flavor, and then I made mushroom noodles. No doubt inspired by Emphis and our late meals and conversations. By sheer providence I had also, by this time, found my way into a garden of my own. Essential to completing ‘Emphis’ storyline, I had been growing my own mushrooms of a particular variety. When I brought him that last requested batch of mushrooms, the elusive Matsutake, Emphis turned the tables on me. Rather than asking me to share another story about myself, he shared with me. I found out where the circular scars on his arms came from. That, similar to my sleeper, he had been used by a corporation for work that took a tremendous toll on his physical body and that it had killed many of his friends and left the rest scarred like him. There was that Bourdain feeling again. Without giving me any hint at the scene, I saw a street, vendors lining the walk, steam and smoke billowing from their stalls. I heard the dull murmur of people talking, punctuated by a cluster of laughter, by a cough, by a chair scraping back from a table. It’s late, so some of the stalls are empty, some are thinning. Emphis and I, Emphis and my sleeper, sit alone in his stall, the “open” sign long since flipped off. He shares his story while I eat noodles from the last dish he has to wash.

There are moments like this tucked all across Citizen Sleeper. They are small and intimate and moving. Each one added a new fold to my sleeper’s story. Tala and Emphis gave me the first glimpse of home. Like I had made a place for myself. Like I had found people who wanted me to be around. Finally completing Feng’s quest got my tracker removed and the next cycle I just ate and worked the bar. I paused every other drive for a day. I was safe. Games like this frequently have an altered impact on people depending on the order in which they complete story heavy moments. The way things coalesced for me told a very specific story.

— — —

I’ve mentioned that I played baseball. This is a fact at this point few people who know me don’t already know. But there was always a quiet dread playing in my mind while I played ball. Perhaps dread isn’t the right word, but as a young black athlete, so many people saw me, and more importantly my body, for its performance potential. For a long time I had to bat away attempts by the high school football coach, constantly badgering me for not using my large frame to pad out his roster. I never had any intention of playing football, and so I didn't. I was fortunate, at a young age, to be able to see the lasting impact that American football had on young men’s bodies. I wanted nothing of that. To this day, twelve years after graduating high school, people still ask, “Damn man, did you play football!?” I always laugh and say no. Sometimes I just respond with, “Baseball.” To which the reaction is always a drawn out and exaggerated “whaaaaat?” Initially I took these comments at school as a form of compliment. I was, and am, very strong. That desire from football programs felt like a statement of worth. I desired the feeling of being wanted so badly I lapped it up. Now, knowing what I know about high school football programs, specifically my school’s, I have a hard time not seeing those questions as veiled attempts to exploit my young body towards someone else’s ends. It’s a tricky minefield to navigate (fully understanding that calling a minefield tricky is redundant).

Very few people in the formative years in my life asked me questions that pertained to my mind. I remember a few gatherings I was able to actually answer questions that challenged or prodded my intellect, but for the most part people just wanted to talk about my body and what it could be used for. The hunger of adult men to see my teenage body perform physical feats feels so gross now. But I also have a hard time holding it against any singular actor. So many generations have played by the same rules the problem has become fully endemic. Still, as I have matured beyond school and scholastic sports, I wrestle with the reality that the most important part of me isn’t my body. Yet the questions and jokes persist. The innocence of strangers marred by a reality that hurt my self worth.

Outside of this specific instance, I was constantly asked to do things that I shouldn’t have. In summer ball we used to rub on a rolling-ball applicator, topical anesthetic that was designed for horse joints. No lie. We used to joke about the fact that, after pitching an entire game, we could make the soreness and pain disappear in moments. The damage we all did to our elbows and shoulders is starting to hurt us now in our thirties. I tore my meniscus my senior year of high school, an injury that would forever make catching painful. But I kept catching. Because my team needed it. Because coach said that my team needed it. I know that these situations don’t all make a clear case that the adults around us wanted to exploit us. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that what happened for years was extremely exploitative. My limitations for my own children will be colored by these experiences. My body’s endurance will be colored by these experiences. I was lucky. I wasn't a kid who had to get reconstructive surgery on their elbow or shoulder. I have one friend who can’t raise his right arm over his shoulder. Two others who underwent Tommy-John surgery at 18.

I miss baseball like hell. Perhaps in some ways because it was hell.

— — —

I caught myself, in the paragraphs of this piece, attempting to walk you through every moment of my playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, and while I would love to do exactly that, I also know telling the important bits holds more value. Plus, the passage of time from my last moments with the game to now have made recollection of the in-between moments messy and inconsistent.

I helped Feng, and as a result, Feng helped me. The removal of my tracker meant two things: I was safe and I had time. So much of the game is informed by timers and decaying progress bars it was a substantial relief to be rid of the one most anxiety inducing. I helped Emphis perfect his recipes, leant him my voice and my ears, and built what felt like a lasting friendship. I helped Tala finish remodeling the Overlook, adding a distillery, earning myself a kitchen, and in turn helping a friend connect with her family's roots. When she asked about renaming the bar the Bantayan, a Tagalog word for “look-out, or “tower,” I emphatically agreed. I stand by my tweet to creator Gareth Damian Martin, I want a shirt with the Bantayan’s sign across the chest and the menu on the back. Badly. I have a friend who runs his own hat shop. I may commission a hat.

During and immediately following these storylines I encountered NEOVEND, a vending machine that had been made the home of a refugee AI. All throughout Citizen Sleeper, until you deal with it, there is a predatory program stalking the hackable submap beneath the world map. Each time you hack a node you draw more attention from this “creature.” Passing each threshold prompts you with a new encounter, as the creature becomes more aware of your presence. NEOVEND’s quest sees you freeing the AI into this flowing current of artificial consciousnesses undulating in the Greenway. As part of this mission you also dismantle the creature haunting the net and meet a steward-like AI called The Gardener. This would lead to the first ending I got, “Warmth and Light.” After working in the Greenway and establishing my own garden I met Riko, an older woman who worked in the Hypha Commune’s gardens. When I got to this point I had done all that I have mentioned so far, so when The Gardener propositioned me with the opportunity to make myself one with the current of artificial minds, I couldn’t help but look out onto all I had done for Tala and Emphis and feel like leaving was the wrong thing to do. I had helped people find a home, and in the process was stumbling my way into finding my own. When I returned from my delve into the network, awaking with Riko’s hand clasped in my own, the sadness on her face (she knew, in that moment, the decision I had made) caused me to pause. I had done the right thing, right? The opportunity I was offered did sound like an escape, but I didn't feel that escape was appropriate. There were people that still needed help. And I could help them right? And what would Tala think if I never returned?

Throughout Citizen Sleeper you are confronted with this, very personally familiar, feeling to help. But the game is constantly reminding you there isn’t infinite time. You want to do all you can to help those who need it, but the reality is you only have so much you can give. You collect things in your inventory and then somebody will ask for it. You save up just enough for you next dose of Stabilizer and then you need to buy resources to finish a job. The game is content to constantly challenge you, to constantly push against your walls. Are these things for me? Should I use them to help others? What happens if I don’t have enough the next time I need it? The same persistent question bleeds into how you spend your time, the games most valuable resource. I had spent my time, hours at this point, helping make Erlin’s Eye a better place. Could I leave that behind now?

— — —

Living in the Midwest is…interesting. While St. Louis is a “big” city, if you have frequented other big cities you quickly discover St. Louis is not all that large. We’ve all encountered someone who acts bigger than they are. Not a personality type I try to find myself in the presence of very often. The Lou is that. Small town with a big town’s hat on. Musicians come during the week, there are very few direct flights out of Lambert, the downtown is strange and hollow, and suburbia sprawls away from the sparse skyline like tipped-over poker chips. As a creative, more pointedly as a game journalist and aspiring developer, the possibilities for networking are very nearly nonexistent. There are studios here, yes, but when they hire they have very specific needs, and I’ve never seen anyone look for a writer.

It’s been a strange eight years, since moving back after college, an experience I stumbled my way through. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I got to college. Baseball was the initial pursuit, but as that fell through I attempted to refocus on my academics. Not surprisingly, the lack of my parents and coaches leaning over my shoulders to check my grades meant I quickly became an ineffectual student. I skipped class relatively frequently, stayed up too late, and rarely considered homework worth my time. These are all things I’m not supremely proud of at year thirty, but also things I don’t blame myself too much for. I understood school then as a prerequisite for sports, a gateway that I had to pass through to enable what I actually enjoyed. As soon as that goal was erased and redrawn, I held a more than slightly contentious view of academics. Coupled with the discovery that I wanted to write about games, outside of journalism and writing classes, I often couldn’t give less of a shit. Shout out to Dr. Estabrook and our Philosophy of Science Fiction class for being one of my fondest memories from that time. Now I constantly debate myself about the ethical quandary of teaching game design at a university. I understand the instruction is important, even foundational for my students. But I also can’t help but feel like universities cost far too much and some of the best tools for learning exist for free on the internet.

I have tumbled around jobs since I started working in high school. To this day I have never been in any workplace a full calendar year. When I tripped my way into my first game studio I had written a couple pieces about them (a trick I would repeat later) and found myself in a position to offer my skills as development was nearing its final stages. They were good people. They currently are good people. I do believe that, though my memory and my emotional brain refuses to let me say it too often. Working on that game was a blast and a nightmare all at once. It was late stage scrambling from day one. A project with far too much money invested in it over time, with very little promise of return. The game would only sell a couple thousand copies, a resounding defeat financially. I remember hearing later that the founders had blamed the kid who ran their social media for part of the flop. Having known the kid, I couldn’t disagree more. But when you are too close to something for too long, I know the type of justification the brain finds. The game industry is rife with stories of failure. Here I was at ground zero of one, without any of the long term investment. I imagine the feeling is broadly similar to the feeling of a nurse coming onto a shift hours before a patient passes away. You take a look at the situation and do what you can, but when everything transpires what can you do but put your hands in your pockets and try to comfort those impacted the most.

They asked me to bill them for the work I did. I skimmed some blogs and forums to see the going rate for the work that I did, knew immediately I couldn’t ask for that much, and gave them a small sum. They undercut it by two hundred dollars and threw in a sweater. No explanation. I didn't ask for one. Six months later they would let me go from their coffee shop after cutting my pay in half three months earlier. They told me they felt like I was working with one foot out the door. I couldn’t find the eloquence to explain why I couldn’t continue to work for so little with a six month old at home. I did ask for an explanation that time. I was told it was a “business decision” and that “I was meant to do bigger and better things” and that I should “take this time to pursue those.” I do believe they are good people. I know they believe that too.

— — —

The first storyline that deeply saddened me came from my interactions with Ankhita. A mercenary without a contract, taking a load off, who’s ship had been sabotaged in port. She was confident it was a member of her crew, I needed the credits. I helped her restore her ship and suss out who the culprit was. On the Eye, there aren’t any other Sleepers. The nature of their employment makes coming across them in the wild a rarity, a point made abundantly clear by the odd looks and clear (and sometimes acted upon) desire to touch and feel my Sleeper’s body. An exotic experience for the regular person, I’m sure. As a black man, I had become familiar, even begrudgingly tolerant of of people asking if they could feel my hair. Of looks I got while walking into a restaurant, with or without my white wife. I have always stood out, be it because of my skin color or my size.

Ankhita’s shipmate had fallen in love with a Sleeper. The Sleeper was dying. As a last resort the crew mate had stolen Ankhita’s shipmind and sought to use it to revive, perhaps just prolong, the Sleeper. There is no way to avoid the confrontation that takes place when you find them, hiding away in the Greenway. If you call it in, Ankhita shows up. If you keep it to yourself, you find out later that Ankhita was tracking you anyway. You come across this scene of Sleeper, hooked into a shipmind, a disheveled man fearfully looking on, hoping, praying that their actions will prove to be of some kind of help. Ankhita is upset. She has been out of a working ship, missing a crew mate, and driven to her wit’s end trying to figure it all out. When she shows up the mindset she carries with her is one of aggravation and aggression. You can try all you want to prevent disaster, but inevitably Ankhita fires her already leveled gun, the shipmind comes unplugged, and in an instant a room with four lives is reduced to a room with two.

I don’t think I blamed Ankhita for what happened. Not in the way you would blame someone who came into a situation having already made up their mind. The verbal exchange was wrought with misunderstanding and mistrust. The crew mate did draw their weapon. They did steal from Ankhita. There aren’t really cops, per se, in Citizen Sleeper, though you could argue the Yatagan faction and the remnants of Havenage are acting as police in their own way, but Law Enforcement with a capital L and E is nonexistent. Ankhita operates from a position of power. She is trained in the use of and has used her weapon, I imagine, many times. When she stumbles into a situation she doesn’t understand, with a being she isn’t comfortable being around, she reacts brashly. My Sleeper exited the ruined building, their head hung. I couldn’t help but think, I have seen this situation before. Armed enforcer encounters situation, fails to fully understand said situation, and in and with a flash, a bang, lives are extinguished. Though extinguished is too sanitary a term. Fire extinguishers aren’t wrong for doing their job. What Ankhita did wasn't merely extinguishing a hazard. It was the snuffing out of a light, a tearing out of pages.

She tried to pay me for my help. I was deeply grateful the game let me choose to allow the coin to fall through my hands to the dirt. I couldn’t take money from someone like that, for participating in an event so needless, again.

— — —

America is riddled with gun violence. A sentence that is both illustrative and descriptive. It’s interesting that so many describe it as an epidemic. Because epidemics, pathologically, are largely the result of how people live. When a contagion is loose in a community with tight personal spaces and undulating public spaces, they spread all the more efficiently. Describing gun violence as an epidemic accidentally does all the leg work of explaining, at least pathologically, why it occurs. I don’t believe it is the result of people’s evil nature, or whatever moralistic bullshit people like to spit from their recliners. It’s the result of environment. Lack of good employment, lack of nutritious food, lack of parks and recreation centers, saturation of tobacco and alcohol marketing. We call it an epidemic because we know what epidemics look like.

When the disease spreads to your law enforcement one can achieve truly extraordinary levels of despondence. The last decade in the United States is littered with bodies left by our police. Last year a friend of mine had a depressive episode and their family called the police. They had taken a knife from the kitchen and were threatening to take their life. The first officer that responded drew his gun almost immediately. Cornered, threatened, and in an unstable mental state, my friend ran towards the office and was shot several times. Miraculously, they survived. But I couldn’t help but analyze the situation to pieces. Why did the officer pull his gun before choosing his taser? Why wasn't the situation, which had to have been relayed, played more cautiously? Why did this have to happen this way? I know the victim, I know who they are, I know that they are a good person that was deeply troubled in that moment. The only conclusion that I could come to was this situation was another instance of an officer who didn’t fully understand what was happening and in a flash, almost destroyed a human life.

When I was a senior in high school one of my brothers was a junior and another was a sophomore. The second oldest, in our family, the junior, started to venture down some questionable paths. I don’t think that it was the result of poor parenting, though there are always mistakes that can be made. It almost assuredly was the result of shoddy friends and their influence. My brother and I grew up playing on the same baseball team. He hit second and I hit third. For years, you could rely on the fact that he would get on base, steal his way into scoring position, and I would drive him in. We had a dynamic then. By high school we had lost it. I had my circle of friends and he had his.

One day I passed him in the hallway. He was joking and meandering with some friends, and he was drinking a Gatorade. From a distance, an innocuous situation. When I got close enough, however, I could tell that something had been added to the bottle of Gatorade. I brushed it off and told myself I would talk to him later that night, at home. Before I could pass them though, I saw him passing the bottle to underclassmen. I couldn’t stand for that, but I also had things to do, so rather than confront him myself I went to our “Resource Officer,” Officer Jones and told him what was going on. I think in that moment I assumed it would just be dealt with by a quick intervention, a discarding of the bottle and its contents, and stern talking to. Officer Jones followed him to his locker, which turned out to actually be the locker of a friend of mine. The alcohol was there. My brother ended up expelled. My friend ended up suspended.

The domino effect of events that would follow essentially deprived me of a brother. After his expulsion he was required to complete a rehabilitation program. I remember being surprised by this. He was a seventeen year old kid who made a mistake, not an alcoholic or miscreant. Did he get up to no good? Of course he did. We were high school kids, it’s what we did. He refused to fully participate in the rehab he was enrolled in, and my parents refused to let him come back home until he finished. He started another, but as you can imagine, hearing your parents say you can’t come home can have an effect on a young mind. He dropped out of the program again, my parents didn't let him come home, and seemingly overnight my brother was living with a foster family thirty miles away, going to another high school. He never lived at home again.

I constantly hold myself responsible for this series of events. If only I hadn’t been so caught up in my own shit, I may have actually stepped in and been his big brother. Instead I shrugged that responsibility onto a police officer who didn't understand the situation fully. He reacted brashly. A life was removed from my home. The week after reporting it, Officer Jones summoned me to his office. He pulled cash out of an envelope labeled “Crime Stoppers” and paid me $36.50. I accepted it and went to my next class without thinking about it. I will always hate that I got paid for what would come to happen to my brother. I promised myself I would never take money from someone like that again.

— — —

I didn't see Ankhita again for a long time. I understood. I didn't exactly want to see her again. The whole situation was so raw and I was just so powerless. I hated it. I spent the next couple dozen cycles interacting with Yatagan, a faction that enforced the Lowend. From a distance I had seen them and heard them described as a gang, but Rabiah, the enforcer I met, asked me to spend some time with them. To actually take the time to see them for who they were. In the time I spent with them I came to understand them. Like so many others on the Eye, they were just trying to forge a better future for themselves and those around them. They were being led by, what I would come to discover, was essentially a corpse being controlled by some far off Corpo, but after helping them deal with that, I could see they were who they believed they were. This quest also helped to iron out my issue with the supplier of Stabilizer I had found early in the game. Fortunately, I had found a sustainable alternative in the in-between. The result of working with Riko and the Gardener.

For the most part, Citizen Sleeper is content with letting things work out in the end. There is a chance that a large portion of my adoration is based on this. There are things that break bad, sure, but by and large, the people and factions you interact with really want nothing more than to live their lives in peace. In safety. There was a cynical thread in my mind that wanted to poke holes in this constructed universe, but the larger part of my mind is convinced of the same things. I guess I can thank my family, and Anthony Bourdain, for that. No matter where I have gone, no matter who I have interacted with in life, I find people who just want to be content. They want to afford a place to live, to eat out occasionally, to watch good movies and shows, listen to good music, and find love. In Citizen Sleeper I was finding that, for my Sleeper, and by extension for myself. I remember the last time I visited the Kompressor, only to find out that Ethan, my former bounty hunter, had disappeared. My Sleeper and I wondered silently if they had drank themselves to death or just decided to depart and find another hole to drink in. My Sleeper and I both decided that we didn't care. Better to let drinking dogs drink.

What remained was a long term solution for employment. And because Citizen Sleeper is so carefully constructed, right at this moment I met Bliss and Moritz. The two were running a salvage dock in the center of Erlin’s Eye. With nothing else to do really, I found myself putting all my resources toward helping keep Bliss’s dock on schedule, earning them future contracts, and then making sure they could make good on those contracts. It was gratifying work, and in short time an ending presented itself. Their last big job was refitting Ankhita’s ship. Creator Gareth Damian Martin wrote every moment of this game with real care and precision. Ankhita’s return was anxious and awkward. I forgave them for what had happened, but also made it clear that I wasn't looking to rebuild a lasting friendship. What had transpired was just too real to lived experience. And how could my Sleeper erase watching a Sleeper’s life ended right in front of them.

I helped work on Ankhita’s ship and Bliss approached me just before the job was complete. Ankhita had offered her a trip off of the Eye, something that in the early game I might have considered, but now, with all that I had done, I passed on without thought. Plus I took a liking to Moritz, the nervous mechanic that Bliss had given a job after she caught him trying to steal from her shop. The kid was straightening out, and I wasn't going to leave him to run the shop all on his own. So Moritz and I sent Bliss and Ankhita on their way and I promised Moritz that I would be close at hand, should he need any help holding the shop down.

— — —

As an adult, there are decisions that one has to make. Often those decisions are small and largely inconsequential. But inevitably there will come times where the choice you make is lived with for years to come. Because of the environment I was raised in, I tend to consider my adulthood as starting far earlier than for many of my peers. One of the first decisions I made, at a very young age, came in the formation of my relationships. At home and outside of school, I became accustomed to a very particular brand of religious obligation. A lot of the people I knew were, for lack of a better term, obligatorily friendly. I fully understand this as the calculation of a young mind, obviously some of those people were genuine in their care and attention. But the stench of implied friendship and performative intimacy wafted into my nose early. It comes across in a playbook of questions, a repeated form of engagement, an unmistakable inquisitorial stance that in the moment might feel like small talk, but upon retrospection feels far more like a self-defined checklist of all the things you should say.

When I made friends in high school I sought people who bent opposite of those directions. I became astute at sussing out sincerity. To this day, many of the real friends I made in those years remain. Most notably my wife, whom I started dating when we were both freshman, fifteen years old. In short time she would witness what my home life could look like and how it impacted me, but she didn't miss a beat. Her family held their caution briefly, but quickly that fell away as well. They were good people to me then. They are good people to me now. I have already mentioned that my wife is the kind of partner that sees right through the bullshit to the truth of what is going on. It is a talent she has had a great deal of time to perfect. It has also been the longest ongoing reminder that when I go with my gut, trust what feels right and then concentrate energy, I know what is worthwhile.

It hasn’t always been perfect, my decision making. In 2012 I bought a motorcycle, my first personal vehicle. I bought the first bike I tried. A 2004 Suzuki V-Strom DL1000. I would eventually grow to love that bike, but by the time I did I also knew that it was a terrible bike to start with. The seat was thirty-four inches high, making its center of gravity a great deal higher than most motorcycles, and during the test ride I dropped it shattering the front right turn indicator. I felt bad. So I bought it. Later in life I would make similar snap decisions in large situations. Sometimes because I mistrusted my gut, other times because I felt obligated. Expectations are a dastardly device.

After I graduated college, my now wife and I separated for about three months. My life felt like it was in a spiral and I wasn't sure how to regain control of anything, so I decided to move out of my parents house, into my grandparents house, and start the process of working to live on my own. That was in June. By the end of August my wife and I were looking for an apartment to share. On the Fourth of July she had come down to visit, and I distinctly remember the lack of anxiety felt while I was next to her. My whole life had become this blurry path I had no idea how to traverse, and when she was near me again, it wasn't that I could see clearly again, but rather I didn't care that I didn't know what was next.

When my parents found out that I planned to move in with her, I was confronted by a familiar scent. To make a long, and laborious conversation short, I was told that “it wasn't right.” That we should, “just get married.” My response of, “I don’t want to make people mad,” was met with, “You don’t have to worry about making us mad, we’re you’re parents. We will always love you. You have to worry about making God mad.” Sometimes life gives you a chance to see the forest and the trees. That conversation ended there. What followed was a six month period where my parents essentially didn't talk to me. “If I come see your apartment, I will have to see where you guys sleep.” Yeah ok…fuck it. Don’t come down then.

Over the next four years, this event would discolor the lenses I saw the world with. In Jordan Peele’s NOPE, the protagonist OJ asks his sister the question, “What do you call a bad miracle? They have a word for that?” It’s a frustratingly simple line that encompasses so much of my young adult life. I would take jobs that would turn sour, only to open opportunities to better jobs that would end abruptly. My grandfather would suddenly pass, leaving the family with a massive hole punched through it. And I would make a series of knee jerk decisions that, despite lacking much introspection, would turn out alright. MY wife and I got married, relatively quickly after we moved in together. I wanted to talk to my fucking mom. We got a dog, because what does a recently married couple of eight years do? A year later we got pregnant, because it was the next item on the list. I bought a car the same summer, first one I tested. Two years later we bought a house, first one we looked at. Throughout all of these momentous decisions there was hardly an emotional reaction evoked by either my wife and myself. We just did what was expected. And the expected, practiced responses we got from family and friends reminded me of why I left the church. The “happy” that people felt for us felt just so…obligatory. During lockdown my wife and I verbalized this realization to each other in essentially the same conversation. We were tired of doing what people expected of us.

— — —

I put off the construction of the Sidereal until the last moments of my playthrough of Citizen Sleeper. I had an inclination that it would conclude with an offer to leave the Eye and I had long forgone leaving as an option. I was making a life here. Throughout my playthrough, I had made the decisions I wanted to make, and as a result I was building, had built, a life for my Sleeper. One that included friends, safety, peace, and stealthily provoked sense of fellowship with the other citizens of Erlin’s Eye. But with literally nothing else to do, I dove into the pursuit of completing the Sidereal Drive. And it would be here, by no coincidence, I would have my most impactful interaction with a pair of NPCs in the entire game. It was here I met Mina and Lem.

It is interesting to think back after finishing this game. Had I done Sidereal sooner, my decision process would have undeniably been different, and while I’m not sure how different it would have been, I know that where this quest met me, I had already drawn strong conclusions of the world I inhabited. Mina and Lem were a daughter and her father, just trying to make a life. Lem was constantly disheveled and obviously tired, a pair of traits I am specifically familiar with, having children of my own. It wasn't hard to imagine the stress and anxiety Lem felt, raising this little girl by himself, in this place. The owner of a frequently over-active imagination, I constantly have daymares of what life would look like should something happen to my wife. I shudder deeply every time the thought crosses my mind. The empathy I felt for them was deep and immediate. But having done everything else on the Eye to this point, I had a sense of how all this was going to play out well before the turning events took place.

Of course, as we neared completion of the Sidereal, a lottery was introduced to see who would be allowed passage on it. Of course it would turn out this lottery was rigged and that none of the laborers were actually on the list. Because I was free of obligations, I had willingly offered to take care of Mina when Lem put in extra hours to try and find a way onto the ship for them. I slowly broke through this little girl’s misgivings of her daddy’s robot-man friend. I saw myself in Lem, should my life take an unthinkable turn. I would want to have someone I could depend on. In Citizen Sleeper I could be that person. When you find out that Mina isn’t actually his daughter, but a kid whose parents died, or were lost, or whatever other myriad things could have happened to them, and that he stepped up and took her in when she had no one, I told myself I would do anything to make sure they were ok.

The Sidereal project ended up being a wash. Sure we finished the ship, no one who worked on it was given passage. It was and off the books project for a Corpo distant from the Eye, who wanted to build their little pet project without the inquisitive eyes of other monied parties. I hoped there was a way that I could find them passage, even forge it, and my desire was met with a mysterious man named Castor, an enigmatic individual playing chess in an alley in the Lowend. Castor claimed there was a way to forge passes for the Sidereal and I leapt at the opportunity. I had to make this work for Lem and Mina. Not because they expected it of me, but because I knew it to be right. Because I wanted to get that little girl and her dad somewhere she could see a sunrise. Somewhere she would be able to feel the percussion of rain on her face.

— — —

Drawing closer to ending this piece, I have this silly sense of dread creeping up on me. I started it back in May, about a week after the release of Citizen Sleeper. I knew that my experience with the game was special. That it had left and indelible impression in my brain. I had no worldly clue the depths of my life it would churn up and make me put on display here in this piece. It’s wild and scary and feels a bit like I have exposed a part of myself I actively seek to keep less visible. Coincidentally this is exactly the reason I knew I had to make sure I kept writing. I rarely get the chance to review games in a manner that would prove timely for people seeking to validate a purchase in those first days of release. So instead I seek to illustrate how games impact me emotionally. I don’t think I have ever done as well as I have here. Of course I’m biased, but if I go with my gut…I feel good about this.

In college I had the fortune to come across a commencement speech given by Neil Gaiman one night while scrolling aimlessly through YouTube. Without detailing the whole speech there is a moment, a sort of call to action near the end, where he urges the kids of this art institute to be honest in their work. He says, “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.” This piece has been that for me. In reality most of my pieces that I publish about games echo this statement. I’ve written about playing FAR: Lone Sails and the feeling of moving on after the loss of my grandfather. I wrote about playing Florence in an ICU waiting room days before he died and how that game offered a window into the struggle my grandmother went through after his passing. I wrote about Forza Horizon 4 and how driving around, learning my cars, let me have the space to encounter and overcome a depressive bout. And I wrote about how a single, random handoff of a copy of Skyrim caused me to forget my plans to take my own life. I find it therapeutic to play games, and I have learned to extend that therapy to my writing. Citizen Sleeper became a sort of master key to a lot of emotional knowledge I had cooped up in my brain. For this reason I am extremely grateful for Gareth Damian Martin and what they created.

— — —

When Castor revealed his true intentions, the reason he would help me get Lem and Mina onto the Sidereal, I didn't really double take or gasp. He revealed that he had bugged me, so when I went with them I could report back to him, whether I was willing or not, on the actions of the corporation that owned the Sidereal. It was this moment of acute clarity. I had spent all this time making a life on the Eye. I had endeavored to make a safe place for my sleeper, free of watchful, hunting eyes, and full of people who were striving to make a better place for themselves and the people around him. I knew in that moment that I wouldn’t be getting Lem and Mina on that ship. Through Castor I learned that it was just another ploy by a hyper-capitalist regime to extend its reach beyond its current holding. That the passengers would just go on to found another corporate city. It was just another business decision that cared little for the lives it was controlling and more about the product it could create. But the Eye had escaped. This place was no longer under the yoke of an absent overlord.

When I got the tickets I had a moment of hesitation. Castor had forged passes for all three of us and I was on my way to give them to Lem and Mina, on my way to show that all our hard work hadn’t been for nothing. I paused outside their door and looked at the passes in my hand. What am I doing? I know what this will lead to for them. How can I let them go?

So I didn't. I crumpled the passes and let them drop into a grate in the floor.

When Lem opened the door he asked me what was wrong. I prepared to tell him what I had done. But before I could confess, I read what Gareth Damian Martin had written. Lem was making it ok. He had found work that was consistent and paid the bills. Mina had started going to a school and was making friends. Both of them looked softer, calmer, happier. I kept my decision to myself. Telling Lem that I was sorry but that I couldn’t figure out how to get them on the Sidereal. He nodded sadly, but in the way someone hangs their head when they want the other person to know they appreciate the effort, but they had made their minds up to be happy where they are.

In my mind, Lem found work in Moritz’s machine shop. I would have connected the two of them. If I couldn’t always be there, Lem would. He and Moritz would run that shop the best that they could, and if they ever needed help there was another pair of hands always ready. In the cycles that followed, I would make noodles and help Tala, but I always left myself with enough energy and dice to go check on Lem and Mina. I imagined my sleeper helping her with her school work while Lem cleaned up after work. The little robot-man was a friend to Mina now. Someone that she looked forward to seeing. I made this place a home for me, but now it could be a place for others.

— — —

For the last decade I have struggled with chronic depression. In that time I have become accustomed to the signs of its approach. It isn’t nearly as predictable as I would like to be, but it is still, nevertheless, something I can feel. As a young parent, sometimes these waves are scary and unpredictable, but each one feels more and more as if it is preparing me to be useful for my children in the future. For a long time the future was something that I didn't have any confidence in.

As a child, we all think about what we want to be when we grow up. We project our minds far into the unknown to imagine ourselves happy, doing what we always dreamed of doing. In 2020 I realized I didn't know what my life looked like ten years into the future. Before I always had an idea of where I was headed but the uncertainty of the world stained those visions with shadows and doubt. At times I debated if I would even make it that far. A lot of these thoughts crept in watching the world struggle to push forward. In those days, and most of the days since, it has been difficult to know if where I am is safe. Like clockwork, each time I fear for my own safety or the safety of my children, without failure my family, friends, and people around me remind me that I am not alone. That we are making a home together. A home that branches across neighborhoods, a home that moves with us as we go about our day.

This has created a new, strange sense in me. A voice that tells me, it's going to be ok. That hurdles will come, inevitably, but they will be surmountable. I’ve become comfortable with the knowledge that I am doing all that I need to be to make sure my children grow up with opportunity. With safety. With love.

— — —

If you had told me when I sat down to write this, on May 17th, 2022, that it would turn into what it did, I would have likely shaken my head. Though I couldn’t have said it was impossible. When I rolled credits on Citizen Sleeper for the last time, I remember sitting in silence for nearly an hour, just scrolling up and down the Eye, making sure there was nothing left to do. I would think about my time with it for more than a week before I was able to even begin to think about what I would write, and once I did start writing, it was immediately clear this would be unlike anything I had written before. Four and a half months after completing the game, I still hold it atop my list of my favorite games of all time. There is something special about the way it lets you interact with its world, its people. The system that Gareth Damian Martin created, the way you are forced to deal with life as it comes, is special, and real to me. Each day I woke up and got a bad roll of the dice I felt it in my bones. Because I have woken up with things to do, but no real ability to do them. The same principle works in reverse. Sometimes I had all the best dice rolls in the world, but I didn't really have anything to do. It’s such a simple system, but the way it emulates life, working in a gig economy, and trying to split your time between desires and necessities is bold and painfully accurate.

I check in on my sleeper from time to time. Popping open the game, just to salvage some scrap, work on a hauler in the dry docks, make some noodles at the Bantayan, and then hang out with Lem and Mina. I narrativize my trips to Moritz’s shop as days he needs a little extra help with a tricky contract. Sometimes I don’t do anything but play games in the Lowend, eat at Emphis’s stall, and feed the stray cat that lives in my apartment. For the longest time I didn't know what the future looked like for my Sleeper. Now I know I can figure it out, because I have made this network of friends. Of humans I care about.

In the fall Damian Martin began releasing episodes of an expansion that focus on a refugee crisis. People fleeing their former lives are being kept out of the Eye by a blockade and you come into contact with a few folks trying to get them supplies. Getting involved wasn't a debate for me in the slightest. On the Eye, no one is illegal. My resources are theirs. I will make sure I do all I can to bring them what they need until the moment I can give them a home here. It’s what Tala and Emphis and Feng and Sabine and Bliss and Riko did for me. To not return the favor would be a dereliction of my duty.

I’m not sure what else to say. Sometimes a work of art is more than just a work of art to a person. Sometimes it sneaks into your life at precisely the right moment. I know people who played Citizen Sleeper and loved it. I’m not sure they had the same response I did, but they came away from it with a deep appreciation for what it had to say. I needed something the day I sat down to play this. I wasn't sure then what it was. I’m not sure now, despite writing this, I know exactly what it was. But I found it.

Games have this incredible ability to give us the chance to live through another’s shoes as presented by someone else’s mind. As an expression of art, games give people opportunities they couldn’t dream of having in life, all the while connecting themselves to emotional tissue within us. Citizen Sleeper is this work of art covered in modular barbs, sticking out in every which way, asking its players to find ways to attach themselves to it. As I stepped away from it I knew I had hooked myself into it in so many places that it would always hold a place in my mind. What a pleasant surprise. In looking for something to play I stumbled across a new lens to view my own life. I stumbled across a path to finding home.

For more: I had the opportunity to speak with Gareth last week and the conversation was absolutely amazing. I don’t want to give too much away, just go have a listen. Two hours of genuinely incredible conversation.

@LubWub
~Caleb

Citizen Sleeper and Finding a Home