I recently played the excellent Citizen Sleeper and I want to highlight two specific moments in it and what that means for games in this space, which I’m going to loosely call the ludic novel. Very loosely, this category includes The Quiet Sleep, Cultist Simulator, Signs of the Sojourner and maybe Sunless Sea as well as Citizen Sleeper. These are games that are centered around the stories they tell but mediated through system-based gameplay. Citizen Sleeper is a gritty game but there were two specific betrayals that cut me deep in the game and I wanted to break them down and show how they define player interaction in this genre.

The Sidereal Horizon

The Sidereal Horizon was a colony ship built on the Hub. I worked hard to get that ship running. Every dya, I would go over there, do some computer work with my good dice, get my money and watch the progress bar tick further to completion. I was sure that this was the way out. I thought that this was going to be the ending for the diligent player, that player that just shows up and does what they’re told. So, I made my decisions accordingly. I spent time helping people out in the hub and tying up loose ends and watching my money dwindle as anyway I wouldn’t be able to take it with me. I was sure that the game’s script would result in me, Lem and Mina all winning the lottery for tickets on the ship.

Instead, the lottery was rigged and none of us were even in the running for a ticket and I was left with an empty stomach, a decaying body and a very thin wallet. This feeling of desperation, of needing to scrabble together enough money to keep going after I thought that I was done, that’s what gave the betrayal weight. When a twist of this sort happens in a novel or a movie, it is always a little flimsy because the money is not a hard number. In Citizen Sleeper, I will just lose if I run out of money and the story will end in failure. The systems are concrete and that concreteness interacts with the narrative in ways that are difficult to replicate in other media.

Ankhita

I trusted Ankhita from the minute I first saw her. I’m just used to being able to trust that archetype in the media that uses it and it ended with another Sleeper being killed. At that point, I had a lot of sympathy for the struggle of the Sleeper and I would also have stolen a shipmind to keep one alive. This storylet worked so well simply because it was well plotted and well written. I would have found it a strong chapter of a science fiction novel. We can sometimes get caught up in the mechanics when analysing games, but the writing does matter and this section worked so well simply because it was written well. Technique matters.

Ludic novels are not visual novels. The mechanics play too much of a role for them to be lumped together. Neither are they really RPGs which sharply cleave mechanics and narrative. Much of the ludic novel is in the intersection of the two and so approaching them as a visual novel or an RPG is to do them a disservice. Hopefully, this illustrates how to better take them on their own terms.