Sleep Is Inevitable

A brief disclaimer: I am an acquaintance of the creator, and I have collaborated with them before on a game jam. My analysis below may seem overdone as a result, but know that I'm not writing this as a favor (academia has not been kind to my writing style), and I hope that my thoughts still ring as genuine in the end!

I feel that Sleep is Inevitable is a great example of how the form and context of a game jam game can stir certain provocative questions as a player interacts with its incompleteness, while being aware of its incompleteness.

Being aware of the short turnaround time and prototype status of the game, the gameplay leads me to ask, "Is this supposed to work like this?" and "Am I doing this right?" These questions mirror my own experiences in retail and service jobs, characterized by their half-finished systems and questionable tendencies to isolate employees. I recommend you play the game first before reading on, as I'm about to offer some examples from my own unique play experiences.

Only a few items can remained spawned at once, and the spawn rate is not flexible, meaning that it's possible for an item you're carrying to be despawned mid-transit. I was incentivized to pick up and carry only the most recent items, letting the earlier inconveniences disappear into neglected oblivion. This is one of several conflicts that the player, just trying to make the most of the situation, will eventually decide is not their problem (or else they will be overwhelmed). The same goes for items rolling off the edge: sometimes it's your fault, sometimes it isn't, but hesitation about that doesn't help to get the job done. A numbness begins to settle in. The careening camera is unpleasant when you're running out of stamina; based on the drowsy spells and panic attacks I've had standing up at work before, it would be miseducative if the feature didn't make me a bit ill. There's a bit of rebellion in using the rope to jump around and work up a bit of energy: the rope wasn't made for you, but desperate for any kind of stimulus, you indulge yourself in using it. Likewise, it took me a while to realize the rope requires you to rapidly tap the E key to use—I had to do more than hear the impulse, I had to get desperate to use it for my own gains. If squeezing a small bit of stamina out of the rope isn't enough to break the player's will, they'll be shattered seeing the Completion meter tick backwards at the halfway point. I gave it several more tests to see if the negation point is a feature instead of a bug, just to confirm that the system I was working under was designed as I had feared. After that, awakened to the bleak circumstances, all that was left to do was participate in inevitability, whether by failing the job, falling out of the world in an act of apathetic self-harm, or resigning by quitting the game.

I truly believe the messages embedded in this game could not hit me as strongly if this game project had full closure in its production. The working world is similarly tumbling in a constant state of unfulfilled potential, from frayed customer interaction policies to company websites riddled with dead-ends. Had this game been neatly polished with a lacquer finish, it would be uncontroversial in the worst way, a hollow performance of workplace opinion instead of authentic participation. Sleep is Inevitable bottles those moments of on-the-job discomfort and futility as an aesthetic, and I feel that there's an immense value in embracing such game experiences. If a game can draw this much meaning from me in its unconventional state, I think it's worth further decoupling the belief that a game is measured on its production value alone.