Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector Gives Me Hope
In the fiction of the Citizen Sleeper universe, two corporations are fully at war within the Helion System, a solar system with no habitable planets. Being set within The Starward Belt, a semi autonomous zone that has no corporate oversight, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector does not have you take part in said war. But, as wars always tend to do, the ripple effects of the actions taken by these behemoth corps shape the lives of everyone even remotely in their orbit, in large and small ways. Basically always for the worse.
Life is difficult in The Starward Belt. Bad people are able to take advantage of a poor situation. Good people struggle day in and day out to find any sort of stability. Despite this struggle, they find ways of carving out a life; a community. Taking what they do have, and finding ways to build on that, to create something better.
We live in a time increasingly defined by ages and technology past. Leaps in advancement across computing, for a few decades at least, shared a parallel trajectory of improving people's lives in measurable ways - better ability to connect with friends and family, access to abundant information, ways of reducing tedium and enhancing pleasure - alongside an explosive growth in corporate profit. As long as both sides of this equation benefited, the allowance for consolidated wealth and power was accepted.
The technological "advances" of recent times have veered away from this. Cryptocurrency; exploitative monetization practices across the media landscape; NFTs; metaverses; generative AI. None of these vehicles for wealth accumulation have had any real positive impact on the day to day of regular people. In a lot of cases, they have made life worse.
The only concern the people of The Belt have regarding the corporations is that their war stay as far away from them as possible. One bad actor attempts to use the war as a means of profit - this is resoundingly rejected by people across the internal political spectrum of the Belt. Everyone from freedom fighters to their own people push back against this blatantly selfish grab for power, knowing how it will negatively effect absolutely everyone.
In the absence of corporate oversight, meddling, control, care, mutual benefit - humanity still persists. Within the Sleeper universe - using cyberpunk as a genre launchpad - it's in the personal connections, the mutual aid, the joint belief that working together can help us overcome the most difficult of challenges, that binds the world together.
Where the first game more explicitly ties your very survival to your reliance on others, the second shifts towards your ability to thrive amongst peers. Ditching your need for stabilizer to keep your body running, your resource balancing becomes that of food, fuel, provisions, and repair components. All of these can be acquired on your own, sure; but essentially every system introduced into the sequel builds on the benefit of surrounding yourself with community.
As an unofficial captain of a stolen ship, your ragtag crew grows over the course of the game. This crew can scavenge for resources every cycle, alleviating the financial burden of working your body to the synthetic bone just to afford the basics. When taking on large contract jobs, having 2 crew members with their own dice rolls is the difference between scraping by at best or failing at worst, and being able to clear objectives comfortably, coming out the other side better off than you were before.
This success is found in the community we have cobbled together, building something out of old technology left to lie fallow. The stolen ship which transforms into a home for yourselves is of corporate origin. The space stations, solar arrays and mining facilities you travel between are remnants left behind, borne of corporate negligence. The technology and history left to languish is rebuilt, repurposed, re-engineered for direct human benefit.
I didn't plan it this way, but playing Citizen Sleeper 2 amongst the announcement and fallout of Microsoft/Xbox's "great reset" - where thousands of people's lives are again being upended, and yet more creative work disappearing into the void - inextricably ties them together in my mind. It's been clear for a while now that Microsoft, as a large corp with tentacles across everyone's lives through direct or indirect means, does not work for the benefit of humanity. Their tools are used for the destruction of an entire people, their continued over-investment in AI is degrading or outright breaking their own longstanding software, and their own internal teams continue to be shed over and over and over until there's nothing left. One of the largest corporations on earth continues to rake in billions in profit every month, while eroding humanity at every possible turn.
Yet, there are signs of positive change on an human level all around. Linux has, after years of being solely the realm of tech nerds, been expanding in user base. People are pushing back against Microsoft with boycotts, and it’s working. The AAA games industry that we once knew is collapsing, but games like Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector can not only exist, but succeed.
Sometimes it is hard to see positives when we are hammered every single day with more chaos, more horror, more loss of control. But through community engagement, mutual assistance and connections made on a person to person level, we as people not only can, but will, overcome all of it.
We can connect with the people around us. We can build our own futures. We can use the technologies these corporations leave to languish to create a better world.
A key for Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was provided by the publisher.