Disco Elysium Wants You To Take A Side

In Disco Elysium, before the politics, before the mystery, before history and even consciousness, there are your skills. However, unlike the tabletop RPGs that Disco Elysium takes inspiration from, your skills talk to you. They listen into every conversation, interject with advice or whim at every pause, bicker amongst each other at every conflict. At every crossroad, you are  choosing which one of those voices to trust, no matter what dark path that may lead you down.

Which is why, when you choose your skills at the beginning of the game, you are not just making a character. You’re writing the story ahead by choosing the narrators that will haunt you the whole way.

Unfortunately for you, dear reader, you don’t have a choice. You only have me.

You gain consciousness. Hungover. Naked. Alone. You remember nothing. Nothing of the room torn asunder around you, nothing of the city block underneath, nothing of the 50 years of post-revolution in Martinaise or the 380 years of Revachol or the 8000 years of recorded history. Over the course of the game, you might piece together these details from others’ tidings, but the city of Martinaise is all you’ll see.

What you will piece together is that you are a cop who arrived a week ago to solve a murder case, only to drink your sorrows away. Even so, that week was enough for people to decide who you are: a rent-skipping penniless bastard with no respect for the laws of the free market; a pathetic half-dead member of an inferior race; a pawn of the international coalition that forcibly occupied this city; an authority-defying freewheeler with delusions of world revolution or apocalypse, with no in-between.

You tried to wipe the slate clean. But there is no starting over with a newborn, unbiased mind. Life has shaped the character into who they are, and life will continue to shape the character you become. 

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Trivial: Success] – “Kids from the more highly politicized homes either look an awful lot like their parents … [or] the predominant views of their peers.” (Insider, 2020)

You cannot create a “new” politics. Elysium has exhausted all options, coalescing them into an encompassing four ideologies for every character: Ultraliberal, Fascism, Moralism, and Communism. This framework, borrowed from our real world, implicitly declares: There is no such thing as “apolitical”. Absolve yourself of politics and you simply accept the status quo, maintained by the global political institutions of the Moralintern that you assume do the good work: The World Bank, Interpol, UNESCO, the IMF, the UNDP’s Human Development Index, and the Coalition, whose airships still hang over Martinaise to keep the peace. Names might be interchangeable.

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Easy: Success] – “…Mr. Rumsfeld gave his most specific instructions for Iraqi civilians … ‘Stay in your homes and listen to Coalition radio stations for instructions on what to do to remain safe and out of the line of fire.’” (NYT, 2003)

Rage against this paradigm all you want. Declare that you are not even involved in politics, that you’re just doing your job. The game already foresaw this complaint, answering with another alignment system that’s some of the same, dressed up respectively as the Superstar, Honor, Boring, and Apocalypse Cop. Just as your character’s work is simply an expression of their politics, Disco Elysium sees how you perform your job and go about your day as an embodiment of a belief in how one should live their life.

And what is politics, if not a statement on exactly that?

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Medium: Success] -”The sheriff’s department in Orange County, California, advised its officers earlier this year not to affiliate with far-right extremist groups … The 66-page PowerPoint presentation for staff also included a lengthy section on ‘the extreme left’…” (The Guardian, 2021)

You can try to defer your alignment indefinitely. Even so, other characters will confront you with their beliefs, trap you in dialogue options that reveal a political bent, no matter what you choose. Make enough such devil’s choices, and your skills will start asking if you want more. Do you want to be richer? To return to a better past? To take responsibility for the world? To organize and overturn it? 

Answer yes, and you will be granted a “political vision quest” to guide you towards your ideological desire. You will not find the fulfillment you seek. Turning down this call to action may be the best choice for you. But they will return, to ask again and again and again, to accept your civic duty and do your part.

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Challenging: Success] – “Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users’ spam folders this week…” (Axios, 2022)

Even the most inane topics the characters spout spawn in your character’s brain, referred to literally as Thoughts, a stand-in for the loot you usually collect in other RPGs, which you can equip to develop into full-blown personal philosophies. Adopting such philosophies is easy. Forgetting them is harder, an in-game waste of valuable skill points that could be used for acquiring other Thoughts instead. But the game still charitably lets you consciously discard … your subconscious Thoughts.

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Challenging: Success] – “The Real Meaning of Implicit Bias Training – Is everyone a racist or is everyone a potential lawsuit?” (WSJ Opinion, 2022)

You, the player, could be anyone. Therefore, your character is the cop that can become anyone. And this is how they think.

Wait. Why is the game telling you how to think?

Though the way we actually think is riddled with contradiction, Disco Elysium is designed to co-opt that brokenness for a grander purpose, down to the dialogue text’s placement. Instead of the typical positioning across the bottom of the screen, the text is laid out in a column on the right. As you progress through conversation, the dialogue auto-scrolls upward, urgently shifting your attention to the next bickering voice. This format is suspiciously a lot like…

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Formidable: Success] – “‘Doomscrolling’: A Twitter Habit Is the New, High-Tech Way to Slide Into Despair” (WSJ, 2020)

According to lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz, this was intentional. Social media has supposedly affected our attention span for long-form writing, but by simply translating the format of social media to their story, crafting the dialogue with snappiness and aggression befitting a Twitter post, you can be enraptured by the text for hours without balking at the over-a-million word count (that’s not an exaggeration.)

Through subtle decisions like this, Kurvitz outright asserts to be attempting to change the way we think. In a RockPaperScissors interview, he describes this effort as a “bloody battle for the future,” one that he admits is hard to define and near-impossible to win. Nonetheless, this was something the creators committed their lives to, lacking entirely in game development experience … made up for in ideological fervor.

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Legendary: Success] – “Disco Elysium Developers Shout Out Marx And Engels In Game Awards Victory Speech” (Kotaku, 2019)

The creators’ self-avowed communist beliefs shape Disco Elysium’s reputation as a “pro-Communism” game. That reputation is both justified and absurd within the game’s context. Fascism and Ultraliberalism are mostly rendered into parody, but that doesn’t mean their take on communism escapes such critique. Begin the Communism quest, and the Rhetoric skill tells you with deadpan snark: “Despite all the thinking you’ve been doing, only 0.0001% of communism has been built.” Disco Elysium is self-aware of how fruitless, fearmongering, impractical and corruptible such a belief system is, writing one of the final people you meet as a decrepit embodiment of all of this. 

Yet, the creators still call themselves communists. In their self-proclaimed “bloody battle,” they take a stand anyway. It is not that they believe their way to be the only way, or that they steadfastly reject all corporate backing — in fact, in a GamesRadar+ interview, Kurvitz describes the ability to attract such funding as a “superpower”.

Disco Elysium’s message is more fundamental than that. It tells the player that every choice, every word and every voice, pulls our attention in all directions of the political compass, demanding us to take a side. It’s unavoidable, as these voices settle into our thoughts and make up our very being. The only way to be without them, put bluntly, is to drink ourselves to death. But that isn’t a option for us. While that cop can become any one of us, we can’t all be the same character.

So why not take a side?

You won’t have peace just because you decided to fight. Yes, there is no absolute right or wrong, and nobody has figured out utopia yet, and inevitably your stance will be corrupted and torn apart by the divergent politics of our world.

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Godly: Success] – “…A blog post written by an editor on the game, Martin Luiga … claims studio leadership at ZA/UM forced out the lead designers at the end of 2021 and has kept it secret ever since …. [insinuating] that the core team was pushed out by the business side of the studio.” (Kotaku, 2022)

Even so, the creators didn’t make Disco Elysium without being prepared for this. 

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Godly: Success] – “Kurvitz: ‘We made it with the express purpose of being failure-proof, in the way that, if it doesn’t succeed, we still have not wasted five years of our lives. That it is artistically solid and we have said everything that we can say.” (GameSpot, 2020)

So say all that you have to say. Believe that there is right in the world, knowing that the world will try to prove you wrong, but in the same breath let you change your side when the time comes.

Because how else am I supposed to react to news of creators being kicked out of their own story, other than by taking their side?

WHIRLYBIRD’S TELLER [Impossible: Failure] – “None of the news in the entire world can speak for you.”