Sleep

I don't need it... 

Hmm, what do you mean I'm allowing my own biases and daily struggles to enter into this blog as topics of conversation that dilute the proposed purpose of this blog? How dare you accuse me of throwing away genuine 'Entertainment Industry' conversation in order to squeeze in a chat about something only barely related to gaming at large! Such shouldn't even need to be voiced. Of course I'm throwing my own nonsense at the wall to ascertain some nugget of conversation worth nattering over, or even a nattering worth gussying up as a conversation if need be. I am no journalist with sources and integrity and responsibility; I'm a mad tyrant lording at the apex of his kingdom of loneliness, propped up on a fragile throne of toothpick think pieces and plasterboarded ideals- thus I am going to post a blog about the idea of 'sleeping' in video games and there's nothing you can do about it!

Sleep. We all know it, we all have it. A universal equaliser. Everybody, at some point in their lives, has to lay down and disengage into the furrows of dreamland, wrapped up in the oblivion and obliviousness of unconsciousness- dead to the world at large. And sleep is apparently so very important, we're told. I'm not entirely sure how much I'm supposed to be having at any given time, but I think we all try our hardest to be as non-degenerate as possible with healthy sleep cycles as 'responsibilities' become more prevalent in our lives and the consuming virus of 'daily routines' start to take hold. But despite the ubiquitous nature of the concept of sleep in the lives of the everyman, isn't it surprising how rarely it is that sleeping is ever used in any mechanical manner in gaming?

I mean, to be fair, I don't think I know of any game at all which attempt to turn going to the bathroom into a mechanic. Except, I guess, 'No More Heroes'- wherein the toilet is the save screen. (A clever use-case if you ask me.) But if you think about what large percentage of the human life is spent sleeping in bed, and how much of gaming is about creating an immersive space within wild open worlds, don't you think someone could have worked a way to turn dreaming into a mechanic? And of course I'm intentionally being open ended because there are some games that do play around with sleeping or at least use the vehicle of sleep and dreams to expand their forms of storytelling out in interesting ways. As for turning sleeping into an mechanic- well there's only one genre that has ever really gone that far, now isn't there?

Survival games are all about turning necessary bodily functions into frustrating resource bars that need to be maintained at the determent of enjoying the game you are actually supposed to be playing. (Which is probably why more developers don't bother adapting sleep into a real gameplay cycle.) Stay up for too long and you may have to curtail whatever actual gameplay you were enjoying to lay down in a bed and skip until morning, as exciting of a gameplay prospect as that sounds to engage with. Titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim Special Edition's 'Survival mode' have debuffs that afflict those who keep up for too long, and some of the more hardcore indie titles will straight up kill the degens who keep only late nights. This is the most literal, and probably the least interesting, way of adapting sleep into gaming imaginable- let's try to look at more creative avenues.

Such as when games use the realm of sleep as an excuse to throw in totally unexpected minigame sections into otherwise distinct games. I always recall that totally surreal moment during my playthrough of the original version of Metal Gear Solid 3 when I loaded into the game in the wee hours of the morning (the only time I could play the game) and found myself in the middle of a totally different-to-Metal-Gear hack and slash DMC style game... only for that to be a secret hidden mini-game dream that Snake was having whilst resting in prison. An example of just one of the crazy Easter eggs that Kojima productions always manage to wind into their games. And, of course, we can't forget the secret levels of the modern Wolfenstien games that are activated by going to sleep. In B.J's dreams, it would seem, he plays the original flat-screen versions of various Wolfenstien 3D levels- what a charming interpretation of dreams!

And to bring things back around to one of my favourite developers, ATLUS. One of their games, perhaps the only one not wound into the Shin Megami Tensi world, is that of 'Catherine'; a narrative about being caught in the middle of an affair that, in great ATLUS fashion, divides narrative and gameplay in thematically significant efforts. (Oh wait, I literally just met the protagonist of Catherine slumming it up in a bar in Persona 3. I guess it very much is another Shin Megami Tensi title.) For Catherine, the actual gameplay takes place during sleep where the player is chased in their dreams across three-dimensional puzzle towers whilst being pursued by the deathly power of a succubus that threatens to kill him in his sleep. The dreams are rife with symbolism and creativity and sue to turn the act of wrestling with one's own moral compunctions into a maze of life and death. How dreamy!

The very prospect of making a game out of being asleep seems like a headscratcher- but the beauty of art is that it can exist anywhere and be about anything, and games are good at capturing the indistinct and making it robust. Admittedly I don't think many people out there are really huffing and stomping their feet everytime a game totally ignores completely accurate process of bodily functions, and neither am I, but I will totally commend any game which does something different and actually interesting with a prospect that sounds dull on paper. Who would think that laying still for 5 hours could be interpreted in so many wildly different ways? And what does it say about me and my current schedule that I felt the need to talk extensively about sleep... I'll let you know once the room stops spinning...