True Love Is Possible

the nihilistic optimism of Disco Elysium

Hello to those that are on this Substack. I have decided to revamp this and occasionally post about essays about things I really enjoy that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else. Hopefully that is interesting to you. This one is about the videogame Disco Elysium.

by Reddit user cardo_de_comer (https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/s29x94/the_next_world_mural/)

TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE

The nihilistic optimism of Disco Elysium

Da dah daahhhh / da dah dunn dah dunnn

If you’ve played Disco Elysium, even if it was only for an hour or so, there’s no doubt your brain is finishing the opening melody of Sea Power’s haunting Instrument of Surrender. That horn motif has taken you to the desolate streets of Martinese, where you are standing just outside of the hostel Whirling-in-Rags. It is 8 AM. You are a fucked up disaster of a human being tasked with solving an impossible crime. You look toward your partner, Detective Kim Kitsuragi. His face doesn’t change, but behind his weary eyes you spot the faintest glimmer of something that maybe — just maybe — looks like hope.

But there’s no time to get existential. Not yet. After all, you have a city to explore and a mystery to solve. You click your mouse on whatever catches your eye, and as you walk, the city starts to speak to you. Or maybe it’s your tie. Either way, you absorb all the cryptic warnings of impending doom and soldier on. You gesture at something – a gardener that knows more than she lets on, a foul-mouthed street urchin, a mailbox that’s begging to be kicked – and see what happens. You might succeed, but you’ll probably fail. You feel like a man who resents that he hasn’t died yet. But you haven’t died yet. And that somehow gives you enough willpower to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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The Short Pitch For Non-Gamers

Very few videogames manage to be what Disco Elysium is. It’s a million-plus word novel doled out to you at your command, and your understanding of its world, characters, and themes can be as foggy or complete as you’d like. It’s a game full of pitiful, grotesque, and delightful characters, deeply funny and heartbreaking dialogue, and so many moments that I’ll think about forever. It’s a game about hope, about a broken man in a broken world. It’s a game about miracles, why only a fool would believe in them, and just how beautiful that is. It’s a game about our inevitable extinction, how nothing can emulsify the stupidity, selfishness, and rage inside our own hearts, unless maybe, there’s something that can. At the very least, we still can dance.

Or that’s what it meant to me.

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If you don’t play games, you can play Disco Elysium, maybe even easier than you played Myst back in the day, or Minesweeper, or The Sims. You don’t need a high-end gaming PC or lightning-fast reflexes. All Disco Elysium requires of you is the patience to read (or the patience to hear all the voice-acted dialogue), and the confidence to make decisions. You talk to people, they tell you their spiel, and you choose how you’d like to respond.

Hopefully, this has been enough to get you to buy in. If not, or if you’ve already played it, let me tell you why I like it, in a section I like to call:

Why I Like It

If you’re a self-identified “gamer”, or even just someone who plays videogames occasionally and doesn’t make it your entire personality, you know that videogame journalists love to talk about the importance of “choices that matter.” For most of games media, this means that, over the course of the game’s plot, the elven king of the fantasy land will eventually ask you, the player, if you want to slay the dragon and become a hero, or take your broadsword, shove it up his royal ass, and take the crown for yourself.

The best games, the games where “choices matter” the most, will give you this choice as early as possible, and the rest of the game plays out wildly differently depending on your choice. If you slay the dragon, the princess will say something like, “thanks for saving the kingdom, hero!” and the elven king will give you some more quests to slay more dragons.

If you assassinate the king instead, the princess will say something like, “you’re a really bad guy, but I guess you’re the king now.” You can side with the insurgent group of goblins against the racist elven monarchy, and when you meet a goblin in a cave fifteen hours later, he thanks you for inspiring the goblin rebellion. That goblin rebellion has now overthrown the elves, and when you go to the castle twenty hours later, the goblins give you a quest to slay a dragon.

These are the choices that matter in games. You can be good or evil, do one world-shattering thing or another, and the characters will call it out as such. Hooray.

It’s not like I don’t get the desire for all these grandiose, diverging choices. Gamers are humans (mostly), and humans want their choices to matter. No one wants to live in a world where we have boundless freedom and free will, but we all end up six feet under, indistinguishable chunks of decaying matter. We all want to pretend that there are far-flung consequences for our actions. We want the princess and the goblin to acknowledge our actions. We all want to live like we are miniature versions of God.

Disco Elysium doesn’t have any choices that matter – not in the way gamers are used to. Unlike most role-playing games, character creation is fairly limited – you always play as the same person, with the same backstory. You don’t get to pick your party (you travel with Detective Kim Kitsuragi and the cadre of voices inside your head). The nature of the game’s central mystery is always the same. There is no saving the world — the most you can do is come to an understanding of the many small and large ways it is all coming to end.

There are no “choices that matter.” Instead, Disco presents the player with meaningful choices.

Through a multitude of dialogue options, Disco Elysium can be about something very different from player to player. It can be a cynical game or an optimistic one, a game about redemption or a game about delusion, a game ready to insight the next great Communist Revolution or one that’s resigned to neoliberal hell, or something in between. Through it’s choices, Disco Elysium asks the player not just to interact with it, but to engage with it — poke around and push against its (often contradictory) ideas. While Disco asks players what they want to do with its characters – who they trust, who they like – it mostly asks players how they feel about its characters.

Which, to me, is incredibly powerful, and something very few games (usually only other quirky RPGs like Planescape: Torment and some of the Telltale adventure games) aim for. I’d rather change the meaning of the story than the story itself. It’s just less interesting to go read a wiki slavishly detailing all the branching quests and different items you could have gotten, all while, essentially, doing the exact same stuff, but with a +5 Sword of Elvish Justice instead of a +3 Goblin Flail. You cannot make a wiki about the themes and ideas. You cannot chart the power level of a story about forgiveness versus a story about acceptance.

“I don’t want to be that kind of animal anymore”

Choosing between good and evil is kind of the backbone of games that use their choices and decisions as a selling point. Do you save the king or kill the king? Do you side with the racist elves or the goblins who want their freedom? And these choices, while occasionally nuanced (the goblins, who would very much like their freedom, can sometimes be a bit rude about it), are never complex. Outside of truly punishingly brilliant games like Pathologic, you never have to give anything up to do the right thing, and you’re always handsomely rewarded for helping others. Maybe you’ll play a game like Fallout: New Vegas and have to decide which faction you’ll support in some coming war – but usually, they’re all different degrees of bad options, and it’s easy enough to go at it on your own (though props to Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire for doing the best possibly version of this).

For all their blustering, most games ultimately ask you if you want to pretend to be a cartoon villain tying maidens up to train tracks, or a regular human being doing their best to be decent. They never examine the real evil that exists in our real world. Rarely do games allow you to, say, punch a child, or be racist (actually racist toward people, not goblins). Rarer still is the game that examines this evil. Sure, you can be casually racist towards goblins, but where does this racial supremacist ideology come from? How does one become a fascist, actually? Can you redeem one? Can you sympathize with one? Should you?

There’s a good reason most games don’t touch these topics — those things are really evil, and most people don’t want to do them, or even pretend to do them. See, in video games, you typically choose the evil option just because you are curious how the game is going to react. You do it because you want to exhaust all content from the game. Undertale is a game that’s about this, among other things. You don’t actually think murdering an entire village is the right thing to do — you do it because you get a different sword or a different ending, and you already did the Good Choice on your last playthrough. It’s fun (or at least, mildly entertaining) to kill the king who wants to help you (then reload a save because you don’t want to be locked into the bad ending). It’s decisively less fun to slowly alienate your friends and family with increasingly racist and misogynist rhetoric. Spouting fascist propaganda to avoid dealing with your own crippling inferiority complex is not most peoples’ idea of a good time.

In Disco Elysium, you’re presented with the option to do some truly repugnant, horrible things. You can be fascist, you can be racist. You can point a gun at a child just for being annoying, and threaten to kill yourself to try to guilt people into sympathizing with you. In Disco, when you are evil, you are evil in a way that reflects the evil that lurks in the depths of our hearts. You can insult a woman in order to make yourself feel better. You can be racist because it is easier to be friendly with powerful racists than it is to stand up to them. You can be a fascist because you know in your heart you are a weak, pathetic man, and fascism will, if not make you stronger, at least make you feel stronger. And maybe worst of all, you can be a neoliberal, spouting the wondrous benefits of the free market to all, fooling no one but yourself.

I’m kidding (about neoliberalism being worse than fascism and racism, not about it being in the game). But Disco is serious about committing to the bit. Once you start down the path, it’s hard to stop. A great example is an early quest where you have to get to the harbor to speak with the head of the dock worker’s union. The obvious path to the harbor is blocked by this guy known only as Measurehead. This guy is a beast. He’s big, he’s tall, he’s strong, and if you try to talk to him, you quickly find out he’s very racist. Worse, he’s a race science kind of racist, and he’ll talk your ear off about skull shapes and inferior genetics, and it’s just as nauseating as you’d imagine.

And you can listen to him, even debate him, but he won’t let you pass to get to the harbor. And you need to go to the harbor to question the union boss — there’s no other way to progress the game further. You can try fighting Measurehead, but most character builds won’t have the stats to best him in hand-to-hand combat. The other option is to learn his race science bullshit by ACTIVELY EQUIPPING THE THOUGHT IN YOUR OWN MIND and parroting his garbage back to him. This convinces Measurehead you’re One Of The Good Ones, and he’ll let you pass. Pal around with him enough and he might even help you take the corpse that’s hanging from the tree outside your hostel (unless you tried shooting it down, possibly desecrating the body with a barrage of bullets). So, it’s a win, right? And besides, you’re not actually a racist — you’re just tacitly supporting one to get what you want. Your partner, Kim Kitsuragi, might disagree, but what does he know? Maybe his naturally-inferior Seolite brain prevents him from understanding the bigger picture.

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So why even put this kind of nasty stuff in the game?

Simply put, the choice to not be racist and to try something else is meaningful. The game doesn’t make you do any of these things — it allows you to do them. You don’t have to be racist, and if you do take the racist thought, you don’t have to keep engaging and indulging it. You can unlearn it. You can shout down racists and fascists. You can comfort the downtrodden. You can reject neoliberalism and all its empty promises.

If there are no material rewards for being good, then the choice to be good means something. If you can choose to be malicious and you are tempted to be malicious because it helps you achieve your goals, then the choice to be kind means something.

The choices you get to make in Disco Elysium are meaningful, but they are also interesting, far more interesting than saving the king or killing the king. The choices you make are akin to what a screenwriter or a novelist would make, filling out character specifics and details of the world.

Like this one: if you are so artistically inclined, you can spray paint some graffiti up on the side of a building. The game presents you with several options: “Mother of All Walls”, “Fuck The Police”, “What shadow lies there, beneath the bright gleam”, or, my personal favorite, “Something beautiful is going to happen”. Does this alter the plot? Of course not. Is there tons of reactivity to this choice, with multiple characters commenting on it, letting you know that their opinion of you has forever shifted, closing off certain side quests and opening up others? Absolutely not. But it makes you feel like the game is reflecting back at you what you want to see. Is it something funny, something sweet, something antagonistic, something nihilistic?

What’s remarkable is I remember these choices more than any of the world-shattering ones I made in those other, king-saving-or-killing games. Putting some graffiti up on a wall gave me, the player, more of an opportunity to express myself than a thousand kingdoms waiting to be liberated or overthrown.

The Next World

Some spoilers ahead

Disco Elysium is an absolutely brilliant story – the central mystery is full of clever twists that are both impossible to predict but extremely obvious in hindsight, and the main character’s dynamic with Detective Kim Kitsugrai is so compelling and earnest that I can’t think of a single person who played this game that didn’t want to be friends with him.

Throughout your playthrough, you learn more about who our protagonist is, and you decide the version of him you would like to be – be it a pathetic, self-hating worm, an over-confident self-centered jackass, a raging communist, or something in between. You make friends and enemies with the various denizens of Martinese, doggedly pursuing the solution to your central case – who killed the Hanged Man, and why? – but eventually, both you and the protagonist come to the realization that no matter what you do, what you choose, or even who you are – you cannot “solve” this. Unspeakably evil acts have been committed before you ever arrived in Martinese, by countless forces, large and small. The region’s political climate makes justice, even some farcical aberration of justice, improbable. Worse, the world is literally going to end, and most likely, soon. What good is a detective in the face of total annihilation?

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the world of Disco Elysium is a fun-house mirror of our own, with all the same cancers, and all the same people exacerbating, celebrating, and profiting off their spread. Disco wants you to be acutely aware that the rot is systemic and ancient. The horrors are cosmic and multi-generational. We can stave them off for now, numb our conscious memory of them with copious bottles of cheap wine and even cheaper speed, but we cannot beat them back forever. The war for continued existence was lost long ago, and we’re living in a drawn out, insufferable coda. The detective can arrive on the scene, but he cannot arrest capitalism, or human nature, or God.

But yet.

There is a particular moment toward the end of the game that you can only experience if you’ve futzed around enough, talked to most of the characters and explored most of the map. It requires you to play recklessly, doing pointless things because you either know RPGs like this reward you for finishing side quests, or because you believe that wasting your time to bring some shred of joy to a dying world is worthwhile. You have to tell a married couple that a life spent pursuing stupid things still means something. You have to peer into nonexistence and throw a dance party at the tear in the fabric of the world. You have to believe in communism so goddamn much that your belief defies gravity. You know – video game stuff.

I won’t spoil the moment fully, but it involves being in the presence of a genuine miracle. Something the game has constantly told you is impossible appears, and you are there to bear witness to it.

You can speak to this miracle. You can learn a little more about it, and through doing so, learn a little more about Disco Elysium’s world, how things came to pass, and what lies in store for the future. You can profess your wonder to the miracle, and it responds that in its eyes, you, with your infinite capability for wanton and random cruelty, are the miracle, which is both comically absurd and profoundly true.

This conversation with the miracle features my favorite choice in the entire game. Before the miracle leaves, you can choose to tell it how you feel about it. There are maybe 4 or so different options, but the one that moved me, the one I felt compelled to pick, was this: “of all the creatures I’ve ever met, you are the kindest.”

This one line is what makes Disco Elysium so unique and unforgettable for me. I mean, how often do you get to tell a fictional character you think it’s kind? How often do you tell real people that? Because isn’t kindness the thing? Isn’t that the miracle of our nature? As we hurtle toward oblivion, despite all our worst instincts, actions, and intentions, we possess the power to be decent to one another, to bring joy. It doesn’t quite make up for all the carelessness and evil we do, but fuck, it’s close.

My second playthrough, which I used as a conscious attempt to make different choices to see more of what the game has to offer, saw me choosing the same line again. My first time through the game was upon release, at the end of 2019, months before everything shut down and one era ended and the COVID era began. My second time was at the end of 2021. My son was months away from being born, and all I could feel was guilt for whisking him out of nothingness and into a world of nonstop horrors and tragedy. What kind of person would do that to someone else? But talking to that miracle felt like talking to my son, in a way. I imagined he, in his unconscious, unborn state, was both in awe and afraid of me. I made him, after all, and I might destroy him, just like my father destroyed me in a thousand tiny ways, just as his father did to him.

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I am writing this while listening to Disco Elysium’s soundtrack. I am thinking about my eighteen month old son, who has no understanding of all the apocalypses that have come before him, and all the coming ones he’ll be forced to endure. He doesn’t know the person I was before him, all my failures and awful regrets, but he loves me, and his love is pure. He gives me hugs and I will myself to go to work. Capitalists gnaw the meat from the earth, holding up the remains for their shareholders to gawk at and applaud. I endure. I think about the part of the game where you learn the protagonist’s age, how the narrator comments that you are far from young, but you still have time. I drink. I take drugs. I endure. Things get worse and I hope they get better. He hugs me and I go to work. I lose hope. I endure. I regret I did not do more to change things; I wonder if there was anything I could have done. The hole in the world gets bigger. I take drugs less. There is still time, I tell myself. I learn a new skill. I watch a good movie. I protest. I love my son, and I hope my love is enough.

There is still time, obviously, for both good things and bad. So I will leave my son with everything I took away from Disco Elysium: that we as a species are reckless and despicable and boundlessly cruel, but some of us can make art and love and disco, too. Us human animals can show remorse and we can be kind, to those that deserve it and to those that don’t. We can give a name and face to our ruin, then turn away from it. We can make matchbooks to light the next world’s fires. We can stack each matchbook on top of one another until it becomes a structure, and we can call that structure communism, and we can believe in it dumbly and wholly, and with our belief we can suspend it in air. And all that struggle, all that wonder and beauty could change nothing, or even make things worse, but no one can deny it was there.

Disco Elysium is a miracle – a miracle that made me believe in the next world, and in myself. We will never get another game like it; it is too late for us. But – and I believe this – we will get something else.

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TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE
ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD -- FOR NEW PEOPLE
IT IS TOO LATE FOR US

WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS