The Creator of 'Citizen Sleeper' Was Inspired by Our Modern Dystopia

The death star is off in the distance but people still live around it. Thousands of lives are affected by the infrastructure needed for these sweeping set pieces, and have nothing to do with the Big Space War. We are that. We are all living around the death star and hearing about what is going on outside. We are paying rent through the day.

I wanted to strike a balance between those two extremes of drama, by juggling a suspenseful, momentous journey in tandem with the intimate experiences of real people, especially those in society's peripheral areas.

There is a phenomenon called the "millennial Dystopia."

Damian Martin shared that one of the game's hooks was that the main character would be saddled with an unfair debt that they would work to pay off in order to win the game.

Damian Martin had to retool their presentation after Hardspace: Shipbreaker was announced for early access. Damian Martin thinks there was something in the water. Drivers in serious debt had to lease their cars while working 15-hour days, evading plain-clothes repo men during fares, because of the awful behavior of the company.

What Damian Martin was seeing in our world was something the genre had never gotten quite right.

Dysstopian stories portray corporations as ruthless and efficient. Scary corporate power is derived from their thoroughness and productivity. In our world, we are seeing this ruthlessness start to exist, but it is not efficient, it is poorly implemented, and it is spreading into every aspect of life.

There is little to gain by asking for years of experience for entry-level jobs, disincentivizing sick days during historic pandemics, and monitoring workers so intrusive that they develop anxiety conditions, that's what the young people of the 21st century have come to realize.

Damian Martin said that when market experiments and disruptive practices are tried to squeeze extra hours out of workers, the results play out across the bodies and minds of people with no choice but to work. The definition of a dispersed agency is that no one is ever required to take moral responsibility for their company.

Damian Martin believes that corporations are not evil because they are often formed of many people who want to do the right thing. Corporate culture is getting better and better at normalized states of passive cruelty in ways that are increasingly difficult to hold to account.