Bodies and Long-Term Harm: Gareth Damian Martin Discusses Citizen Sleeper 2

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is the upcoming sequel to 2022’s science fiction hit Citizen Sleeper, and I had the opportunity to chat with developer and writer Gareth Damian Martin in a video call earlier this month in order to figure out what the deal is with the upcoming game. The short of it is all good news: a science fiction game set in space that blends tabletop dice mechanics with big ideas storytelling to tell the tale of a small ship and its crew. The long of it is in this interview where we chat about its mechanics as well as some of Martin’s big ideas about genre and how the Sleeper games fit into it. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paste: What’s the pitch on Citizen Sleeper 2?

GDM: Citizen Sleeper was a proposal to say “what if we bring these cool tabletop ideas into videogames,” and I also wanted to tell this very specific story from my past around experiences with gig work. It’s a game I discovered as I made it through a lot of experiments. But I think then because everyone was like “oh, this is really cool”—and I was not necessarily expecting everybody to say that—I had more in the tank, and by the time I got to the end of making the DLC, I feel like I had amassed even more things that I was like “oh, I wish I could add this to the game.” I’ve discovered over the time of seeing the game come out, seeing people play it, making more content—I can see so many interesting things here. Eventually I was like, oh, I’ve got a sequel here. I’ve accrued a sequel worth of material.

I also think I had a relationship with Citizen Sleeper where I got to talk about it so much in interviews and podcasts that I feel like I’ve really formulated an idea of what the Citizen Sleeper frame was. I’ve always really loved these Firefly, Farscape-type stories. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool to take this Citizen Sleeper frame and tell one of these ship-and-crew stories within this frame that marks it out a little bit. I think I would never really want to tell one of these stories straight off the bat because it’s quite genre for me, it’s quite broad. But having the Citizen Sleeper frame—there’s something interesting about bringing some more traditional RPG and science fiction aspects back into Citizen Sleeper, but then still maintaining a really clear vision of what Citizen Sleeper is about and what structure it is.

That means that now you have a ship and a crew, so in a way you have some slightly more traditional RPG elements. You have a party, so to speak. You go on these jobs, contracts, that are non-combat tactical battles in a way where you’re battling against the conditions that you’re in. You’re battling against your own body, you’re battling against your stress, your crew’s stress. You’re using this new Push ability, which is like a pull from Blades in the Dark slightly—this idea that you can take on more stress to  push yourself harder. They’re these escalating stories that are meant, in a way, to feel like an episode of a science fiction tv show. You go away on a contract and you have an escalating, really narrative, trying to have an interesting premise, kind of contract. Then you come back and have this down time in between, which is much more like Citizen Sleeper—it’s much more slice of life, spending time in locations, slowly recovering. 

There’s a lot of mechanics around the dice explicitly being the Sleeper’s body this time. Your dice take damage, they individually break, and when you try to repair them they get glitched and then you have to let the glitch play out. So there’s all these processes of repair and recovery and dealing with stress and dealing with more long-term harm, which is something that I wanted to model because I feel like games are not very good at dealing with the concept of long-term harm; where there can be permanent marks on a body because game bodies don’t have permanent marks, generally, they only have temporary ones. 

It became a really fertile ground for me to make the sequel, and it’s been a process of working through those ideas and add mechanical scaffolding to the themes of the game so that it feels really heavily supported, and that players who are mechanically focused might find themselves being drawn into situations that are then accentuated by the narrative. Citizen Sleeper was maybe slightly more the other way around where the narrative draws you in and then the mechanics accentuate it.

Paste: It sounds like you’re pulling a lot more from the tabletop space and ideas in this game, especially these ideas about damage to dice. I’m curious to hear a little more about how you’re diving into the overlap between tabletop design and videogame design. The tabletop game scene and the videogame scene are often treated like they’re separate, but they’re really not—lots of people play both. 

GDM: That’s what it felt like I was proposing with Citizen Sleeper, and having that proposal accepted has given me a chance to double down on it. I’ve started running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for professional curiosity, I would say, because I got so sick of people telling me what D&D is like. I was like, I’m just going to run some D&D and see what happens. It’s incredible when you start running D&D for the first time, and you’re like, oh wow, videogame RPGs have been pulling from this eternally. The thing with Citizen Sleeper 2 is: there’s all this stuff that I’m finding really cool in Blades in the Dark, Mothership, and Heart: The City Beneath, running campaigns of those. There’s so much good stuff here, and there’s no reason it can’t be in a videogame. Like you say, this gap is not as big as people think. Immediately, the first thing put into Citizen Sleeper 2 was the stress system because I just love accruing stress which you then have to roll over or roll for a complication. I think the way that creates a growing tension across a setpiece one shot or a setpiece job or contract or mission, whatever your RPG is structured around, is so exciting. I found that to be a really productive and exciting way in which I was playing with my players. 

I love stress also because it fulfills one of the needs that I have for Citizen Sleeper, which is that it’s a kind of harm that is abstract enough to occur from almost any activity. The beauty of making a game that is based on dice is you can have the player do anything. You don’t have to be like, “I’m gonna make a quest, and then I have to put combat in that quest.” You can do anything, and then the dice are just the mechanic for resolving whatever conflict or challenge occurs. It’s the same with stress—stress can be accrued from a conversation, or from physical stress. So it becomes this really nice paradigm for still allowing the broadness of Citizen Sleeper that I think is really core to it. It’s not that it’s a noncombat game, although I don’t think there’s any combat in it as a siphoned off section of reality, but it is a game about other kinds of challenge and difficulty. The combination of stress and dice and contracts were me trying to pull things from RPGs that would let me tell stories about a heist or salvaging a derelict or jobs, but use the same systems and the same kinds of tension. That’s part of Citizen Sleeper’s identity: alternative tabletop games come to videogames kind of thing.

Paste: The genre stuff that you talked about before, Firefly for example, gave me the assumption of high combat and action and it sounds like you’re saying that’s not really the case. I’m curious about that—are you trying to pack more different tones into this one? Is it happening through the different crew members? How are you hitting these different tones?

GDM: I’m really happy with Citizen Sleeper as an urban slice of game, and I wouldn’t want to just make more urban slice of life material. The beginning of Citizen Sleeper 2 throws you right in the middle of something, rather than Citizen Sleeper which is softer and more like waking up in a city and discovering what the new city is. Citizen Sleeper 2 is like, no, you’re halfway through a reboot, you’re woken up by someone who wants to kill you, somebody else is then attacking them—it’s a lot pace-ier. I think a lot of that came out of also making the DLC around the refugee flotilla in Citizen Sleeper and wanting to reach for a more exciting cadence. I would say it’s less actiony and more that I’m quite influenced by noir-ish storytelling, especially the Gibson mode. It’s often about “regular people” improvising their way through situations, not really a fight scene. In the same way that I think Farscape or Firefly don’t actually have all that many fight scenes in them—they have a lot of tension and difficulty, but not combat in that way. 

Tonally, I felt myself reaching for that in the DLC, and I was like, actually, this is something I would like the tools to do. It seemed like taking the characters away from the urban setting and to a location with a time-sensitive thing happening would allow me to reach that higher dramatic point and create a more varied tone. To me it comes quite naturally, and I think I wanted to do it with Citizen Sleeper a bit anyway. So it allowed me the opportunity to tell those stories anyway. I’m not stuck on this idea that Citizen Sleeper has to be cozy or soft, especially if you’re on the run and with a crew of people. There aren’t any criminals in this world because there’s no law. So you’ve got this really open space for exploring different kinds of things. The characters bring all kinds of different tones to the game as well. There’s one character that has an almost “spaghetti western” plot line that I really enjoyed writing, and I love Leone’s films and it’s slightly in tribute to those. In a way, Citizen Sleeper does have some of that tone, but it did not have the mechanical tools to push the player to a point of tension. At the end of Feng’s story in Citizen Sleeper, you do a cyberpunk heist. You hack into a facility, and Feng is in the facility Metal Gear Soliding his way around. But I am really stretching the envelope of the Citizen Sleeper dice system when I do that, and for Citizen Sleeper 2 I decided to support that and have that.

There’s a whole variety of tones, and it’s that anthology thing. There’s cute things between characters. There’s a whole plot where there’s a stowaway on the ship, and you don’t know who it is who is breaking into your supplies, and you’ve gotta figure it out. Cowboy Bebop is also a massive reference point for me because it’s a show about the gig economy and about precarity, and for me it nails the “doing both”: doing both something real and something fantastical. That show has all kinds of different episodes, and I wanted a little bit of that feel to it.

Paste: Earlier you mentioned that for Citizen Sleeper you wanted to build in and think through some of the things you experienced as a precarious worker, gig worker, someone bouncing around. Post-Citizen Sleeper you’ve been able to be a full-time game dev and creative work consistently. Does that change the way you think about what goes into Citizen Sleeper? Has that changed the way you engage with it as a thing to speak with?

GDM: I think to some extent. It’s not like when I made Citizen Sleeper I was working as a gig worker, I was already five or six years out of that world and had been a freelancer for a while, but I was doing freelance design for theatre and exhibitions and games criticism and all kinds of stuff. It was always reflecting back on that particular period. It was also, though, very informed by a theoretical approach to precarity—reading Dardot and Laval’s The New Way of the World and Anna Lowenthal Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. It was always this combination of felt things and thought things when I was making it. So to that extent, Citizen Sleeper 2 continues in that mode. In a way, Citizen Sleeper 2, because I am going more into this more genre space, it has slightly less direct structural relevance to a period of my life. What I was interested in was exploring this idea of possessing a shared space. I live in London, and very few of my friends live in London anymore—it’s very hard to afford to live in London—and one of the things that our house has become is a place that people come to, a kind of refuge or place when people need to come to London and stay somewhere. I have a child, and we have people who help us out with childcare and things, and these people often have become integrated into our family because we don’t have family in London. So we have this very complex London family that is assembled out of different kinds of relations. 

I think that’s why I was quite drawn to this ship and crew paradigm because, again, one of the things with Citizen Sleeper is taking genre things and complicating them by bringing them closer to reality. I do like that thought experiment of “what’s it really like to be a Firefly guy?” It’s not all Joss Whedon jokes all the time, it’s the reality of living with other people. And I know what that’s like, it’s the reality of a flat share—Cowboy Bebop explores that. 

It was that, but then also one thing that really came through from Citizen Sleeper to Citizen Sleeper 2 is that I really wanted to write about bodies a lot. I really wanted to write about my own relationship with my body, and I wrote very vulnerably and honestly. I was able to see other people relate to that and see that, and while making a sequel I think I think I understood finally that I invented the Sleepers not to talk about… like, it always was strange to me that I was writing about a robot when I really don’t care about AI and I don’t like that side of science fiction particularly. I realized I was writing about a robot because I was writing about an alienated subject with an alienated body, and that was the paradigm. Knowing that now, making the sequel, I think that’s allowed me to turn up the volume control on exploring that both mechanically and personally. Through development I ended up having surgery twice. The reboot scene at the start of Citizen Sleeper 2 was always inspired by a surgery I had four or five years ago and the feeling of waking up from surgery. For whatever reason, waking up is a big part of Citizen Sleeper, it’s a core thing that I sort of get stuck on—but that idea of waking up from surgery and how it’s different from waking up from sleep is where I started writing the game. Having surgery during development sharpened that relation, so I think a lot of the game also has some personal feelings about entropy and how we deal with the idea of a falling apart body, process of diagnosis, assessment, and alienation from our own bodies. But also connection to our own bodies. It’s messy again now—when Citizen Sleeper came out it was messy, and then it became clear through the critical response from people, and the funny thing is that I felt like I started with clarity with Citizen Sleeper 2 but then over development it has picked up that personal messiness again.  So I’m once again waiting for other people to explain it back to me. 

Paste: You’ve made three games (In Other Waters, Citizen Sleeper and Citizen Sleeper 2) that are unambiguously in the science fiction genre. Can you talk about that?

GDM: I’ve always been a science fiction person. I think it’s because I have always been a forward-facing kind of person, I never really was big for nostalgia. I think this whole thing has got a lot of nostalgia threaded through it because it is only in recent years that I have gone back to William Gibson and Philip K. Dick and people and been like, yeah, there’s still something here for me that I find. But generally I’m not a very nostalgic person, so I think that’s what drove me into science fiction.

The first science fiction book I read was JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, and so I started in a weird place, I think. I read a bit of broad science fiction—like Aleister Reynolds I was a big fan of when I was a teenager, who writes very epic space opera stuff. Very weird, very cool-weird stuff going on in those books. I think those books are quite influential on me in the sense that they are that kind of science fiction, where science fiction became cyberpunk—science fiction contained already cyberpunk and cyberpunk kind of came out of it—and Aleister Reynolds is writing these books about spaceships, but also about humans who live forever and what happens to them. Or like humans that can clone themselves 50 times and send themselves out into the world. How are they people, and what is that experience? I think that caught me really strongly in science fiction; science fiction allows us to talk about other human experiences, allows us to access other cadences, that might actually be ultimately quite human. In In Other Waters, you also play as an AI, and that’s another one where I was like “why do I want to make the player an AI when I really don’t care about the ‘is a robot a human?’ Asimov questions…what is my angle here?” I think my angle here is that, for me personally, I like transgressive art and a lot of art that feels like it reaches to what we call the edges of human experience but that for me feels relatable or personal. I find myself more often in those spaces of strangeness—maybe it’s my personal history, maybe it’s my gender, maybe it’s not something that I really isolate to one thing. But I think that’s where I find myself most comfortable is in that space of difference and strangeness. 

So I think that for me, science fiction has a particular way of accessing strangeness. And strangeness through technology just feels so resonant to me as a person. There’s a Gibson quote where he’s like, “I just thought about computers as analogue to human memory,” and I think it’s just the generation I grew up in—the internet landed in my teens—it was a weird nonspace of webcomics, forums and that’s where I cut my teeth. I was reading stuff like Gibson at the time, I was obsessed with The Matrix—all that stuff really landed with me. The Matrix really stuck with me when I was younger. I’ve been clinically depressed my whole life, but one of the things that comes as part of that is very, very vivid dreaming—I have vivid dreams that are so real that sometimes it takes me a long time to shake them off in the morning, which I think is a part of this Citizen Sleeper thing. I think for me that science fiction connects to that vivid dreaming, it’s a kind of active, vivid dreaming process. I find it very personal and connects to something that feels very essential to me about being human. 

To bring it to Citizen Sleeper, it’s hard to feel like there’s permission to talk about human bodies in a certain way, but when you’re like “oh yeah, this person’s a robot, and their body is implanted, and it’s not theirs” it just gives you license to explore all of the ways in which we are like: oh, I just felt a pain in my foot that I’ve never felt before in my life, and I will never tell anybody about that pain in my foot. I will go to my grave. No one will know about the weird pain in my foot that happens at 4 p.m. on a Thursday every week, or whatever. It’s so personal and so intimate, and we don’t have a language for it.

The first thing I wrote for Citizen Sleeper was that opening scene where you’re waking up in a body that’s not yours. Who am I? I think that, for me, is always what I’m scratching at—the unhealed wound that I’m picking at, going back to again and again, to that space of waking up and assembling yourself and that being an important part. Science fiction allows me to do that in a way that I really enjoy, and also is not too deeply intense and introspective, but does that in another space where we can play and things can be exciting and fun. It’s not like Citizen Sleeper is a kind of totally morbid horror experience. It’s also full of people and energy and conversation and all the things that I love in life, what gives me energy in life. It feels like a space I can have both.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.