Sleep is Death is an indie game released last year by Jason Rohrer who is the developer responsible for games such as Passage, Gravitation and Between. All of these games are short, meaningful and honest, they have heart. Sleep is Death is a much larger project compared to his previous games and although it has been out for a while, I feel like I’ve only just ‘got it.’

This game can be described as a two player interactive comic with one player being a character and the second being the artist. It’s neither coop or competitive, each player has 30 seconds in a round to interact with the story dictated by game master. The GM has control over every single asset in the game world, he/she can change the environment, characters, lighting, music…everything. The player only has control on what is in the world, and even that control is finite if the GM chooses. Interactions come in the form of speech bubbles, so say if I were the player and you the game maker, if I walked up to a glass of water and typed a verb such as spill, it then becomes your choice as the GM to either spill the water, break the glass, turn the glass into a chicken or do whatever your brain can dream up. The interesting part is that the GM isn’t quite as powerful as it seems, if you were the GM and you spent a round drawing a nice button on a table and you wrote ‘push’ above it. What would you do if I decided to not push the button? Would you have a plan in your story for that eventuality, or would your tale crumble at the seams and destroy itself into insanity? Because of the unpredictable nature of humans, the game becomes a very improvised experience with the GM feeding the player and the player feeding the GM, it’s smart, the player has almost just as much control over the narrative as the GM does.

In the Edge magazine (#214) Jason said in an interview how he added subtle touches to the deign and interface in an attempt to project a particular mood over the game. ‘The background is black, the interface is sparse, it looks very primitive with these white icons – it looks very basic and empty. A lot of the stories I’ve told with it have moments that feel lonely…With the music editor, I’m forcing a minor key, it’s impossible to make a song that’s upbeat sounding’ He explains.

This slight touch of mood and atmosphere resonates with every game you play or see, there’s something about the painfully awesome crude drawings and complete lack of animation that gives this game its own vibe and feeling. The interface which the GM has to navigate starts off as an over-simplified but confusing mess of symbols and images. On my first game as the GM with my friend Darren, I really didn’t know what I was doing, I could not figure out the interface, my objective or anything. Darren mocked me as was to be expected so we traded places and his reaction to being the GM was similar to mine. We persisted and after about 3 hours of playing we started to get the hang of it, though I still wasn’t comfortable with my control over the scenes.

Our time with Sleep is Death started jokey as we were trying to learn the interface, but when I started to get to grips with the interface, I quickly realized some of the frustrations that come with being a GM, with no discredit to Darren who was having fun, when I did try to set up a scene with an element of storytelling to it, Darren remained insolent. In a scene I set-up featuring two policemen, one of which Darren was in control the first line of dialogue his character said was, ‘I hear sirinz blazin but there are none for me BONK.’ – This made me think, what if you were a very serious GM and after spending hours crafting delicate scenes for an amazing adventure, the person you’re playing with is a jackass? There are bound to be GM’s who would get very annoyed and frustrated but I don’t think this is an appropriate reaction. As a GM you have to understand and accept the power that the player has over the experience because the player can essentially suggest to say or do anything. This is part of the beauty of the game and the reason why improvisation plays an important part, in the same way that a player could ruin an experience by not behaving correctly, the GM can also ruin the experience by taking his or her story too seriously.

There are some fantastic community features, for example, as a GM, every art or audio asset you create in the editor gets added to a larger pool of assets, meaning the more people play it, the more access we all have to different environments, objects and creatures. Ultimately Jason has done for videogames what D&D did for board games. He has giving gamers an expressive outlet for creativity and at the same time he’s created an art-piece, a strong examination of narrative with a message about the creative process all wrapped up into a social, collaborative experiance. He did all of this by creating a tool, not a game.

I’ll close off this article with another quote from Rohrer himself, which I think sums the game up perfectly, ‘You’re in a room and there’s a hot tub, a bottle of gin and a gun. What’s going to happen next?’

Go play: http://sleepisdeath.net/

Check out this awesome film made entirely in the game! It’s called Rule by Simon Cottee:

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com