This review contains spoilers
spoilers for Planescape: Torment below
We like to view ourselves as monolithic beings. Each of us has their own name, body and (according to certain religious sects) a soul. A person might have different inclinations, ideologies and occupations, but these are mere appendages, never lessening the image of an unified whole.
But although we view ourselves as unitary beings, with a specific agency, we often find that we do not act according to our own standards. Thisproblempuzzledpeopleevenbeforetheyfiguredmaybeyououghttoseparatewordsinsentences: according to a guy called Aristocles (nicknamed by his contemporaries as Plato, ancient greek for big chungus) the soul/psyche can be thought of as a flying chariot, pulled by two pegasi: the good one being virtuous while the bad one is self-indulgent, with the charioteer (reason/logistikon) responsible for restraining the bad horse while giving rein and guiding the good one towards the heavenly World of Forms. Millenia afterwards, daddy Freud would change the scheme slightly: this time the charioteer/ego had to find equilibrium between the instinctual impulses of man-as-an-animal (id) and the imposed norms of society (superego). In the 60s a guy called MacLean would propose that this inner conflict boils down to our brain being composed of different parts respective to different stages of our evolutionary history: pure survival/sex drive instincts were regulated by the ganglia/“reptile brain” (from the times of tiktaalik, when synapsids (you, me, rats, whales) and diapsids (pigeons, iguanas, tortoises) hadn't split off forever), the limbic system provided emotions and sociality (this appeared when mammals were still scurrying beneath the feet of archosaurs in the mesozoic, before tasmanian tigers split off from actual tigers) and sophonthood (laws/logic/culture) was only achieved when hominids refined the placental neocortex (disco acknowledges this by having your “ancient reptilian brain” and “limbic system” act as occasional side characters whenever harry slips into the unconscious).
As for the idea of an unified absolute self: it is a historical phenomenon and in no way an universal consensus between human cultures. The ancient Egyptians did not conceive a single soul, but many constitutive parts which made up a living human being and split off after death (the ba, the ka, the akh, etc.). If you ask a follower of Siddartha Gautama (the guy we use to call the the buddha), the self is an illusion produced by the different faculties of a human being (skandha): i.e. not that you do not believe/feel to be a conscious/continuous entity, but that what we view as a “self” is just the succession of different states of being experienced in the same impermanent body; it has no continuous substance/essence.
But if any field has been truly successful in breaking the illusion of the unitary human being, it’s neuroscience. The advent of the scientific revolution entailed to not only the desacralization of “nature”, but also of what we previously thought of as the "soul". Our identities stopped being seen as the incarnation of an ethereal rational principle instinctively guided by the virtues of metaphysics; to byproducts of a complex set of physicochemical laws regulated by an unfathomably long and wholeheartedly indifferent experiment of game theory.
So we started sending x-rays and radio waves through the brains of mice, chimps and people to see the neural pathways and electricity running through the synapses. We paid attention to how intracranial injury impaired the mental faculties of TBI survivors. We discovered how every aspect of our cognition is shaped by the different parts of our brain. We realized that to eliminate or damage certain areas of our central nervous system is to take away parts of our own being.
Human experience became a sort of jigsaw puzzle. You can take away motoric skills and the ability to react to sensory stimuli by damaging the parietal lobe, with worst case scenarios leading to the complete inability to perceive certain areas of the body. The ability to recognize faces of family members or even recognize the general characteristics of a human face can be erased by injuries to the temporal lobe, with other side effects leading to difficulty recognizing words or objects. Damage to that same temporal lobe, which is also responsible for our perception of time, can also result in an individual living in an eternal present, unable to recall memories from before or after the accident, or being unable to imagine themselves in a future scenario. Even our personalities did not stay intact: damage to the frontal lobe, the area responsible for planning, selecting and executing patterns of behaviour, may lead from sainthood to sin, transforming the previously “well adjusted” into impulsive, erratic and confused persons. Subjective experience too can be molded by changing the amygdala (part of the instinctual “lizard brain”). Scientists have managed (through an arcane witchcraft technique known as optogenetics) to induce predatory behaviour in mice by triggering the amygdala with lasers. The reverse effect follows as corollary, with other scientists managing to "tame" wild monkeys by removing the amygdala itself, resulting in the absence of aggressive or fearful behaviour.
The primacy of consciousness itself was put into question. We figured that the automatic processes of our brains added another layer to our perception of reality, constantly playing tricks on us. Remember how damage to the parietal lobe can make someone completely unaware of a region of their body? Well, they might be consciously unaware, but still have their bodies instinctively reacting to sensory stimuli: say, pulling an arm away after being pinched while being unable to feel pain in that region or to be aware of the pinching sensation. Vision itself can be thought of as a very elaborate illusion. You do not have a “crystal view” of this text. Your brain is constantly creating an ideal image: it turns your vision upside down and left to right to adjust it to your preferences; feigns that there aren’t two blindspots in your field of view; pretends that the rod receptor cells in your peripheral visual field can detect colour just as well as the cone cells in your visual field center; removes blurry images created by jerking motions of your eyes by pretending time has stopped during the transition. It also makes mistakes sometimes: it will try to predict objects and patterns in your eyesight and create an impression of a thing, but if it realises that the updated pattern is inconsistent with the original prediction, it will swap to a better fitting model and automatically convince you of it, leading to a bunch of optical illusion tricks. But at least you’re aware that you are seeing something and logically you can only react to visual stimuli if you are at least visually aware of it, even if it’s distorted, right? Well, not exactly, because though most information travels from your eyes to your visual cortex (which makes you aware of seeing something) before reaching the amygdala, some of it takes a shortcut and goes straight to the amygdala. People with only the amygdala shortcut have a condition called “blindsight”: they are incapable of consciously seeing and identifying things, but can instinctively react to things their brains identify through their eyesight but do not make them consciously aware of. Or, to be more accurate, every human being with this neural connection (which makes for most of us) has blindsight, an unconscious capacity to view and react to objects without being aware of them. That much of our reactions are unconscious or automatic is reinforced by experiments with wild rhesus monkeys which only had the left or right portions of their amygdala removed (each of which deals with input from its opposite side of the body), with the result being that the monkeys would act placidly when viewing humans from the non-amygdala-connected eye, but aggressively when vision included only the amygdala-connected eye or both eyes.
Ok so, what the fuck does any of this have to do with video games?
Though (respectively) religion, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience have been challenging the view of humans as singular beings for thousands of years, video games seem to (AFAIK) have completely missed this development. You could argue that most games, like first-person shooters and platformers ought have no reason to be bothered with psychological mechanics instead of “objective” gameplay, but even role-playing video games did not make much headway for simulating the human mind: in RPGs you mostly control an unified individual; they might have different ways of interacting with the world and a outer personality, but their mind stays as uncharted territory. Role-playing games are also seen as being all about player agency (though free will in philosophy is another huge can of worms): these games are all about influencing the world, making your own choices and seeing the result. The way different characters or character builds see the world is mostly the same: a botanist and a lumberjack view a forest the same way, but the botanist has a special ability to discern edible fruit, whereas the lumberjack has a skill for refining timber. In a way games let us play the ultimate fantasy: that of the completely subservient automaton contained in the purely objective universe.
So what does Disco Elysium do? It does its own sort of ludic “copernican revolution”: “I think that there’s an entire layer of our perception of reality that has not been simulated at all” [1], affirmed Kurvitz. There’s an outer layer where Disco is very similar to other rpgs: there is a player character, npcs this character can interact with, a system for skills/attributes and checks for the successful use of these for achieving specific outcomes in the narrative. But what sets disco apart is the willingness to simulate the inner layer of the mind as an active element of gameplay. Your character’s mind has its own cast of “skills” (which are aspects of your mind/body), each of which has a specific personality and their biases on what elements of reality they care about. They are not only used to pass checks: they also work through “passive checks” by intervening in conversations (this sometimes applies for failed passive checks; e.g. to misjudge someone by fucking up on empathy) regardless of player agency. Their output changes the possibilities of player input in interactions with npcs/objects. In a way you feel as if you’re the driver of Plato’s chariot, but instead of two there are twenty four horses; your main choice is deciding which of them will you nourish the most for an increasing amount of psychological leverage.
Another interesting thing are the skill checks. There’s nothing inherently revolutionary about them, but disco handles most of them well by embracing failure. It seems to me rpgs often are afraid of having the player fail interactions for two reasons: they are afraid of upsetting the player and losing their trust (and money) or they fail to see how failure can be used as a means to advance the narrative and develop characters. Some of the funniest interactions of disco elysium are caused by failed checks. Hell, some of them may lead you into their own side-quests. This is not to say I consider every check to be equally good in this regard: disco’s checks are at its best when failure is an option just as valid as success, leading to new and unique narrative avenues. It’s at its worst when checks just gatekeep you from important areas or unique interactions.
There's another thing disco's checks do, one which is a big no-no in rpg design: they sometimes take away player agency. One of the game's iconic moments involves your character calling Saint Kim Kitsuragi, your beloved companion, a "yellow monkey fucker" (the heresy!). This goes against all the pre-established rules of role-playing: it's rail-roading, the game is putting words into your characters mouth based on an arbitrary skill check. Rpgs are all about agency: being able to do what you want when you want it. Sure, there might be an option to call someone a racial slur, but that depends on player input, on what kind of character the player wants to roleplay. So, bad design, right? But think about it, think about all the automatic functions of your body you have no control over, think of the freudian slips you blurted out in the wrong social context or that time you hurt someone you hold dear but "didn't really mean to". Sometimes we act instinctively, impulsively, and most of all should someone like harry, a legendary alcoholic who has been putting his prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for censoring your speech) through the grinder for decades, have difficulty controlling his urges in certain situations ("I want to have fuck with you"). It's a bold decision, but it does very much fit disco's intent to simulate the inner human being, as Kurvitz put it: “In reality we do not have control, or complete control, of our minds. Just like our body, it is something that we give – not even commands – wishes to, and we hope it’s gonna do it. We hope it’s not gonna break down... we hope it’s not gonna rebel against us.” [2]
Ok so, what about setting? Disco might be set in a post-modern universe, but setting is nothing more than a glorified form of set dressing, right? You just swap the horses for cars, swords for guns and carrier pigeons for radio waves. Well, not quite, because though history keeps on rhyming, its semiosis changes. We might have the same basic needs and face very similar struggles to previous generations, but we do not view ourselves, society or the universe in the same way. Elysium’s modernity is holistic and deals with capitalism, nationalism, racism, fascism, communism and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds) besides ignition engines, plastic bags and analog computers (though the writers have a keen interest in even the most miscellaneous of minutiae, just max out the "encyclopedia" skill to check it out). All of this happens in a distinct universe which, if not identical to ours (why should it be?), developed similarly in a kind of sociocultural case of convergent evolution. And although Elysium’s “current century” is very much modern, its past lingers on, fossilized in the streets of Martinaise:
“So we took the previous, discarded versions of Elysium – the bronze age and the age of sail and the industrial revolution, even the medievalism – and turned them into historic periods within the setting: Palm & Pine, the Franconigerian century, the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum). This allowed for distinct aesthetics, which in turn informed each other. Across two centuries the oily black gold of Franconegro melted into the cream of Dolorianism. The bright colours of Palm & Pine are still visible, faded underneath Modernitas – the present horizon of Elysium.” [3]
In a kind of way this game is also a postmodern take on Planescape Torment. Which is funny, cause years ago everyone was hyping up tides of numenera (which I havent played so this might be a disservice) as torment's successor, but then disco comes along and just blows every other rpg out of the water. For thematic parallels, there's the amnesiac protagonist trope; in torment your identity is based on not having a name (being the nameless one) while in disco you don't know your name nor your appearance during the beginning of the game (eventually you learn you're called harrier du bois… probably because you just had a hangover… gueule de bois… get it?). Then there's your relationship with your unknown past: in torment you're this legendary hero trapped in a cycle of metempsychosis and are plagued by the effects of your previous lives, whereas in disco you must deal with the actions of who you forgot to be. This also means both games are filled with relevant npcs whose lives have been negatively affected by a previous version of yourself, it's just that in torment you enslaved a poor sod for all eternity and committed extradimensional genocide while in disco you ruined the police department's spending by crashing a car and made a poor sod paraplegic for property damage.
Then the prose, oh boy. Disco's prose can get so purple it could claim inheritance to the byzantine empire. You max out your "shivers" skill and get all these extensive descriptions of your surroundings straight from literary realism. But to say the prose is boring and tiring is to do a huge disservice to the game. First off, dialogue is usually very dynamic because of the intervention of the "skills", which are constantly shifting the center of your attention. Also, though the descriptions can get fancy, characters (including most skills) always speak according to their cultural lingo which is typically much more mundane; you get used to going from thesaurus to urban dictionary between two sentences in the blink of an eye. Then there's the HUD, which takes the form of a column set in the right corner and filled with relatively short bursts of ascending text, purposefully made to mimic addicting social platforms like twitter. Combine all of these factors and the result is that I almost never felt bored reading disco's more than a million words : the sentences were almost always dynamic, funny, touching, evocative, but not boring at all (which is a must for a game that depends on its writing).
One thing disco mostly avoids is combat (which is technically just a glorified skill check), which is actually a good thing. Some blokes out there really think disco is not a true rpg. Why? Because there's no traditional combat (I guess rpg is an acronym for riposte-parrying game now, so nidhogg and 3rd strike are classic rpgs). Lengthy paragraphs might be boring, but you know what's exciting? Grinding in the same area because your character did not have a high enough level to advance to the next section. If you read the old blog posts you realize the developers probably wanted combat to have a greater (but still secondary) role. In a way combat should be characterization, with your own skills influencing your tactics and possible outcomes. Had ZA/UM not met such unfortunate circumstances, the devs would probably expand the role of combat in other games.
As a roleplaying video game inspired by tabletop rpgs, disco has its own alignment system, but instead of the good-to-evil/lawful-to-chaotic spectra there's four main ideologies: communism, fascism (which some argue is not genuine fascism though I think it generally fits Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalism”) and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds). It is to disco’s credit that, though the writers very much have their political views, I never felt like the game was intended to be a sermon or a piece of propaganda; instead, disco’s themes revolve around how ideologies shape our identities and our cultural milieu, including how often our ideological labels fail to take into account ideologies as a manifestation of inner psychological complexes. Take reactionarism for instance; plenty of characters in disco can be classified as right-wingers, but they differ in how their beliefs relate to themselves: for René reactionarism is his only means to stay linked to his lost past (and at the same time, his loyalty to his past imprisons his romantic inclinations for his best friend); for Gary it fulfills his needs for a strong authority figure to cover his own weakness and to make him feel secure; for the racist lorry driver it is a way to weaponize his envy of others; for Jean-Luc/Measurehead it is a means to deny his status as a nobody and to declare himself as an übermensch.
So, five stars… do I think disco is a perfect game? Not really: the thought cabinet was a very good idea messily executed; some failed checks just block you from importants bits of the game without giving much in return; the clothing mechanics were interesting in theory but mostly serve as a means to powergame in practice; those rat-ass shareholders ensured the game would never be completely (though it’s almost so) voice acted in their stunt to fire Hindpere. Disco isn’t perfect, but it punches waaaay above its weight. It does so by innovating; by having some of the best game prose I’ve ever read; by the richness of its world building and characters; by being a genuine work of art; and most of all, because no game manages to scratch quite the same itch. It is a wonderful genuine thing and I’m glad it came to be.
Notes:
- I also think Measurehead is an interesting take on how subaltern groups can adopt/adapt pernicious power structures or ideologies to oppress other subaltern groups. This was prompted by a certain twitter interaction I saw recently, with some very racist remarks towards the Igbo people. What surprised me was that the person who wrote that was not a white supremacist, but identified himself as a “yoruba nationalist”. His claims of Yoruba “superiority” were surprisingly western: the Yoruba ought to be seen as superior because they produced “superior” art (when I write superior, replace it with “realistic”) and (supposedly) wore more clothing (seriously), with the guy even employing racist wojak memes to denigrate the Igbo (any similarity with a terminally online white supremacist is mere coincidence). This harkens back to measurehead: though he claims to be a semenese supremacist, his ideology is very much “occidental” (elysium’s equivalent to “western”): the semenese ought to be seen as superior for fitting in the standards of occidental phrenology/racism, for avoiding occidental “decadence” (the cyclical history “fremen mirage” trope) and because they descend from the mythical aeropagite übermenschen (translatio imperii as a racial origin myth).
- Klaasje’s relationship with Lely (the hanged man) was very nuanced. Though Lely and the rest of the PMCs are some of the worst human beings in the game, disco avoids the generic option of sexual violence to acknowledge that erotic relationships are complicated things and one’s sexual attraction acts regardless of one’s own personal ethics. I also liked that although Klaasje was hardly a “damsel in distress”, the game never villainized her for being engaged with a bad human being.
- another subject whose execution I liked was nationalism. We subscribe quite strongly to our “national” identity, even in our pluralistic age. But where does one’s national identity lie? In birthplace, language, customs or phenotype? Kim is one of the most “nationalistic” characters in the game, in the sense that he genuinely cares about Revachol and strongly identifies with it, but his phenotype and ascendancy inhibit him from ever being considered a true “revacholiere” by many of his compatriots.
- Another way in which Elysium is similar to Planescape is in the metaphysical power of cognition. But whereas in planescape thought is a creative force, with belief being able to create planes and pantheons (and “change the nature of man”), in Elysium thought is a negative force, with its side effect taking the form of the “Pale”: a kind of geographical blindspot which will consume elysium itself in the 73rd year of the “current century”.
- I’m saddened by the current status of ZA/UM. I very much agree with Hindpere that Kompus & company used workplace issues as a kind of casus belli in their coup to take over the IP
_______________________________________
[1] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=755
[2] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=800
[3] https://thoughtgained.tumblr.com/post/694215013077041152/i-went-ahead-and-scanned-digitized-robert
We like to view ourselves as monolithic beings. Each of us has their own name, body and (according to certain religious sects) a soul. A person might have different inclinations, ideologies and occupations, but these are mere appendages, never lessening the image of an unified whole.
But although we view ourselves as unitary beings, with a specific agency, we often find that we do not act according to our own standards. Thisproblempuzzledpeopleevenbeforetheyfiguredmaybeyououghttoseparatewordsinsentences: according to a guy called Aristocles (nicknamed by his contemporaries as Plato, ancient greek for big chungus) the soul/psyche can be thought of as a flying chariot, pulled by two pegasi: the good one being virtuous while the bad one is self-indulgent, with the charioteer (reason/logistikon) responsible for restraining the bad horse while giving rein and guiding the good one towards the heavenly World of Forms. Millenia afterwards, daddy Freud would change the scheme slightly: this time the charioteer/ego had to find equilibrium between the instinctual impulses of man-as-an-animal (id) and the imposed norms of society (superego). In the 60s a guy called MacLean would propose that this inner conflict boils down to our brain being composed of different parts respective to different stages of our evolutionary history: pure survival/sex drive instincts were regulated by the ganglia/“reptile brain” (from the times of tiktaalik, when synapsids (you, me, rats, whales) and diapsids (pigeons, iguanas, tortoises) hadn't split off forever), the limbic system provided emotions and sociality (this appeared when mammals were still scurrying beneath the feet of archosaurs in the mesozoic, before tasmanian tigers split off from actual tigers) and sophonthood (laws/logic/culture) was only achieved when hominids refined the placental neocortex (disco acknowledges this by having your “ancient reptilian brain” and “limbic system” act as occasional side characters whenever harry slips into the unconscious).
As for the idea of an unified absolute self: it is a historical phenomenon and in no way an universal consensus between human cultures. The ancient Egyptians did not conceive a single soul, but many constitutive parts which made up a living human being and split off after death (the ba, the ka, the akh, etc.). If you ask a follower of Siddartha Gautama (the guy we use to call the the buddha), the self is an illusion produced by the different faculties of a human being (skandha): i.e. not that you do not believe/feel to be a conscious/continuous entity, but that what we view as a “self” is just the succession of different states of being experienced in the same impermanent body; it has no continuous substance/essence.
But if any field has been truly successful in breaking the illusion of the unitary human being, it’s neuroscience. The advent of the scientific revolution entailed to not only the desacralization of “nature”, but also of what we previously thought of as the "soul". Our identities stopped being seen as the incarnation of an ethereal rational principle instinctively guided by the virtues of metaphysics; to byproducts of a complex set of physicochemical laws regulated by an unfathomably long and wholeheartedly indifferent experiment of game theory.
So we started sending x-rays and radio waves through the brains of mice, chimps and people to see the neural pathways and electricity running through the synapses. We paid attention to how intracranial injury impaired the mental faculties of TBI survivors. We discovered how every aspect of our cognition is shaped by the different parts of our brain. We realized that to eliminate or damage certain areas of our central nervous system is to take away parts of our own being.
Human experience became a sort of jigsaw puzzle. You can take away motoric skills and the ability to react to sensory stimuli by damaging the parietal lobe, with worst case scenarios leading to the complete inability to perceive certain areas of the body. The ability to recognize faces of family members or even recognize the general characteristics of a human face can be erased by injuries to the temporal lobe, with other side effects leading to difficulty recognizing words or objects. Damage to that same temporal lobe, which is also responsible for our perception of time, can also result in an individual living in an eternal present, unable to recall memories from before or after the accident, or being unable to imagine themselves in a future scenario. Even our personalities did not stay intact: damage to the frontal lobe, the area responsible for planning, selecting and executing patterns of behaviour, may lead from sainthood to sin, transforming the previously “well adjusted” into impulsive, erratic and confused persons. Subjective experience too can be molded by changing the amygdala (part of the instinctual “lizard brain”). Scientists have managed (through an arcane witchcraft technique known as optogenetics) to induce predatory behaviour in mice by triggering the amygdala with lasers. The reverse effect follows as corollary, with other scientists managing to "tame" wild monkeys by removing the amygdala itself, resulting in the absence of aggressive or fearful behaviour.
The primacy of consciousness itself was put into question. We figured that the automatic processes of our brains added another layer to our perception of reality, constantly playing tricks on us. Remember how damage to the parietal lobe can make someone completely unaware of a region of their body? Well, they might be consciously unaware, but still have their bodies instinctively reacting to sensory stimuli: say, pulling an arm away after being pinched while being unable to feel pain in that region or to be aware of the pinching sensation. Vision itself can be thought of as a very elaborate illusion. You do not have a “crystal view” of this text. Your brain is constantly creating an ideal image: it turns your vision upside down and left to right to adjust it to your preferences; feigns that there aren’t two blindspots in your field of view; pretends that the rod receptor cells in your peripheral visual field can detect colour just as well as the cone cells in your visual field center; removes blurry images created by jerking motions of your eyes by pretending time has stopped during the transition. It also makes mistakes sometimes: it will try to predict objects and patterns in your eyesight and create an impression of a thing, but if it realises that the updated pattern is inconsistent with the original prediction, it will swap to a better fitting model and automatically convince you of it, leading to a bunch of optical illusion tricks. But at least you’re aware that you are seeing something and logically you can only react to visual stimuli if you are at least visually aware of it, even if it’s distorted, right? Well, not exactly, because though most information travels from your eyes to your visual cortex (which makes you aware of seeing something) before reaching the amygdala, some of it takes a shortcut and goes straight to the amygdala. People with only the amygdala shortcut have a condition called “blindsight”: they are incapable of consciously seeing and identifying things, but can instinctively react to things their brains identify through their eyesight but do not make them consciously aware of. Or, to be more accurate, every human being with this neural connection (which makes for most of us) has blindsight, an unconscious capacity to view and react to objects without being aware of them. That much of our reactions are unconscious or automatic is reinforced by experiments with wild rhesus monkeys which only had the left or right portions of their amygdala removed (each of which deals with input from its opposite side of the body), with the result being that the monkeys would act placidly when viewing humans from the non-amygdala-connected eye, but aggressively when vision included only the amygdala-connected eye or both eyes.
Ok so, what the fuck does any of this have to do with video games?
Though (respectively) religion, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience have been challenging the view of humans as singular beings for thousands of years, video games seem to (AFAIK) have completely missed this development. You could argue that most games, like first-person shooters and platformers ought have no reason to be bothered with psychological mechanics instead of “objective” gameplay, but even role-playing video games did not make much headway for simulating the human mind: in RPGs you mostly control an unified individual; they might have different ways of interacting with the world and a outer personality, but their mind stays as uncharted territory. Role-playing games are also seen as being all about player agency (though free will in philosophy is another huge can of worms): these games are all about influencing the world, making your own choices and seeing the result. The way different characters or character builds see the world is mostly the same: a botanist and a lumberjack view a forest the same way, but the botanist has a special ability to discern edible fruit, whereas the lumberjack has a skill for refining timber. In a way games let us play the ultimate fantasy: that of the completely subservient automaton contained in the purely objective universe.
So what does Disco Elysium do? It does its own sort of ludic “copernican revolution”: “I think that there’s an entire layer of our perception of reality that has not been simulated at all” [1], affirmed Kurvitz. There’s an outer layer where Disco is very similar to other rpgs: there is a player character, npcs this character can interact with, a system for skills/attributes and checks for the successful use of these for achieving specific outcomes in the narrative. But what sets disco apart is the willingness to simulate the inner layer of the mind as an active element of gameplay. Your character’s mind has its own cast of “skills” (which are aspects of your mind/body), each of which has a specific personality and their biases on what elements of reality they care about. They are not only used to pass checks: they also work through “passive checks” by intervening in conversations (this sometimes applies for failed passive checks; e.g. to misjudge someone by fucking up on empathy) regardless of player agency. Their output changes the possibilities of player input in interactions with npcs/objects. In a way you feel as if you’re the driver of Plato’s chariot, but instead of two there are twenty four horses; your main choice is deciding which of them will you nourish the most for an increasing amount of psychological leverage.
Another interesting thing are the skill checks. There’s nothing inherently revolutionary about them, but disco handles most of them well by embracing failure. It seems to me rpgs often are afraid of having the player fail interactions for two reasons: they are afraid of upsetting the player and losing their trust (and money) or they fail to see how failure can be used as a means to advance the narrative and develop characters. Some of the funniest interactions of disco elysium are caused by failed checks. Hell, some of them may lead you into their own side-quests. This is not to say I consider every check to be equally good in this regard: disco’s checks are at its best when failure is an option just as valid as success, leading to new and unique narrative avenues. It’s at its worst when checks just gatekeep you from important areas or unique interactions.
There's another thing disco's checks do, one which is a big no-no in rpg design: they sometimes take away player agency. One of the game's iconic moments involves your character calling Saint Kim Kitsuragi, your beloved companion, a "yellow monkey fucker" (the heresy!). This goes against all the pre-established rules of role-playing: it's rail-roading, the game is putting words into your characters mouth based on an arbitrary skill check. Rpgs are all about agency: being able to do what you want when you want it. Sure, there might be an option to call someone a racial slur, but that depends on player input, on what kind of character the player wants to roleplay. So, bad design, right? But think about it, think about all the automatic functions of your body you have no control over, think of the freudian slips you blurted out in the wrong social context or that time you hurt someone you hold dear but "didn't really mean to". Sometimes we act instinctively, impulsively, and most of all should someone like harry, a legendary alcoholic who has been putting his prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for censoring your speech) through the grinder for decades, have difficulty controlling his urges in certain situations ("I want to have fuck with you"). It's a bold decision, but it does very much fit disco's intent to simulate the inner human being, as Kurvitz put it: “In reality we do not have control, or complete control, of our minds. Just like our body, it is something that we give – not even commands – wishes to, and we hope it’s gonna do it. We hope it’s not gonna break down... we hope it’s not gonna rebel against us.” [2]
Ok so, what about setting? Disco might be set in a post-modern universe, but setting is nothing more than a glorified form of set dressing, right? You just swap the horses for cars, swords for guns and carrier pigeons for radio waves. Well, not quite, because though history keeps on rhyming, its semiosis changes. We might have the same basic needs and face very similar struggles to previous generations, but we do not view ourselves, society or the universe in the same way. Elysium’s modernity is holistic and deals with capitalism, nationalism, racism, fascism, communism and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds) besides ignition engines, plastic bags and analog computers (though the writers have a keen interest in even the most miscellaneous of minutiae, just max out the "encyclopedia" skill to check it out). All of this happens in a distinct universe which, if not identical to ours (why should it be?), developed similarly in a kind of sociocultural case of convergent evolution. And although Elysium’s “current century” is very much modern, its past lingers on, fossilized in the streets of Martinaise:
“So we took the previous, discarded versions of Elysium – the bronze age and the age of sail and the industrial revolution, even the medievalism – and turned them into historic periods within the setting: Palm & Pine, the Franconigerian century, the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum). This allowed for distinct aesthetics, which in turn informed each other. Across two centuries the oily black gold of Franconegro melted into the cream of Dolorianism. The bright colours of Palm & Pine are still visible, faded underneath Modernitas – the present horizon of Elysium.” [3]
In a kind of way this game is also a postmodern take on Planescape Torment. Which is funny, cause years ago everyone was hyping up tides of numenera (which I havent played so this might be a disservice) as torment's successor, but then disco comes along and just blows every other rpg out of the water. For thematic parallels, there's the amnesiac protagonist trope; in torment your identity is based on not having a name (being the nameless one) while in disco you don't know your name nor your appearance during the beginning of the game (eventually you learn you're called harrier du bois… probably because you just had a hangover… gueule de bois… get it?). Then there's your relationship with your unknown past: in torment you're this legendary hero trapped in a cycle of metempsychosis and are plagued by the effects of your previous lives, whereas in disco you must deal with the actions of who you forgot to be. This also means both games are filled with relevant npcs whose lives have been negatively affected by a previous version of yourself, it's just that in torment you enslaved a poor sod for all eternity and committed extradimensional genocide while in disco you ruined the police department's spending by crashing a car and made a poor sod paraplegic for property damage.
Then the prose, oh boy. Disco's prose can get so purple it could claim inheritance to the byzantine empire. You max out your "shivers" skill and get all these extensive descriptions of your surroundings straight from literary realism. But to say the prose is boring and tiring is to do a huge disservice to the game. First off, dialogue is usually very dynamic because of the intervention of the "skills", which are constantly shifting the center of your attention. Also, though the descriptions can get fancy, characters (including most skills) always speak according to their cultural lingo which is typically much more mundane; you get used to going from thesaurus to urban dictionary between two sentences in the blink of an eye. Then there's the HUD, which takes the form of a column set in the right corner and filled with relatively short bursts of ascending text, purposefully made to mimic addicting social platforms like twitter. Combine all of these factors and the result is that I almost never felt bored reading disco's more than a million words : the sentences were almost always dynamic, funny, touching, evocative, but not boring at all (which is a must for a game that depends on its writing).
One thing disco mostly avoids is combat (which is technically just a glorified skill check), which is actually a good thing. Some blokes out there really think disco is not a true rpg. Why? Because there's no traditional combat (I guess rpg is an acronym for riposte-parrying game now, so nidhogg and 3rd strike are classic rpgs). Lengthy paragraphs might be boring, but you know what's exciting? Grinding in the same area because your character did not have a high enough level to advance to the next section. If you read the old blog posts you realize the developers probably wanted combat to have a greater (but still secondary) role. In a way combat should be characterization, with your own skills influencing your tactics and possible outcomes. Had ZA/UM not met such unfortunate circumstances, the devs would probably expand the role of combat in other games.
As a roleplaying video game inspired by tabletop rpgs, disco has its own alignment system, but instead of the good-to-evil/lawful-to-chaotic spectra there's four main ideologies: communism, fascism (which some argue is not genuine fascism though I think it generally fits Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalism”) and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds). It is to disco’s credit that, though the writers very much have their political views, I never felt like the game was intended to be a sermon or a piece of propaganda; instead, disco’s themes revolve around how ideologies shape our identities and our cultural milieu, including how often our ideological labels fail to take into account ideologies as a manifestation of inner psychological complexes. Take reactionarism for instance; plenty of characters in disco can be classified as right-wingers, but they differ in how their beliefs relate to themselves: for René reactionarism is his only means to stay linked to his lost past (and at the same time, his loyalty to his past imprisons his romantic inclinations for his best friend); for Gary it fulfills his needs for a strong authority figure to cover his own weakness and to make him feel secure; for the racist lorry driver it is a way to weaponize his envy of others; for Jean-Luc/Measurehead it is a means to deny his status as a nobody and to declare himself as an übermensch.
So, five stars… do I think disco is a perfect game? Not really: the thought cabinet was a very good idea messily executed; some failed checks just block you from importants bits of the game without giving much in return; the clothing mechanics were interesting in theory but mostly serve as a means to powergame in practice; those rat-ass shareholders ensured the game would never be completely (though it’s almost so) voice acted in their stunt to fire Hindpere. Disco isn’t perfect, but it punches waaaay above its weight. It does so by innovating; by having some of the best game prose I’ve ever read; by the richness of its world building and characters; by being a genuine work of art; and most of all, because no game manages to scratch quite the same itch. It is a wonderful genuine thing and I’m glad it came to be.
Notes:
- I also think Measurehead is an interesting take on how subaltern groups can adopt/adapt pernicious power structures or ideologies to oppress other subaltern groups. This was prompted by a certain twitter interaction I saw recently, with some very racist remarks towards the Igbo people. What surprised me was that the person who wrote that was not a white supremacist, but identified himself as a “yoruba nationalist”. His claims of Yoruba “superiority” were surprisingly western: the Yoruba ought to be seen as superior because they produced “superior” art (when I write superior, replace it with “realistic”) and (supposedly) wore more clothing (seriously), with the guy even employing racist wojak memes to denigrate the Igbo (any similarity with a terminally online white supremacist is mere coincidence). This harkens back to measurehead: though he claims to be a semenese supremacist, his ideology is very much “occidental” (elysium’s equivalent to “western”): the semenese ought to be seen as superior for fitting in the standards of occidental phrenology/racism, for avoiding occidental “decadence” (the cyclical history “fremen mirage” trope) and because they descend from the mythical aeropagite übermenschen (translatio imperii as a racial origin myth).
- Klaasje’s relationship with Lely (the hanged man) was very nuanced. Though Lely and the rest of the PMCs are some of the worst human beings in the game, disco avoids the generic option of sexual violence to acknowledge that erotic relationships are complicated things and one’s sexual attraction acts regardless of one’s own personal ethics. I also liked that although Klaasje was hardly a “damsel in distress”, the game never villainized her for being engaged with a bad human being.
- another subject whose execution I liked was nationalism. We subscribe quite strongly to our “national” identity, even in our pluralistic age. But where does one’s national identity lie? In birthplace, language, customs or phenotype? Kim is one of the most “nationalistic” characters in the game, in the sense that he genuinely cares about Revachol and strongly identifies with it, but his phenotype and ascendancy inhibit him from ever being considered a true “revacholiere” by many of his compatriots.
- Another way in which Elysium is similar to Planescape is in the metaphysical power of cognition. But whereas in planescape thought is a creative force, with belief being able to create planes and pantheons (and “change the nature of man”), in Elysium thought is a negative force, with its side effect taking the form of the “Pale”: a kind of geographical blindspot which will consume elysium itself in the 73rd year of the “current century”.
- I’m saddened by the current status of ZA/UM. I very much agree with Hindpere that Kompus & company used workplace issues as a kind of casus belli in their coup to take over the IP
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[1] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=755
[2] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=800
[3] https://thoughtgained.tumblr.com/post/694215013077041152/i-went-ahead-and-scanned-digitized-robert