Notgames Forum

It should be released today for the people who preordered for 9$. I'd be interested in trying the game with you.

I found myself too late to preorder, but I will buy it when it comes out.

I have it and tried it once with my gf, it was very fun! Just need to learn the interface a bit better.

I'm still practicing in the controller role so I would prefer not to play untill I can make something good, but I'm aviable to be your player just when you want :)

I'd love to get it, but I really can't say whether that'll be happening sooner (i.e. in the next week or so) or later. When/if I do get it, I'll be sure to check in here again.

I'd been meaning to make a comment here about how I was still going to be to poor to afford this for the near future (still underemployed- I'm literally running about 5 miles each day to avoid paying $4 for bus fare). Then I noticed the whole "Buy for you and a friend" thing.

We're friends, right? Guys?

I'll tell you a story~  ;D

Yes, Sleep is Death seems really interesting.
I wonder, how does the experience compare to pen and paper roleplaying?

I haven't been around on the forum for a while, but I just had to say this:

I just started playing Sleep Is Death with a storytelling friend, and it is really important. Probably the most important (not)game out there right now.

It is such a notgame.

If it were single-player, Michael would love it. I'd compare it with The Endless Forest, another freeform game about play and creating an experience with other real people through an artfully restricted set of interactions.

It is really dominating my thinking right now. I'll let you know when I've had more time to puzzle over it.

You can read through my first two stories here, in comic form:
http://sidtube.com/gallery/1194/
http://sidtube.com/gallery/1205/

I took the role of the Player. Keep in mind that these are raw noob attempts at improv acting. :P And yes, they are silly. Not really kid-safe though.

I've never tried tabletop roleplaying, otherwise I'd compare the experience. But the interaction is deliberately constrained in a way that crafts a particular type of experience. And it works very well.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts once you've tried it. :D

I also mentioned SID in a comment on this blog post (http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/choice-in-narratives/) by Krystian Majewski. I thought our subsequent conversation would be worth reproducing here, for reference.


I didn’t think it was that interesting until I played it either. I’d recommend that you wait to classify or dismiss it until you’ve played it a few times. And also that you bump up the priority of playing it.

In some sense you will come upon a paradox if you get too fixated on the idea of securing authorial control and encoding it immutably into the mechanics of your game. You get too greedy with control and pretty soon your players have nothing to do; it ceases to be a game.

Admittedly Sleep Is Death goes pretty far toward the “abdication of authorship” approach of game storytelling, like The Sims, but at the same time once you start playing it you will start to see ways in which this authorship could be regained, while still allowing the player considerable freedom within it. It’s a shift in worldview. From the old place it looks like a dead end, but once you step over you will start to see that this is just the beginning.

For example, when I play I feel like an Actor. I am Playing a Role. This is fundamentally different than how I feel when I play a typical game, even one with a good story. And it is one of many aspects of Sleep Is Death that offer a new model for understanding authorship and story and freedom and choice in games, with many more possibilities than we had previously thought possible.

Cool?

Doesn't the experience depend entirely on the storytelling talent of the "Controller"?
It feels like a Punch and Judy show to me. I'm only interested in playing it with somebody whom I think can tell a good story. And that's very few people, in my taste.

But this is probably because I'm looking for art. And maybe Sleep is Death is something else.

Yes. And of the player - the lead actor.

My suggestion is not that Sleep Is Death is the ultimate in interactive art or game storytelling, but that it points in a very interesting and fruitful direction for further exploration.

At the simplest level, I will say that playing Sleep Is Death with a decent storyteller may give you lots of ideas about how to do interactive art and storytelling in your own projects.