🌱 What Citizen Sleeper Tells Us About Building a Better World

Dear friends,

In today's newsletter, I'm going to attempt to answer a very big question.

What should I be doing right now?

In the US, we're seeing approximately 53 new horrible things happen every day. The heaviness is suffocating. It's hard to figure out where to spend energy. It's exhausting.

One thing I've been doing is playing Citizen Sleeper for the first time. In the game, when someone goes into debt to the Essen-Arp Corporation, they have the opportunity to be put into cryosleep and have their consciousness copied into a robotic being called a Sleeper. The Sleeper will work off their debt, and they'll wake up when it's done.

You play as a Sleeper who has escaped from the corporation and onto a space station called Erlin's Eye. You need to find a place to live, make money, buy food and medicine to keep your body operational, and stay out of the corporation's reach.

On the surface, it doesn't sound like an incredibly hopeful game. In fact, it sounds a little too similar to the brand of technocapitalism we're all currently experiencing in real life.

But what I love about Citizen Sleeper is that it helps us play out how to keep going despite living in a technocapitalist hellscape.

Now, I get that it's a video game with a narrative. Things happen in certain ways in this game because they're scripted to, not because they're a mirror of the ways things would always work in our world. That's fine; it's still powerful to imagine what some of the more positive outcomes could look like.

As I've been playing through my first run, I've been rotating a few ideas around in my mind. Here's what I'm envisioning.

This is a simple illustration for a complex question: What should I be doing right now? But indecision is the enemy of action, so this is a starting point.

Level 1: Take Care of Yourself

As a Sleeper, you have to deal with the planned obsolescence of your company-issued body. It's not meant to be taken away from the corporation; it'll break.

One of the first things you have to figure out how to do is get stabilizer, a medication that maintains your body's normal functions. Yes, you have to pay for that medication. You also have to pay for food; if your energy decreases to "starving," your body will deteriorate faster.

Outside the game, we may not have synthetic Sleeper frames, but our bodies will still break down if we don't take care of them. For some of us, this is the level we're going to be operating at for a while — and that's okay. You don't have to have 100% of your needs met in order to do other stuff for collective well-being, but if you're at a breaking point, you probably need to take care of that first.

Think about it this way, if it helps: Companies don't want us to be healthy or feel good. They make money off our suffering. So while it might not feel particularly radical to go to all your follow-up appointments for your chronic health condition (ask me how I know), by making your way through the bullshit of our current systems, you're standing up for yourself.

Another part of this level is doing things you enjoy. As a Sleeper, I found meals that excited my synthetic tastebuds, , and spent precious coin on feeding a stray cat. Outside the game, I

Level 1.5: Take Care of Yourself in Community

In between drafting explanations of Levels 1 and 2, I remembered that we don't always take care of ourselves alone. I'm in a few different groups of disabled and chronically ill folks, and their support and commiseration has had a huge positive impact on me.

Community in this sense for you might look like a support group of your own, a friend who can accompany you to appointments or help you fill out paperwork, or someone you can scream into the void with. It's even better if the support flows both ways.

Citizen Sleeper doesn't engage with this idea in the way I would want; you don't ever directly interact with another Sleeper. Maybe in a future game?

Level 2: Engage With Your Community

Once you're feeling functional, you can engage with the wider world. This is where I see some folks lose steam or freeze up; there are simply so many options for what to do that it becomes difficult to choose any.

In Citizen Sleeper, you can interact with different people and engage with different communities around Erlin's Eye. When you don't have to put as much of your energy or resources into simply staying alive, you can participate in other characters' stories, which helps you upgrade your skills and gain new abilities. Whether you make a home on the Eye or escape to somewhere else in the stars, your choices will eventually end your Sleeper's story.

You mainly interact with the world through skill checks. The better condition your body is in, the more dice you have available to use. (This game maybe does the best job simulating what it's like to live with chronic illness, but that's a separate essay.) You modify those checks with five upgrade-able skills: Engineer, Interface, Endure, Intuit, Engage. You can also add items to your inventory, including money, stabilizer, data packets, metal scrap, machine components, various species of mushrooms, and other story line-specific items.

This all got me thinking about a framework for figuring out what to do in your community outside the game. I came up with this:

In Citizen Sleeper terms: What skills do you have? What resources do you have? What skills and resources are you hoping to get?

You can download and print a worksheet version of this grid to fill out for yourself. Once you have a few items written in each category, see where the overlaps might be — both between parts of your grid, and between your grid and your community's needs. Maybe you know how to fix bikes, and you want to learn how to darn your biking socks. Does your community have a repair cafe you can work at? That way, you can help someone else out, and someone else can help you!

This level is where I see some really wonderful possibilities, and where I think the heart of Citizen Sleeper is. I have a copy of the worksheet out on my desk, and I'll go through my own answers plus some other examples in a later letter.

Level 3: Engage in Political Actions

Once you've gotten involved with your community, you might want to take stronger political actions. This level can include attending protests and rallies, forming a union at your workplace, commenting at local government meetings, or running for local office. In Citizen Sleeper, one of the higher-stakes story lines I followed involved hacking an organization to steal data that proved they were corrupt.

Sometimes you need to take bold action to make lasting change, and although I have the least amount of experience with this level of action, I still wanted to include it. To me, this level takes the most stamina and commitment. Not everyone is going to engage here — and that's okay. You just have to do what you can.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

In between starting to write this newsletter and finishing it, I completed my Citizen Sleeper playthrough. I found my Sleeper's ending so moving that I took a photo of the screen so I could transcribe it for you here:

You focus on only the next step, because that it the only way you have learnt to persist. And to persist is to believe that a future, any future at all, is possible.

I loved playing this game. It moved me deeply and it's been rolling around in my head for days. My Sleeper made their way through a harsh world and found community and meaning along the way — and so will I.

Special Announcements

• My "secret gender" game Nectar won a 2025 Nonbinary Tabletop Award from Snowbright Studios! I was absolutely shocked to learn that it won alongside Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, one of my favorite games I played last year.
• My friend Kurt did a playthrough of Colossal on Lady Tabletop's podcast Alone at the Table! Colossal literally came to me in a dream and it's lovely to hear it played.
• I'll be appearing on The Dovecote, a ttrpg news and discussion show, with Darling Demon Eclipse next Tuesday, March 11! Check us out on Twitch!

Things I Worked On This Month

• I've done a bit more work on my Tam Lin game, which won a Luminary Grant for its development last summer. I think I've finally cracked the structure!
• Otherwise, my main creative avenue has been sewing. I can touch projects with my hands and don't have to look at a screen; I've been having a lot of migraine days that make focusing/writing difficult.

Things I Loved This Month (Aside from Citizen Sleeper)

• Watching the new season of Severance, which has some notable similarities to Citizen Sleeper!
• Reading The Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher, best described as body horror fantasy romance? I tore through the first four books and can't wait for the next one.
• Drinking hot chocolate (Trader Joe's European drinking chocolate is my favorite type).
• Using the Finch self-care app to remember to do things that make me feel better.
• Making a very strange frog-themed cliffside tavern in a game of Stewpot.
• Reading how-to books: I currently have books on mending, urban gardening, and throwing parties on my nightstand. Can't wait for the spring energy to actually do these things!

Thanks for joining me today, and hang in there! Next time, I'm planning to share my community engagement worksheet alongside some example actions you can do.