I also mentioned SID in a comment on
this blog post by Krystian Majewski. I thought our subsequent conversation would be worth reproducing here, for reference.
I don’t know about this one. Isn’t Sleep is Death a game narrative as a chartroom is literature? I thought the trick was to be able to understand storytelling at a fundamental level and putting that genie in the bottle. Giving up all authorial control to the players doesn’t seem like doing either of those things.
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?
