# Disco Elysium: The Reverse Engineering of Love, or Doors that Never Open > [!INFO] An Analytical Review > **Author**: Nikita Stulikov > **Teacher**: Dan Clark > **Game**: [Disco Elysium](https://store.steampowered.com/app/632470/Disco_Elysium__The_Final_Cut/) (2019) > **Developer**: ZA/UM (Estonia) > **Genre**: Acid CRPG > ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/DiscoElysiumThoughts.jpg]] ## Intro In this analytical review I explore Disco Elysium's affective capacities (ZA/UM, 2019) referring to Aarseth's ontological and semiological conceptions of games and ergodic literature (1997, 2011), as well as to Vella's aesthetics. Disco Elysium is a CRPG that follows a detective who tries to solve an ominous case in a delirious fugue. The game allows a high degree of player agency, yet dooms it to an existential failure. Its central theme is the parallel between revolution and love: both are destined to fail but failure is enough reason for making them. ## 1. Design > "Players are aware of the partial nature of their experience, the numerous strategies and paths not taken, and the fact that the game may contain mysteries they will never encounter, solutions outside their reach, tactics beyond their skill level. The implied game contains all these secret moments that the actual game may never reveal” - Aarseth, 2011 Disco Elysium is a textual maze. The game's map is small but it contains a plenty of obscure strategies, secret passages, unexpected encounters and shortcuts in the dialogue system. It gets close to text-based adventures of 1970s, achieves mastery in writing and complements it with excellence in visual and auditorial representation. How does this *cybertext*, a textual maze, works? According to Aarseth, the discourse of text-based adventure games is formed by the *intrigue*[^1]. That is a narrative structure, alternative to *plot* in traditional media. Intrigue is a presupposed "secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target <...>, with an outcome that is not yet decided" and depends on the user's input (Aarseth, 1997, p. 112). The intrigue drives the player's traversal of the game/cybertext. It eludes the holistic textual body in *aporias* and reveals solutions to them in *epiphanies* (ibid, p. 91). Disco Elysium even has aporias without epiphanies: like a [[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/DoorThatNeverOpens.png|door]] the player might try to open several times, only to discover that it was never meant to be opened; it is there to convey the idea that some doors will never open. Through humour and meta-irony, the game ensures that the player is "aware of the partial nature of their experience" (Aarseth, 2011). Some [[ESSAY_TwoTypesOfDoors|doors never open]]; and when others do, the third get shut. Why hit doors that will never open? Disco Elysium enforces the intrigue and thereby the player's curiosity and will to explore mechanically (see section 2) and narratively (see section 3). Mechanics target the need for *competence* with the skill tree and skill check. Narrative meets needs for *autonomy* and *relatedness*: high player agency allows to customize political and philosophical beliefs of the avatar (for the self-determination theory in games see Boyle et al., 2011). ## 2. Mechanics At the core of Disco Elysium there are 6 core mechanics relative to the game's emotional effects: dialogue, the skill tree, randomized skill check, thought cabinet, outfit skill boost, and exploration. #### Dialogue The player spends most of the game talking with characters. Disco Elysium uses a "diamond" branching dialogue system. Most dialogue decisions do not make a change to the game world. But a notable minority triggers unique skill checks and events (see below). The writing aims for a poetic tone, or at least avoids banality. Thereby, the large amount of text rarely feels tedious to read. ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/InnerDialogue.png]] Dialogues with other characters get frequently interrupted by inner dialogues between the avatar's self, and his impersonated *skills*, as if it was a ludic analogy of the modernist's *flow of consciousness*. #### Skill tree The skill tree contains 24 conceptual characters, or voices whose strength depends on how many experience points the player invests. These voices sometimes clash within the avatar’s deteriorated mind. Skills in Disco Elysium clearly differ from the overfamiliar sets found in Classic and Post-Non-Classic RPGs. Their names are routine yet philosophically existential. Their descriptions are poetic, and deliberately ambiguous. However conceptually clear, it's usually hard to predict a gameplay situation when a particular voice speaks up. At the end of this section, and in the last section of the analysis, I will further elaborate on the aesthetics of mystery and the sublime. ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/SkillTree.png]] #### Randomized skill check Based on the avatar's skills, a CRPG skill check occurs at decisive events. It is usually accompanied with an impersonalized skill's voice. A success at the skill check leads to a reward, a presumably desired effect on the game world. But some doors are not meant to be open -- the player is tricked to believe that success is an option where failure is the design. ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/DoorThatNeverOpens.png]] Sometimes un/successful skill checks provoke a thought-affordance, circling around the avatar's head. The player can catch it to conceive in the thought cabinet. #### Thought cabinet Some inner dialogues seat ideas in the head of the avatar (e.g., what's the allure of fascism? Or, is failure -- the ultimate point of a revolution? Or, am I gay?). These contemplations are represented quite literally within the game world. In the *thought cabinet*, the player may select a thought to conceive. This takes in-game time (time flows just during dialogues), and results in a buff and/or de-buff of some skills. ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/ThoughtCabinet.png]] #### Outfit skill boost Different outfits give buffs and de-buffs to skills. Besides a purely mechanical value, the outfit also provides a cosmetic customization. Often good boosters look ugly, and player must choose between gameplay effectiveness and the suspension of disbelief. The intention behind this design decision might be the enhancement of the game world's dramatic romanticism. In a similar fashion, some people can be described as sacrificing parts of their personality for career and effectiveness. ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/Outfit.png]] #### Exploration Exploration is an essential but not a challenging part of the game. The environment serves an emotional function, similarly to the game's soundtrack. It evokes anemoia, or even a *hauntological* attunement: a nostalgia for the anticipation of futures that never happened but felt real in the past (comp. Sweeting, 2023). Some environments are mere textual description. And still they arguably evoke a stronger objectless longing than they would if they were represented visually. As in the image below, the object of the character’s gaze is deliberately concealed off-screen. Vella describes this technique and its aesthetic effect as a construction of *mystery* intended to evoke the sense of *ludic sublime* in the player (Vella, 2015). ![[ATTACHMENTS/REFS/DiscoElysium/LudicSublime.png]] ## 3. Semiotics #### Diegetic and non-diegetic voices in the head The game uses a diegetic tutorial to explain the core mechanics. Although the skill tree is explained in a non-diegetic way -- at the UI screen before the game worlds evokes -- this mechanic is expected to be seen trivial, and familiar. When the skills’ voices begin interrupting conversations, a separate voice (in cyan-tinted text) informs the player about the technical details of the skill-check mechanic. The same cyan font sips into the inventory, explaining the thought cabinet and the outfit skill boost mechanics. At times, voices in the avatar's head break the fourth wall, commenting on the player's action, or the underlying rules of the game world. #### Dissociative fugue syndrome Negarestani notices a fundamental element of computer games' narration that he calls *the Thing*. In *Cyclonopedia* (2009, p. 244) he writes: "the plane of the Thing is characterized by lack of any cognition about the self despite total control from first or third perspectives, dissociative fugue syndrome, mirroring and the total immersion of player or reader into the Ludicosm of the game-space". The protagonist of Disco Elysium drives himself into a delirious fugue in an attempt to attain an objective perspective on the detective case he needs to solve. Even if it was a mere rationalization of self-destruction (or of self-deconstruction?), the fugue as a narrative element makes the avatar highly customizable and thereby relatable. Reality strikes back. The player may give the avatar a new name (e.g., Tequila Sunset). But the people continue to call him by his old name, and the world keeps reminding him of who he was, until the past fixes him in a predetermined future. #### Mystery and ludic sublime In the previous sections I mentioned the effect of ludic sublime that Disco Elysium produces through ambiguities and omissions reflected in the tone of dialogues, skill and thoughts descriptions, and flavour texts. According to Vella, the "sublime" aesthetic attempts to extend beyond the "representative" regime of art where “the artwork can only represent what is thinkable within its parameters: it cannot transcend the limitations of its system and, in doing so, bring those limitations into view, gesturing towards what lies beyond the grasp of its conceptualization and remains, therefore, unthinkable”. In contrast, in games "the promise of concealed affordances and mechanics drives the player forward in engaging and experimenting with the possible uses of the object, in a localized instance of the heuristic magic cycle and of the essentially ungraspable, noumenal game object at its centre". The noumenal game object here refers to both Kantian transcendentalism and Aarseth's implied game object: "the formal nature of games establishes a rift between the phenomenally-given game object and the supersensible, noumenal game object that the player strives to frame an understanding of" (Vella, 2015). In the rift between the phenomenal and the noumenal game objects, emerges the sense of mystery, affecting the player with Kantian sublime aesthetic: "Just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality, as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things in the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us" (Kant, 1790 (1987), §25, p. 250). ## Conclusion Disco Elysium addresses an elusive and haunting attunement through its adoption of philosophical and political discourses. A game about the failure of love to offer consolation, it developes this thesis when it explores Marxism's failure to reimagine society, the psychedelic revolution's failure to extend towards reality, the art's failure to save the world. In these directions, the game indicates an objectless longing for the future that has long decayed into the past. > "*Thitherwards, stormier than the sea, stormeth our great longing!*" - Nietzsche F. (1883) *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, § Old and New Tables ## Reference - Aarseth E. (2011) *Define Real, Moron! Some Remarks on Game Ontologies*. - Aarseth E. (1997) *Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature*. - Boyle E., Connolly T., Hainey T. (2011) *The Role of Psychology in Understanding the Impact of Computer Games*. - Kant I. (1790) *Critique of Judgment*. - Negarestani R. (2009) *Cyclonopedia*. - Nietzsche F. (1883) *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*. - Sweeting J. (2023) *Hauntological Videogame Form: Nostalgia and a "High Technology" Medium*. -- [Link](https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/3/) - Vella D. (2015) *No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime*. -- [Link](http://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/vella) - Screenshots -- [Link](https://www.rpgfan.com/gallery/disco-elysium-screenshots/) ## Footnotes [^1]: Crawford uses "metaplot" for Aarseth's "intrigue"