Citizen Sleeper 2: Philosophy of Failure

Context

I’m starting this piece with a question that came to me during my first few hours of play in the franchise’s second installment:

“Why am I so afraid of failure in Citizen Sleeper 2?”

[This article spoils elements of the Citizen Sleeper 2 story.]

Failure

Negative result of an attempt or undertaking, lack of success; defeat, failure, setback.

In video games

Failure has always been an integral part of video games, at least since their commercial beginnings in the arcade. Due to technical constraints and the need to squeeze every last penny out of players, games were short and difficult, with frequent deaths. With the arrival of home consoles, we had to learn how to define a game structure to suit this new video game consumerism. Longer levels and games, more in-depth storytelling, lower difficulty – I’m not going to go through the whole story again. Failure, on the other hand, has remained the same: the famous “Game over”, “You Died”, ‘Busted’, “You are Dead” from Resident Evil or “Abandon all Hope” in Devil May Cry IV. It still means the end of the game, but it’s no longer synonymous with starting the game all over again. With the advent of memory cards and the end of the arcade, games are no longer designed to impose exaggerated difficulty to increase their lifespan, or their profitability. In both cases, failure takes the form of an invitation to start again. Repeat the same mission, the same level, the same race; and thus, overcome the obstacle that posed the problem. There’s nothing definitive about failure. Generally speaking, video games don’t hold failure back; they simply set us back on the road to victory. Please note that when I talk about failure, I’m talking about the goal that the game gives the player, not the goal that the player sets when faced with a game (maximum difficulty, no hit, speedrun…).

Attempts have been made to better integrate failure into video games, to give it a new importance. Some genres, such as Rogue like and lite and Die and Retry, have even made it their core mechanic, pushing us to progress through our countless deaths. Permadeath modes also add to the feeling of failure, forcing us to complete the game without dying once. Some have tried to penalize the player who dies; FromSoftware’s games and their experience system are a perfect example. Death is accompanied by the loss of the game’s only essential resource, leaving the player with a single opportunity to recover it. This mechanic plays on our stress and creates a real momentary tension: who hasn’t squeezed their buttocks in Elden Ring when the time came to fetch a few hundred thousand runes lost in a hostile zone? Finally, others choose to embrace failure, to let us lose, to integrate it fully into the game. I’m talking about RPGs, and Citizen Sleeper 2 is one of them.

Failure in Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper 2 has a very particular philosophy when it comes to failure. Like humanity adrift at sea, it’s omnipresent in the universe, and we’re confronted with it at every roll of the dice. Every action renders failure probable, hovering over our heads like a sword of Damocles. With a simple throw of the dice, we can miss out on great rewards, an encounter, a new quest and new solutions for survival. What makes failure sometimes cruel is that Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game that leaves no turning back. Where genre tenors such as Baldur’s Gate 3 allow you to make quick saves and rewind at the slightest unfavorable decision or consequence, thus annihilating the importance of choice, Citizen Sleeper 2 simply moves forward. It overwrites our saves with every action, with every roll of those famous dice. This system forces us first to think carefully about what we’re going to do with our cycle, taking into account the randomness of the 5 daily dice, and then to take responsibility for each of our choices and actions, which also depend on the favor of the dice. These daily dice bring a new dimension to the game, that of simply having a bad day, when you wake up with 5 dice of 1, you know that today you won’t accomplish much. Literally, these are cycles of failure. In this society depicted by Gareth Damian Martin, at the height of Uberization, every cycle is decisive, and a single bad day can have disastrous consequences. These parameters mean that failure can sometimes be hard to swallow. Between bad rolls of the dice at the start of a cycle, bad choices on our part and the randomness of probabilities, everything suggests that fate is momentarily against us.

Even more difficult is the anticipation of failure. As the dice offer us only a limited number of daily actions, we can foresee in advance whether we will be unable to accomplish a mission. The game adds the notion of time, offering a deadline for accomplishing an objective. So you’ll have to juggle the different missions, their importance and their different levels of urgency. Here too, the game forces us to make choices: we can’t do everything, but how can we be the most efficient? How can we lose as little as possible? There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a few cycles on a mission and realizing that we won’t be able to complete it in time.

A frantic race

Finishing on time. These words are fully appropriate to Citizen Sleeper. Citizen Sleeper is a race against our own obsolescence in the first episode, and against loss of control in the second. Our status as Sleeper brings with it considerable disadvantages. This artificial body is made dependent on a substance, the Stabilizer, to prevent its programmed deterioration. This deterioration was deliberately created by Essen Harp, the now-defunct corporation behind the sleepers, which loomed like a shadow over every step in the first episode. In Citizen Sleeper 2, our bodies are no longer subject to Essen Harp’s stalking and control. Our new employer, Laine, has seen to it that you’re rebooted to remove the addiction, but in return he’s left backdoors in your central processor to control you remotely. The problem is, you ran away from Laine. You found yourself with amnesia, on the run, with the help of your galley-mate, Serafin. Laine and his men will then pursue you relentlessly throughout the system. It’s impossible for you to settle down anywhere – immobility is your worst enemy. With each cycle, Laine moves closer to you, increasing his hold on you. You’ll have no choice but to keep moving. What’s more, on certain occasions, he may take control of your body, jeopardizing your entire mission and the integrity of your crew. This flaw makes you a real danger to yourself and your loved ones. In Citizen Sleeper 2, the objective is clear: get rid of Laine’s hold on you as quickly as possible, before the irreparable happens. This control leads to constant stress during contracts, as we never know when Laine will decide to intervene and screw things up. It’s interesting to compare the two episodes, as our two sleepers are subject to different types of control, their constraints and the manifestation of this control are not the same. The protagonist of the first episode has to fear for himself, while the protagonist of the second is primarily concerned with those around him. The meeting and exchanges with Flint, another sleeper we come across on our journey through space, are very touching. He is still in need of Stabilizer, we are at Laine’s mercy. Each distrusting the other, each subject to a different form of control, and yet, at heart, so similar.

A world on your shoulders

Citizen Sleeper depicts the aftermath of humanity’s greatest failure, its collapse. Humanity in constant survival in an inhospitable environment. This survival is felt in every stratum of the game, as we inhabit dilapidated stations built on the remains of this disastrous past, living from day to day, the very idea of living in safety a sweet utopia. Citizen Sleeper is about the weak fighting the weak, while the powerful, with the exception of certain underworld leaders, do not exist in the outer rim. You have to understand that, in Citizen Sleeper, everyone is a loser.

All this taken into account, you begin to understand the weight of the word failure in this universe. If I had to give life in Citizen Sleeper 2 a personal label, I’d say “fragile”. What heavier burden could there be than being responsible for a set of lives in such a universe?

Here we come to the element that’s most important to me, the one that makes me not want to fail, the one that makes me need to succeed: other people. In Citizen Sleeper, more than in any other game, I feel responsible for the fate of the characters around me. Even though they are represented only by still images and express themselves only in long, undubbed texts, they are full of life and truth. Between Gareth Damian Martin’s fine writing and Guillaume Singelin’s illustrations, which perfectly capture every expression and attitude, we believe in them and become attached to them. We become attached to them, to their stories, and ultimately to our own destiny. The stakes are always human, yours, theirs and those of strangers. Citizen Sleeper 2 appears to be a game where the aim is not particularly to win, but simply to avoid defeat. Every defeat avoided can be celebrated as a victory – life goes on. The game presents us with clear stakes, and we are aware of the consequences of our failures for ourselves and our friends. This attachment reinforces the stress I feel during each roll of the dice. Stress directly materialized in the game interface by a gauge. We’re stressed because our failure would also be theirs. I found a study that discusses this very special sensation that Citizen Sleeper 2 made me feel, and I’d like to quote an extract from it:

This study builds on another one it cites immediately after:

“As Jesper Juul mentions (2013, p. 112,The Art of failure, ”the fundamental difference between tragedy in games and in stories is that in stories, we never feel responsible for failure and suffering; in games, we do.“”

This is precisely how Citizen Sleeper 2 makes me feel. Our failure as players results in a fictional failure for all the characters, and the emotional impact of this failure in fiction is stronger than that of our failure as players. In my eyes, I couldn’t feel such pressure if I wasn’t fully immersed in the experience. This immersion is achieved through the coherence of all the game mechanics outlined above and the strength of its story, its universe and, of course, its characters.

Forward

As I said earlier, Citizen Sleeper is a game that’s all about moving forward: while you can’t erase setbacks, moving forward allows you to overcome them. It’s a game that’s part of the Hope Punk movement, the bright, optimistic counterpart to Cyberpunk. If you’d like to find out more, please see our interview with Guillaume Singelin, art director on Citizen Sleeper, as well as my review of Citizen Sleeper, in which I take an in-depth look at the themes of the first episode. Hope Punk moves away from the ambient nihilism of Cyberpunk to propose solutions to prevent the coming apocalypse.

Like the survivors of the Helion system, we too will learn from our past failures. We must continue, persevere and rebuild, because life waits for no one. We’re learning to manage our crew better, so we can be more efficient on our contracts. We find ourselves over-preparing for our outings, thinking about the unforeseen events that have already befallen us and those that may come our way. With a new opportunity chasing a setback, we pick ourselves up and start hoping again. New encounters are made, with their share of stories, difficulties and hopes. We discover new places, sometimes similar to what we might call refuges, that try to live far from the hustle and bustle and dangers of space and what’s left of civilization. We learn to help each other, to trust each other and, finally, to move forward together.

Sources

Maxime Deslongchamps-Gagnon et Alexandre Poirier – Journals Open Edition – 2016
L’expérience émotionnelle du joueur en échec dans l’art vidéoludique