Sleep Is Death was ahead of its time
Friends have been gathering around tables to play pen-and-paper games together for decades, but what's changed recently is that now those friends can have an audience while they do it. Whether through 'actual-play' podcasts, Twitch livestreams, or sold-out performances at gaming events, there is a new audience eager to spectate while creative people improvise stories together.
I understand these audiences mainly because, back in 2010, I spent hours trawling a website called SIDTube. SID stands for Sleep Is Death, the name of Jason Rohrer's 2010 two-player storytelling game in which one person controls a single character and the other weaves the story around them as game master. At the end of each story, the game would output the actions of actor and storyteller as a flipbook of images that users could then upload to SIDTube and sites like it.
Sleep Is Death's popularity was short-lived and SIDTube slipped offline years ago, but while reminiscing with a friend recently I discovered that someone has uploaded the site's archives to ModDB. There are 500 stories available and in among them are a handful in which I am either the actor or the storyteller.
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