Disco Elysium and pessimism in games
The renowned video game RPG really got me down. I hated it for that, but now I'm not sure…
I play a LOT of games, both tabletop and video games. One of the unspoken conventions of game design is that the player is in some way ‘the hero’. By this, I don’t mean that the player’s character is a good person, just that what they do is consequential in the world that is created. They have agency. In Ticket to Ride you build a train line, in Madden you are the quarterback… you get the idea.
This is not to say that games can’t be difficult, or frustrating. But when you get past that end of level boss, the game will reward you- you will feel a sense of having won in some way.
Games don’t have to be like this. The brilliant designer and commentator Amabel Holland has pointed this out in her great video essay “Should board games be frustrating”. Broadly her argument is that in order to be good, games don’t need to make us feel good. She cites the video game “Getting over it” as a game about failure, and accepting failure as part of life being the game’s main message. It’s a great video, check it out.
Disco Elysium is, in this sense, a game about failure. You play as a washed up, drug-addled cop in a run-down part of a sprawling metropolis. Someone has been hanged in the back yard of the scruffy hotel you are staying in. Another cop has showed up and wants you to help to investigate. But you could just as easily distract yourself by investigating the odd office block across the street. The game doesn’t massively care what you do. Yes, it will reveal more of itself over time, and if you are persistent you can make some progress towards an eventual denouement that I won’t spoil, but you never get the feeling that solving the case matters that much in the grand scheme of things.
Partly, the game does this by avoiding anything resembling a simplistic victim narrative. Bad stuff has happened, but no-one’s hands are clean (again, not a spoiler). The other way it diminishes the importance of your case is by placing it in the context of a torrid, violent political climate. There is a genuinely interesting attempt at world-building here, albeit with far too much detail. You are in something like China Mieville’s The city and the city in terms of atmosphere, but clearly based on downtown Paris. Politics is divided rather sharply between socialism, fascism and an amoral corporate centrism, which is currently in ascendance. And the NPCs in this game LOVE to talk about politics.
So playing Disco Elysium is no-one’s idea of a power fantasy. You are no-one’s knight in shining armour. Characters do you no special favours because you are the protagonist. I think this is the first reason why I found playing the game dispiriting. And that’s on me.
I play video games to unwind and destress after the frustrations of working for the NHS, so I am not the target audience for a game about your lack of importance within a complex and unfeeling political system… And if that was it, I would just say ‘OK, great game, not for me, move on’.
But there are other things that dispirited me about the game, which might make it… also bad?
The game really doesn’t like your character. Quite a bit of the voluminous dialogue, including the first few minutes, are various parts of your own psyche talking to you about, essentially, what a pathetic wash-up you are. These gargoyles are given different names informed by the index of a psychology textbook, but they are virtually indistinguishable. They are an indivisible greek chorus that, whatever you do, hate your guts. Your guts, on the other hand, remain mercifully silent.
The game is also both fascinated by politics, and disdainful of anyone who takes it seriously as a force for positive change. At various points you are obliged to make political statements using the games dialogue choices. If you are consistent (in my case, centrism was the least-bad option) the game starts to mock you, both using the greek chorus and ironically named trophies like ‘Most laughable centrist’. Subtle, eh?
The game also doesn’t really like competence. I wanted to play as a decent person who does his job. I’m fairly good at sifting through a lot of information and finding the relevant clues, so made good progress in the case. So the game started to put things like ‘boring cop archetype’ into my psychological profile. This is a shame, because the profile is a mechanism that is potentially fascinating but ruined by the snarky attitude taken to any humanistic impulse, or competent play.
I think I could have got over this, as well. I absolutely love the board game John Company, covered masterfully by Tom Brewster here. Your characters in John Company are rapacious, corrupt officials of the East India Company, and the game is clear that we should not be rooting for them, even as we play to win. But John Company is, while complex, a game that make sense, in a way that shows respect to the player, if not the character.
Disco Elysium cannot help but extend its contempt from the character over to the player. The movement system is glitchy and fiddly, considering you are just moving around a map. Fast travel barely functions. Some events only happen after a given time has passed, so you find yourself doing actions, reading books, just to advance the clock. This may be a satire at some level. What it is not, is good game design.
But the most annoying aspect of Disco Elysium is the frequency with which you just get stuck. There are checks, very much like in a tabletop RPG, which get locked when you fail them. For reasons that are complex and I cannot summon the will to explain, sometimes you just can’t unlock them again. This may lead to having to start again, or, at best, loading a save game from before you rolled those dice. Put it this way- I had never heard of save scumming before I played this game, and I don’t feel good about having to learn about it, much less do it repeatedly.
So, conclusion, I guess. I applaud the idea that games like Disco Elysium exist in the world. I’m happy to push aside my need to be the hero in order to have a different, refreshing experience. I’m even happy to have the piss taken out of me for being a centrist (although the equation with corporatism grates). But I will not tolerate bad game design hidden under the cloak of being different and edgy. I will not play a game made by people who don’t like their players.