| Description |
This paper will be centered around the 2022 video game Citizen Sleeper. As an art-object, Citizen Sleeper is a setting for the player to explore precarity and mutual aid through game design and narrative. My thesis will delve into the multimodal ways Citizen Sleeper serves as an interpreter. The game interprets the literary genres of cyberpunk and sci-fi, it interprets neoliberalism and Anna Tsing's possibilities of life-supporting systems within capitalist ruins, and it interprets the experience of the game developer, Gareth Damien Martin, into a text about a path through all of it-modernity, neoliberalism, cyberpunk-to a life after, daring to show what that life could look like. It argues that hybridity between states of being, human and nonhuman, community and individuality, nature and man, mushrooms and computers, can convey the precarity of life within capitalist ruins. This thesis will specifically study the way that Citizen Sleeper expresses precarity through its narrative and game design, and how this idea is thematically and literally linked with rhizomatic motifs (from cyberspace to communes) as its counterpoint. The modes of analysis this paper will use are 1) close reading of both textual elements and artistic elements such as character art, and 2) game design analysis with respect to narrative. Many game design elements have strong either explicit or implicit effects on the themes of Citizen Sleeper. There are a multitude of game design elements to discuss, but the most prominent are the dice-based game cycle's relation to precarity, the "cyberspace vision" ability of the Sleeper, and the emergent narrative possibility that comes from all the game design choices in dialogue with each other and the narrative of the game. The study of Citizen Sleeper and the game's discussion of themes of precarity will be contextualized in the diverse array of texts that have influenced it. A key influence is Anna Tsing's book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, a commentary on how the unique social, economic, and cultural dynamics at work in the societies of matsutake pickers in the Pacific Northwest represents possibilities in the periphery of 21st century capitalism. Tsing argues that precarity is a state commonly seen as undesirable, but which may lead to salvation in community and mutual aid. In dialogue with her book, Citizen Sleeper builds a world where players can experience this dynamic. |
