Game Writing vs Game Intent, and Hope. A Disco Elysium Retrospective.
how the dialogue choices and consequences of the somewhat typical RPG dialogue mechanics belie a sincerity into the writer's actual political beliefs, sense of hopefulness, and love of absurdity
So this is admittedly a sort of response essay to the somewhat famed Vice review of Disco Elysium, which expresses disappointment in the games narrative ambitions falling somewhat flat when it tries to delve into important, philosophical truths of the world (The game world and our own.)
I read the article once and put it down, mostly content. Then I read it again a few days later, put it down, and came away with a somewhat pretentious thought in my head: “Did I play more of this game than this games journalist? Did I also play more of KOTOR 2 than this game journalist?”
Me qualifying my statements this way comes from a deep understanding that yes, with the many possible ways one can experience a game, we can’t agree on genre conceits+design philosophies in them as easily as, say, film or music. We’re almost guaranteed to be experiencing something very similar to each other when experiencing that media. Within games, the whole point of the interactive elements that distinguish them from other types of media almost guarantee that people can have more individualized experiences.
That is all to say, I am sure people don’t need to be doing absolutely everything there is to do in a game in order to assert that they’ve finished it. That isn’t where my issue lies.
For people to claim some sort of authority on something as hard to pare down as game journalism, there needs to be a more transparency about just how much of the game they’ve experienced to be able to make claims about something as sweeping as overall game theme, game intention, and narrative intention.
My main argument is this:
The game isn’t ironic and detached, it deals with themes of irony and detachment, as well as hope and investment, and what levels you see on any individual play-through ultimately depends on how you play, and how much you play. The character creation aspect extends throughout the game as you build thought cabinets, and thus, the main narration of the world is heavily filtered through player choice. This means that without knowing the extent through which your choices can affect the world and the game, people are likely to take their singular game experiences as emblematic of writer intent.
Reliability
After the Klaasje scene, there is a very critical thought bubble moment that reveals that some of Harry’s senses lie to him. Meaning that he can’t trust them. There is even a dialogue option that flat out asks “Is this [unreliability] going to apply to anyone I meet?” And even just the sight of that option, to me, was enough to instill a healthy level of skepticism towards all of Harry’s thoughts from that point forward. He did, just recently, talk to a corpse, so reliability was always going to be questionable here. Rarely does a game ever just give you the information of The narrator having the ability to lie to you. The narrator is You, the player, which makes the implication easy to miss, because this is the internal monologue where You the player are dictating all of your gameplay decisions around. There has to be a level of trust in order to feel any conviction around your gameplay choices. However, since it is almost taken for granted that the main narration of a video game has to be leading you down the correct path, it can be easier to not ever be looking critically at what may be true in the game’s narration. I cannot take that away from the article writer.
In a funny parallel in the article, there is a scene cited in KOTOR 2 where Kreia, the mentor figure of the protagonist, chastises the player for both options that they take in response to a beggar asking for money. I remember having the same emotional reactions, beat for beat, that this article writer did, upon a grim realization that my choices were meaningless in that moment in time, even after loading a previous save and going through every dialogue tree option.
The issue with taking that scene out of the context of the game and inscribing some sort of universal game writing truth to it, is that Kreia, the mentor character and stand-in narrator, is a villain; but more importantly than that, she is an unreliable narrator. She manipulates the protagonist, lies to the player, and abuses NPCs who dare to show any amount of skepticism towards her. If you didn’t know this before getting to that scene in the game, then of course you’d be inclined to believe the worldview she is trying to impart on the protagonist, but it was on my second playthrough, with a more holistic perspective in my mind, that I came to realize that the beggar scene may have been Kreia imparting something she believed to be true, but given her distaste for the force, the delicacy of the universe in that moment, and her desire to control the protagonist, her dialogue was a better example of her imposing her will on the player and protagonist, rather than her instilling wisdom on the protagonist, like a mentor figure typically does. Without the very critical information of Kreia’s nature, it’s easy to substitute the game text for the game’s intent.
The difficulty with even beginning to parse the text from intent is that game intention is much harder to decipher than other art mediums, where art directors and storytellers typically expect to guide their audience in a journey with very little interaction, games (especially ones with multiple styles of play available) often need to guide players through an experience that isn’t necessarily one sided and controlled, but rather fun and engaging. This is all to say: I cannot claim to have a “better” view of the game just because I sought to complete everything that I could, socially and mechanically.
Hence, when thinking about the validity of my experience versus anyone else’s I am constantly reminded that my style of play might just be more meticulous, and more willing to seek optimism and hope in messaging that is matter-of-fact, or resigned. I am a viciously hopeful person, and I wasn’t discouraged by the game, but if I was in a more depressed place, I could’ve easily just agreed with the article writer and never had a dissenting opinion.
There is also a slight imposter syndrome to my own line of thought. How dare I have confidence in my opinions that stand in slight opposition to a real game essayist, or whatever. I must put that aside for the sake of putting everything I know on the table though.
There is no ‘cop-type’ that is billed as inherently superior to any other (they all have wildly varied stat bonuses, if mechanical superiority was anything to go by), but I do feel confident that my preferred style of play (the high PSYCH + INT cop) meant that I could engage in the social aspects of play better than, say, a PHYSICAL + MOTOR cop. While it is true that the game doesn’t punish or give preference to any particular stat build, building a philosopher cop definitely helped me see how Harry thought, and by extension, how he thought of others. A more physically built Harry would definitely have interesting things to say, but the imaginative Harry that I created said things I would never have been able to predict on my own.
A woman with a missing parakeet? Using your literal nose to sniff out communists? Having to grovel to a teenager for a paintbrush to make high concept graffiti? These concepts sound very silly, but also integral to the errant thoughts a character like Harry could have, and not necessarily a blank slate for a player to draw upon. He is shown to be impulsive and erratic, with just the knowledge that Harry has at least 3 possible reactions to things at all times, and some of them just have nothing to do with the urgent murder mystery at hand. That design choice alone highlights Harry’s literal patterns of thought in a way that would make it easy to understand how he is often not a good barometer for the truth. Especially with Kim as a guide for “reasonableness” (or, moderation) by him at nearly all times. The player is the primary pilot for Harry after all, so the direction of the narration in part, always falls to them.
There is something wondrous about the unreliability of Harry, unlike Kreia’s, which is colder, calculating, and most of all, lucid. The unreliability with Harry comes directly as a result of the unreliability within himself, and his multitudinous nature that is somewhat guided by the player. The player can lean into the whimsical nature as much as they desire, and drugs get to play a near total role, if you’d let them.
Kreia’s unreliability comes through her utter control of the narrative of the game of KOTOR 2, claiming to always know what’s best for the protagonist and talking to authority figures in the game with utter poise and foresight. She has spent her exile peering into the hearts of the chess pieces, while Harry isn’t even aware there’s a board. The pieces are his psyche and he is unreliable because to him, there is only one move after the next one, and not a whole game to play. The game intent becomes more clear when the player lets go of the voices in Harry’s head, and realize that they are all clamoring over each other, desperate to make sense of the world, and often clumsily attempting to do so. This is also demonstrated best in the post Klaasje scene, in which his senses actually argue with each other to see which of them are working around Klaasje, and most of them failing to do so. All other instances of unreliability in Harry’s head are more subtle echoes of this. This all still acts as evidence that the authorial narration of the game, coming from Harry, is very flawed, to the degree that it is hard to build an explicit case for its reliability, with the exception of the shivers mechanic.
Hope.
That has been nearly insurmountable to really tackle as of late, as it is a skill, a trait, and a belief that can be so violently shattered with enough external evidence to give into despair. Indeed, that gets to be tempting as we are looking into the face of genocide with no real recourse for it besides *drawing attention to genocide*. That is, of course, not the type of hope that the previous author believes to be abandoned in the game.
It is a little painful to reckon with the amount of real world parallels that now go beyond fiction, that make fictional war seem tame in comparison. Like nothing could really quite lead you up to it. It has definitely re-contextualized my relationship to this article in that the hope in the game is now almost barefaced and honest; something you need to keep an intentional eye out for, similar to real life, where hope can see sparse. Hope in the world of Disco Elysium requires just a little to stumble into, because it rarely stems from the main dialogue options that just involve Harry’s internal monologue, unless, again, it involves the shivers mechanic.
There is a level of the prose of the shivers mechanic that gets more apparent as the mysteries of the town of Revachol get unwrapped and the description. The descriptions of the natural world, the anatomy of the pipes to the concrete, helps to piece together Revachol as some representative organism and ecosystem in which we are just the cells in the body. The body has answers, not just in relation to the story of the game, but about the possible realities the game inhabits, the fragility of the people in the world, the weather effects as the sound design intermingles with the low voice of the narrator, taking you out of the tensions of the story, if only for a moment, to breathe in a way that a living embodiment of the city might also breathe. There is a beauty in that persistence, that can be seen no matter what your stats are, all throughout the game. There are no attempts to dress up the shitty state of the world with any flowery language, but the things being described unfold and unfold as Harry leans on his natural instinct to question everything, ask about what may be beyond the periphery. The shivers, at times, grants him a glimpse into the textures and shapes of the world as if it was his first time truly looking, with his eyes (which may be true in game, due to his retrograde amnesic state). There is a very simple beauty and hope there that can easily be transplanted to how we could appreciate what's right in front of us, even in a world that is littered with despair at every corner. Even in a world where hope needs a little bit of effort to avoid being washed away.
The little side quests that the game lets you go on also give the more shining, constrained instances of hope in the game (to me, the game becomes much less rich without them). The Sniffing out Communists side quests ends with a particularly metaphorical tower building sequence that can easily be interpreted as the power of community building in praxis. The quest is about hope and how philosophy by itself is meaningless. The matchbox scene supports this, where the group of four, together, creates a larger structure than the two students did before, alone, but importantly, the structure still crumbles. The game doesn’t follow up on this but the original sentiment of the philosophy of communism remains: “you can’t do this alone. Get out there and find people”. A week within a game isn’t enough time to build a resolution, but it is definitely enough to start one, which is oftentimes what people struggle with the most. Philosophy alone is not enough to promote real change and the game even gives you thoughts in the cabinet that say so. The actionable thing to do, which the game hints at you to do, is to sniff out some more communists so that the individual struggle becomes the community effort. Hope becomes easier to carry when split amongst the shoulders of many, after all.
The general themes of hope and perseverance are set to the backdrop of a somewhat scientifically observed phenomenon known as the Pale, which represents a few things in the game, but is most commonly understood as a void of matter, thought, and reality. The Pale becomes a very sincere expression of the game writer’s nihilism. It becomes a quantifiable parameter for suffering, cognitive decay, and surrealism within a world that tries to stay down to earth despite it all. The game writers inject some probable cause for the wondrous elements in the world, and room for Harry’s delusions and hallucinations to be grounded in the world, as evidenced primarily by the Phasmid encounter.
The role of the pale is small but is extremely instrumental in another side quest in the game, about the failed game designers of the “Pale Cylinder” quest line: Where the radio game developer’s failures weren’t of the result of their ideas shaping poorly, and the game developers of the past were pushed to failure by para-natural forces, as opposed being able to survive from the merit of their own ideas. Knowing a bit about the obstacles to developing this particular game, the structure and result seem to be somewhat analogous to the development of Disco Elysium itself. And Joyce even imparts a message to the in-game developers: that their failures were not their fault, and that there was an external force causing destruction that no one could’ve possibly predicted to ultimately shut the studio down. Having all of the pieces of knowledge together ties the messaging of that quest line into a sort of javelin that pierces what is just being said behind the screen, and thrown into the hearts of the creators that they were (hopefully) meant for. That becomes a more poignant piece of the puzzle to this game.
The existence of the phasmid is the last big notable piece of the game that not only expresses a strong desire for hope, but also a plea to the player to engage in sincerity and suspend their disbelief long enough to reap the reward of believing in something beautiful about the word.
The existence of the Phasmid represents a lot of things about the world, The Pale, and the general sense of faith in the unknown that people need to have in order to accept unexplainable things into their realities. The crypto-zoologists are initially wary of letting the player into their world because they are used to the ridicule that would come from not only having a hobby like theirs, but also believing in something that has never been proven to be real. I would imagine that for some people, it becomes easy to get bogged down in the horrors of what is real, and those types of people would probably be the type to abandon this quest line due to the slight insistence from Kim that there is no logical through-line to helping these people. Kim being the moderate voice of reason in this context would definitely make people more bound to reason shy away from the possibility of something as “small” as a phasmid discovery affecting their world view.
However, the phasmid very much can exist, in the face of many evidenced portions of the Pale, and general despair. It is a beautiful moment in the game where time literally slows down and Harry’s para-natural abilities get to come to light. The two philosophize a bit about perseverance and the beauty of it. Of course, the fact that this scene is very easily miss-able, means that it is hard to frame it as vital to supporting the games messaging, but the existence of that moment at all is an important piece to giving this game a possibility of a satisfying ending, which can go a long way in leaving a strong impression of what the game can be about.
Even if this game showcases brutality in many forms, that is not what it is about. It is primarily about moving on from brutal circumstances, and connecting to the mundane after experiencing horrors upon horrors upon horrors. Then getting up 4 times after getting knocked down 3 times.
The game’s repetitious desire to stand up and move on from ruin as diligently as it can, is what cements itself to me as a hopeful game in its core, even when hope is not the singular central theme of the game. Especially when brutality is what is reckoned with so often in the game. That is arguably what makes any degree of hope in Disco Elysium more potent, and vital to us.
As a disclaimer, I recognize that most of these elements I discuss can be missed in gameplay, but I am also adamant that missing these parts of the game shortens the experience to the detriment of the player, who then cannot confidently claim that they have experienced the totality of the game if more than 50% of the game was willfully skipped by them. I may be making up an imaginary type of player for that example just now, but it is really just in reaction to the original article that I was writing about. These were just the thoughts generated from the article and my own gameplay experience : )
I will work on standardizing the end of these posts as time goes on. For now just give some grace as usual. Thank you.