Sleep is Death

The seconds are ticking down. My mouse is moving faster than it has in any game. Ever. I click furiously. I type in a manic urgency, no time for typos. Quake 3 deathmatch was nothing compared to this. My heart pulses as if in a chase. The seconds run out. I lean back in my chair and watch as the timer turns red. I’ve made it. I managed to show my player shooting the heads off two demons that he was about to have a threesome with. No time to relax though. His turn runs out and he wants to shoot himself. Thankfully, I’ve prepared for this, I replace the protagonist’s sprite with a bloody corpse and double-click to send my turn. This game started with a blind date and ended with carnage in a basement. This story was one of the many that Sleep is Death allows you to tell.

At a basic level, Sleep is Death is a two player, turn based, storytelling engine and editor. The controller creates scenes, moves sprites, and writes dialogue for all the objects onscreen, save the protagonist. The player also has a degree of control over their own object in the game world, though how much is at the controller’s discretion. There are no rules within the game except those that the controller decides. This means, perhaps more than any other game, that the experience is unique to each player and to each controller. The possibilities for storytelling are near limitless, bar the restrictions of the 2d engine and the imaginations of those playing. Each game is saved on the player’s computer as a “flipbook”, essentially a HTML slideshow, that can be posted online for posterity.

Playing Sleep of Death as a protagonist conjures a curious feeling of both control and helplessness. You are effectively in another person’s story, yet your input flavours the whole experience. The controller may have crafted a meticulously plotted psychoanalytical exploration of the human condition, but that doesn’t mean squat if the protagonist just wants to slap people with his penis. Unsurprisingly, most of the stories posted online at www.sidtube.com have an element of humour to them. This is no bad thing, and the divergence from Rohrer’s intentionally sombre theme is an interesting study in what people want to improvise and play, given the opportunity. There’s a heady feeling of freedom when you realise that you can say or do anything in the gameworld and expect to see another person’s interpretation of the consequences. My first game as a player was a ninja story, an assassination, that the controller had clearly spent a great deal of thought on. Respecting the care he had taken, I did my best to fit into his world while still attempting to make my own decisions. The story proceeded smoothly, linearly, until I surprised him by opting to take the Daimyo hostage, rather than slaying him, and he had to adapt in less than a minute.

Being controller is a stressful, yet exhilarating experience because of the player’s perceived freedom. On one hand, you have your gameworld, which you have full control over. On the other, you have the player, who can ask to do anything. Even if you plan contingencies, the player will inevitably throw you a curveball: either something you don’t yet have art for, or a narrative swerve that you had not anticipated. I did not expect my player to request a threesome with two demons, especially after he had stabbed the first demon with a broken bottle earlier in the story. It turns out he planned to lure them back to his place, so he could find a gun and shoot them to bits. I could easily have had the demons refuse, and kill him on the spot, but one of the joys of SiD is that it can take you down unexpected paths. Also interesting are the times when the controller chooses to deny the player’s suggestion. This kind of control could range from stopping the player from moving because they’re tied up, killing the player because they made the “wrong” decision, or simply ignoring the player’s actions. Linearity can make for potent gameplay, so long as the player still has decisions to make, however, abuse of this power can lead to slide-show like games.

The timer in Sleep is Death is a massive component for both players. The ticking seconds nip at your racing mind, hurrying every decision and leaving no time for self editing or timid second guessing. The timer is set at 30s by default—not nearly enough time, particularly if you want to play an open game, or to preserve your sanity. The consensus seems to be that 60s is an ideal limit for the controller, while the player can get by with a little less.

The timer isn’t your main adversary: it’s the interface. The editor, in which objects, sprites, and rooms are generated, is an archaic anachronism. You know when you open up a game in DosBox and the game appears in a tiny window with a massive cursor? SiD is like that. It’s like stepping back to 1993, and not in a charming, nostalgic way. A bad way. Thumbnails for objects are so minuscule that similar models are indistinguishable from one another, while the character limit for naming them is set at an arbitrary 10 letters. Object libraries can contain thousands of different models. It is far too easy to select a sprite with a bottle of beer instead of a sprite with a Luger at a crucial juncture in the story. That said, it is possible to do what you want to do with trial, error, more error, and lots of patience. During my first game as controller, my player wanted to pick a fish up off the ground and I was unable to oblige him. In my last game as controller, I was asked to turn a man inside out, and I did it.

The sprite editor itself is slightly more acceptable than the scene editor: a beefed up Paint that allows you to layer multiple sprites into single objects. Sprites can also be imported with inSide (a third party program), though if your image exceeds a certain size, you’ll have to piece the fragments together like a puzzle in the editor—worst mini-game ever. SiDtube, the primary community for the game, has a resource library that includes an ever-growing collection of models from interpretations of Cthulhu to the cast of the IT Crowd. Anything goes, so long as its pixellated and 2D.

Jason Rohrer released the source code for SiD and there have already been some patches to rectify its shortcomings. The most prominent of these allowing the controller to keep a flipbook of the proceedings, as well as the player. Unfortunately, some of the prospective modders I’ve chatted with on SiDtube have been put off by the code, which is allegedly as out of date as the interface. As a programming luddite, I can’t comment on this personally, but this is a game just begging to be modded, if only to fix its many problems. The interface is a massive barrier to new players, particularly those who want to control games. As a result, there’s a massive gap between controllers and protagonists. Go on SiDtube and declare that you’re a controller and you’ll be mobbed like a supermodel at a boy’s boarding school. New versions of the game are being released at a rapid rate, however, and things can only get better. Case in point is the new music editor in version 14c, it is already light years ahead of the release version, with an improved interface and far more flexibility and variation in its options.

Sleep is Death is a difficult game to score. So much depends on who you play with and how patient you can be with the interface. A game with the right player or controller can be a hilarious or moving collaboration; a game with the wrong player or controller can be a disappointing and frustrating chore. There is less ambiguity about the interface in its current state. It’s imperative that Rohrer and community improve things before SiD joins Dwarf Fortress as the game that many want to play, but can’t. Despite these flaws, I’ve had more fun both controlling and playing SiD than I expected, and I think that it should be something that everyone with an interest in storytelling and games should try out. The community is still in its infancy and I can’t wait to play and see what people manage to with this visionary, yet stunted game.