Lars Söderlund

The upshot of this post: there’s a newish game called Sleep is Death, and it has both great potential as a teaching tool and crippling difficulties that prevent it from widespread adoption by educators (or most people, for that matter).

Introduction

Sleep is Death (Geisterfahrer) is a 2-player game by Jason Rohrer, indie game designer and all-around creative guy. The game has 2 players, who work together to tell a story. One player is the “Controller,” who manages the backside interface of the game to provide the other player with a setting (character models, scenery, and textures for walls and floors) and options for action to keep the story going. Here is a beginner’s tutorial on the Controller mode:

The other player, called the “Player,” only controls one character, and uses the abilities granted to her by the Controller to make her character speak, move around, and interact with the environment. The Player and the Controller take 30-second turns interacting with one another and creating the story as they go. At the end of a game, a moment chosen by the Controller or determined by the Player signing off, the game leaves behind a slideshow of what happened during the game.

If you haven’t played before, it can be hard to imagine. Here, then, is an account of what the game looks like from the Player’s perspective: after you start a game with the Controller, you see on your screen a square tableau of people, animals, ground and wall textures (hardwood, glass, water, etc.), and scenery that altogether look like something out of the early King’s Quest games. You have thirty seconds to do any or all of the following things: you can click different areas on the screen to move your character (provided the squares have not been restricted by the Controller), you can click on your character and begin typing to create dialogue, or you can click on a piece of scenery or another character on the screen and begin typing an interaction you would like your character to having with it.

Teaching

The promise of the game from a teaching perspective is the way it allows players to collaborate in the creation of texts and to invent using improvisation. The game actually requires players to enact these processes, which allows for a hands-on learning experience with these practices that are in many ways at the core of writing and communication.

This sort of possibility is discussed by Ian Bogost, whose book Persuasive Games establishes the idea of “procedural rhetoric.” Procedural rhetoric is the unique persuasive appeal that computer programs and video games are capable of, and it is based on “procedurality.” In this case, procedurality describes the mechanism through which a player proceeds through video games and computer programs: the player makes decisions about what to do based on the options granted by the program, and the player’s decisions mixed with the options allowed by the program are what makes the game proceed. Bogost points out that this immerses the character in the rules of the program, exerting a new type of experiential influence he calls procedural rhetoric.

Bogost points out that this immersive quality holds the programmers of video games to a high standard: if they wish to persuade players of something through their video games, they must persuade through the way the game is played, not just through the content. For instance, if programmers are attempting to create a game that teaches about improvisation, they have several options. They could create a game for one player: maybe they would faithfully recreate the look of Chicago’s famous Second City improv school and allow the player to create funny lines of dialogue for the on-stage actors to say. However, this would not teach the player anything about improv. Improvisation is the process of successfully adapting to a changing situation, and if a player was to generate all the content herself they would not be learning how to improvise. For instance, many consider the “Yes, and…” technique, in which improvising actors try always to build on what each other have said rather than tear each other down, to be at the core of what improv is, and it is much harder to learn this technique if one is simply playing an improv game by oneself. How can someone learn to adapt to a changing situation if that person is always the one who changed it?

Much better is to create a game like Sleep is Death, which forces two players to work together to tell a story. It teaches improvising skills, because the two players must work together if the story is to be coherent, and in the same way it shows how collaboration must come from all members in a team in order for it to be successful. These are lessons that students of writing would do well to learn, and as such the game has a lot of promise.

Problems

There are, however, problems with the way the game proceeds, and they have mostly to do with the game’s interface. If you watched the video above, you saw how the controller interface can be very difficult to learn. For myself, I was very excited to play the game, but the difficulties of mastering the controller interface and allowing the Player to do whatever they suggest should be done (moving the character, adding new characters, editing the setting, changing character sprites on the fly) was overwhelming. 1UP’s review puts it well: the Controller interface is “something only a programmer could love.”

Now, it is true that constrictions on creativity can be constructive: in my experience, for instance, students do much better when I give them specific assignments in which to be creative rather than just saying “do whatever you want.” These “productive constrictions” are in many ways key to how I run my writing courses at all levels. Still, when such constrictions go from productive to regularly frustrating, it is difficult not to re-think the usefulness of the constrictions. I will say that even with my initial enthusiasm, it has been difficult to go back to the game after playing it poorly for many rounds as I got used to the controller interface.

Conclusion

I was unable in the course of my research to find out just why “Geisterfahrer” is the secondary name of the program. I did find out, however, the German translation of it: ghost driver. I was led to a message board of Germans discussing the country’s serious problem with people driving drunk on the autobahn, with their lights off. This “ghost driving” happens for a number of reasons, and it seems strangely beyond the capacity of German police authorities to stop.

Whether this ghost driving is the source of the game’s subtitle or not, it does provide a good analogy for playing the game. As the Controller, with your complicated interface and unlimited possibilities, you feel both in control and out of control. Playing with an unprepared controller feels like a vastly less serious version of being on the autobahn with a driver going the wrong way with their lights out- you’re not sure what they will do, or if they know what they’re doing, or even if they’re there at all. From both perspectives the game is overwhelming, and can be scary to face. Still, just as certainly, the innovations in the game suggest that something exciting is coming.