Sleep and stress research was reviewed on 29 October to test an early story idea. In that idea, a human "owner" scrolled bad news, slept badly, crashed and injured their brain. The user excluded the whole owner storyline on 30 October. Sleep is now private background, not game content.
In the research#
The review checked each link in the chain separately.
- News and phones. Doomscrolling correlates with distress, but the evidence is cross-sectional and very low certainty. Sleep and phone use affect each other in both directions.
- Short sleep and attention. Experiments show that repeated short sleep impairs attention, and people underrate how impaired they are. This is not evidence of brain injury.
- Short sleep and crashes. Large studies link short sleep to higher crash risk. They measure crashes, not brain injury, and cannot predict one person's crash.
- Sleep and immune measures. These do not establish human neuroinflammation.
The review's conclusion is that such a chain is at most one plausible fictional event, never a universal outcome.
Why it is not in the game#
- Zero owner content. Plan v0.5 forbids any human scene, face, phone, news, alarm, crash sound or hospital, in main or optional content.
- No causal claim. The game must not tell players that news inflames their brain, or that bad sleep leads to injury.
- Inside only. The Act V injury is shown entirely from inside the cellular world, with its cause unspecified.
- Clues disabled. The user allowed that tiny clues might be considered in future. The plan treats them as disabled by default until the user approves each one.
Development#
- v0.1 of the plan had six human intercuts. v0.2 removed them (30 October).
- The review remains in
.GAME_PLAN/as research history.
See also#
Sources#
- .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_STRESS_SLEEP_AND_INJURY_CAUSAL_REVIEW_2026-10-29.md (working copy, not in Git)
- .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_THE_LONG_WAKE_COMPLETE_GAME_PLAN_v0.5.md (working copy, not in Git)