For large swaths of its playtime, Citizen Sleeper 2 is more or less a book. Dice rolls or no, you spend the bulk of your time in-game reading. For me, that rules, especially because developer Gareth Damian Martin is, for my money, one of the best writers in games right now. I love their evocative exposition, describing not just the physicality of a fully imagined cityspace, but the ways in which it plays on the minds of those who inhabit it. The story explores questions of migrancy, liminality, and scarcity with finesse. The writing is so strong, in fact, that a question occurred to me: Why isn’t this a novel instead of a game?

A version of that question has been asked in less charitable terms, I’m sure. To borrow a phrase from Polygon alum Justin McElroy, there are undoubtedly those out there who see games like Citizen Sleeper 2 as “books-level boring.” But, for those among us who love books and games, the question I’m posing here isn’t so much “Should this have been a book?” and more “Why is this a game?” That is, Martin could’ve easily taken all the text here and fashioned a very good book out of it. (OK, maybe not easily. Writing books is hard.) Is so much gained from dice rolls so as to justify the extra creative labor?

To answer that question, here’s a hypothetical reimagining of the beginning of the game. Without spoiling anything, the opening salvo launches the protagonist into a kind of forced migrancy, demanding that they never stop too long in one location lest a certain antagonistic force catch up with them. As far as plotting goes, this is an........

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