Imaginary Worlds - Disco Elysium

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Disco Elysium has been called one of the best role-playing video games of all time. It's won a slew of awards and it’s a worldwide best-seller -- which is odd because the game wasn’t put out by a big studio. It was made by a group of friends in Estonia who had very little experience making video games. And this detective game is just as much about politics and the existential nature of reality as it is about solving a murder. I talk with Justin Keenan, one of the few American writers on the crew, along with game critic Paul Walker-Emig and game developer and former critic Heather Alexandra about why Disco Elysium is a revolutionary game that also reflects the moment of history we’re living through.  Today's episode is brought to you by Realm and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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To get started, just open the app. It's as easy as that. See the PC Optimum app for details. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. Over the years, I've talked about how much I love to play role-playing games, or RPGs for short.

Whether they're tabletop games with dice, or theatrical LARPing, or role-playing video games, an RPG is the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure. You get to craft the personality and the moral compass of your character, and the ending of your story depends on the choices you make throughout the game. And during the pandemic, I played a lot of role-playing video games. But there's one game that really stuck with me. In fact, I can't stop thinking about it. It's called Disco Elysium.

When you first start to play Disco Elysium, everything is dark. Your character is asleep, and you hear this eerie voice. The text on the right side of your screen tells you this is your character's ancient reptilian brain. There is nothing, only warm primordial blackness. Your conscious from Ensini, no larger than a single grain of malt. You don't have to do anything anymore. Ever. Never.

Ever. Never. Ever. And then you hear your brain's limbic system, which has its own voice. You wouldn't like it if I told you what was back there. Why'd you think you had to bludgeon yourself into oblivion? When you finally wake up, you're sprawled on the floor of a dingy hotel room. Your character is a heavyset middle-aged white man with long hair and a handlebar mustache. You look like a washed-up rock star. And you're completely naked, except for your socks.

Eventually, you discover that you're a cop here to solve a murder, which is difficult because you don't remember who you are or how you got here, although it's pretty clear from The Hangover that you lost your memory because you went on an epic bender. Luckily, you've been assigned a partner who's very patient and can answer most of your questions. I'm Kim Kitsuragi, Lieutenant, Prison 57. You must be from the 41st. By the way, this is a top-down video game, so the camera is at a bird's eye view, although you can zoom in if you need to. It's also an open-world game, which means you can move anywhere in the game and talk to any character you want.

Their dialogue appears as text on the screen, which is also read by an actor, and then you get a multiple choice of things to say in response. You don't hear your own voice, but you do have these voices in your brain giving you advice, including a voice that is not insane and can give you the lowdown on what's going on. Hello, officer. The young woman raises a cigarette to her lips. Her eyes are brown and her face is speckled with birthmarks. She can't be more than 28.

Disco Elysium has gotten massive critical acclaim. It's won a slew of awards. I've seen people debate online whether it's the best role-playing video game of all time. In fact, they sold so many copies, they used the money to redesign the game. And a few months ago, they released The Final Cut. All the characters are now fully voiced by professional actors, and they added extra branches to the story. I've played both versions, and I think The Final Cut really elevates the game to being a work of art.

And I wanted to figure out why this game has resonated with so many people around the world. By the way, there are a few spoilers about friends in, of all places, Estonia. Over many years, the world that they were creating evolved from a medieval kingdom to a dingy, fictional modern city. From what I've read, the lead game designer thought this could be turned into a novel at first, and then he realized it would make a better video game, but he had never made a video game before. And one of the members of his group told him, quote, my friend, we failed at so many things. Let us also fail at making a video game. I was not able to interview any of the Estonian game designers, but I did talk with

Justin Keenan, who was one of the few native English speakers who was brought in to help them write the game for the Anglophone market. When I came onto the project in 2018, like I already knew that I was seeing and working on something very special. And so it didn't shock me at all that the game found an audience. But it did shock all of us when it turned out the audience was as big as it's turned out to be. And because they never made a video game before, the group came up with ideas that were so original, I think other game designers are going to copy them for years to come. For instance, when you start playing, you can choose three archetypes for your character.

Thinker, sensitive, or physical. Sometimes people ask what the difference is between the three archetypes at the start of the game that you can choose between. And the kind of standard answer is one is Sherlock Holmes, one is Dale Cooper. Dale Cooper was Kyle MacLachlan's character in Twin Peaks. And one is Vic Mackey from The Shield, Michael Shiklis' character. I didn't play that version, the brutal cop, but I did play the Sherlock Holmes and the Dale Cooper versions. The latter one is definitely my style.

When you play the sort of Twin Peaks version of the game, your brain is so wired towards empathy, you have extrasensory perception. You can talk with the corpse of the victim. Even your necktie will talk to you, although it gives pretty bad advice. I did everything a multi-patterned necktie can do to help a man. I mean, I tried to get you to do all the fun things. Drink beer, drink wine, drink cider. Go to parties with young people around and drink beer and cider.

Do drugs too, so you don't fall asleep. There's actually not a lot of movement in the game. You can run around the city, but most of the time, the characters are standing still. But your inner voice, or inner inner voices are describing what's going on. And the writing and voice acting and even the music are so good. I didn't even notice the lack of movement for a really long time. The melting snow seeps through your thin clothes. Grandmothers don't let their grandchildren out to dress so lightly in this weather. You look around. More winding coastlines lined with abandoned buildings.

Crumbling piers. Saltwater lapping at their door. Justin Keenan says originally they set out to make a video game that was more animated. But. Animations are very expensive. And we, for most of the production, we only had one animator is this amazing dude. But you know, he had many, many animations to do and like lots of our, you know, we have a whole list of things that we wanted to animate and just didn't have the time or money for. So we had to be very sparing about those moments. despairing about those moments. Well, one of the common complaints that a lot of players have about the game is just that there's so much text to read. Like, did you guys ever have conversations about like, okay, is this text going on too long? I mean, are we making people read like a novel

worth of information? You know, we have lots of conversations about whether a given conversation is too long or whether a given branch has become too text heavy. But I mean, the game is the game, man. It's going to be a lot of reading no matter what. And in a way, scrapping that idea and just saying like, no, all the interactions in the game are going to have to happen in this text engine actually ended up being quite liberating. And that kind of pushed us to like say like, well, how can we make just reading for hours and hours at a stretch

as entertaining as possible? The character that you're playing eventually remembers his name. It's Harry Dubois. And the fact that Harry lost his memory because he went on a bender is played for entertainment, but we're also meant to understand that Harry is an addict. but we're also meant to understand that Harry is an addict. He's using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate his emotional anguish. And that actually plays out in the game mechanics. You get opportunities to take speed or psychedelic drugs. Each drug will give you extra points in certain skills,

but you will lose points in health and morale. Justin says that came from a pet peeve that he and the rest of the team had about the way that drugs and alcohol are used in other video games. You know, we wanted this game to feel as much as a game can like real life. Like we wanted the we wanted to deal honestly with like what is tempting about substances. Even when you're in the throes of addiction, you can still think it's quite fun to go and get high or drink or whatever. And in a way, we wanted that for those players who decide, nope, this is Harry's last chance and he is going to stick to the straight and narrow now.

We wanted that choice to feel meaningful and that like you really are, you're like really passing up real temptations and not just playing the game correctly in some way. And I've read interviews with the Estonian game designers who said that Harry's addiction was based on their own battles with alcoholism. was based on their own battles with alcoholism. A lot of us at the studio have our own kind of complicated history with substances or mental illness or whatever else. Writing this game, like everyone who wrote for it, it was a very personal project. And in some ways, like we were writing not not for our audience, but for ourselves, like,

and like for the other people at the studio. I mean, are you comfortable talking about whatever, whatever you brought personally to it? Um, yeah, sure. I mean, I, you know, I'm someone who's dealt with depression for most of my life. And, you know, one of the aspects of Harry that really speaks to me are, in some ways, there's not really an obvious antagonist in the story, except for limbic system and your ancient reptilian brain, who are telling you every night, there's no reason to keep doing this, Harry, you should really give up and sail the inky blackness into whatever. And that idea of your own brain kind of being your worst enemy, I relate to, like, absolutely. You know, at the same time, you having this sort of panoply of voices, not in like a trite, like schizophrenic way, but just knowing that there are different versions

of yourself who are always kind of like carping and sniping at you, even when you're going about doing completely normal, basic, not super stressful things, jumping in with a thought that you like didn't need or want to hear at that moment. That's an experience I relate to that I've like never felt in another game.

There's another innovative aspect of the game called white checks, where you're given an option to say something or take an action. But to do that, you have to beat the odds. And whether you have a 5% or a 50% chance of beating the odds

depends on which version of Harry you're playing and how far you've progressed in the game. Beating the odds opens up a new story branch. But if you fail... I mean, I will say that as writers, we often put more time and energy into writing the failures of the various, you know, some of the white checks

or the checks that you can retry over and over. Those often require three or four different, distinct failures. And so getting to kind of say like, what's your second shot, Harry? In fact, here are some headlines from articles praising the game. Disco Elysium is an enchanting lesson on failure.

Why I love failing in Disco Elysium. When my Disco Elysium character gave up, I was like, yeah, I get it. And dying like an idiot in Disco Elysium character gave up, I was like, yeah, I get it. And dying like an idiot in Disco Elysium just makes success more satisfying. That last article was written by Heather Alexandra. She is a former game critic and now a game designer. When she first started playing Disco Elysium, at the very beginning, after Harry wakes up in this hotel room, you can go downstairs to the lobby and talk to the manager.

He said I owed him money. And I said, well, certainly, sir, I do not owe you money. So I ran away and I failed what was essentially a dexterity check. I tripped over, fell into a woman in a wheelchair. fell into a woman in a wheelchair. And so my character flies through the air, turns around, flips the guy off while he's soaring through the air, crashes to the lady in the wheelchair.

And then when he hits the ground, my character had a heart attack and died on the spot. I think one of the ones that people will tell you about a lot if you talk to people who play this game is there's a check to get your tie off the ceiling fan. Yep, that's how I died in the first few minutes of the game. That's one of the most common ones too. So you can take enough like mental damage from failing a check while seeing yourself in the mirror for the first time. And so there's a lot

of ways to die very early on in that game, which is not a very common thing in role-playing games, especially modern role-playing games, right? I think modern role-playing games make a lot of affordances to make sure that the player feels powerful and that even when they fail, they tend to have viable alternative paths that can get them vaguely towards the conclusions that they want. And that's why Heather thinks that failure makes success all the more satisfying. Like when Harry goes to inspect the body of the victim, it's hanging from a tree. First, you have to beat a check of physical revulsion, which is difficult. Most likely, you'll end up

vomiting and lose health points. And one of the options for getting the corpse down from the tree is to take out your gun and shoot at the buckle that's holding it up. I think it's a belt, but that's a really low percentile chance. The buckle explodes into tiny pieces, coming loose with a whir. You know, if you know you have 5% odds and you hit that shot and you also managed to hit it knowing that you're also the type of idiot who, if you trip, could potentially have a heart attack and die, that changes the context of how important that shot is, right? Like, you make that shot in Disco Elysium early on. It's incredible. It's an amazing moment. It's so amazing that even your wonderful partner, Kim Kisaragi, is like, dang, dude. My favorite check in the game is when you try to sing karaoke at the hotel bar. If you succeed, you sound like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits.

None of this matters now. And if you fail, you sound like this. None of this matters. This matters! And all! Some critics have argued the game goes too far in how low Harry bottoms out. In fact, Disco Elysium was banned in Australia for its depictions of drug use, although you can still find ways to download it there. Heather is sympathetic to that point of view,

although she's more concerned about the morally reprehensible choices you can make. Now, if you play Harry as being completely unethical, you can do some terrible things. You can even shoot a child. It's an evil child, but still. It immediately leads to a game over, but you can shoot a child. It's an evil child, but still. It immediately leads to a game over, but you can shoot a child in this game, right? And that's horrible.

I probably, if I was making a game, would not put that in a game for a lot of reasons, especially now, especially in the world that I live in, in the political realities that I live in, right? The country I live in. I don't find that to be something that has much redeeming value, but it is a thing that exists. And if I wanted to put a positive spin on it, I would say it at least places trust in the player's hands instead of just existing for the sake of

gratuity. Because I've played gratuitous games, and I don't think Disco Elysium is ultimately a gratuitous game. Which is to say, there are times in Disco Elysium where you are given the ability to cross lines, or characters are made to cross lines that I don't think characters in other games would. Again, Disco Elysium trusts the player to make the distinction as to those things. We can debate whether that trust is well-placed or not, but ultimately that level of is the

trust well-placed varies from player to player. You know, once you make a game, what's done with the game to a certain extent is out of your hands. And that is not the only controversial aspect of the game. Disco Elysium is deeply political, and it wrestles with politics in a way that's made some people uncomfortable. But that's also why I think this game might be reflecting the moment that we're all living through right now. We will level up to day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that?

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only at Tim's. At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. Detective video games are hot right now. And it makes sense from a practical standpoint. A detective is a great character to control because you have to go looking for clues, interviewing witnesses, and solving mysteries. But even if these games have the cinematic look of a film noir, they often don't reflect the depth of the genre.

Like in some of the best detective stories like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential or Twin Peaks, the detective character is a narrative device to explore the themes and aspects of those worlds. And that's where I think Disco Elysium can hold its own against any great film noir, whether it's film, TV, or a novel, because the game is really about this fictional city called Ravishal and its tortured relationship with its past. The backstory of the city, of the whole land actually, is that there was a monarchy for hundreds of years and then a communist revolution which failed. And today, free market capitalism has the upper hand. But the characters have a wide range of beliefs. Some are nostalgic for the old monarchy. There's a growing fascist movement,

which is scary. And there's a labor union that's on strike, grinding the economy to a halt. Right to work! The union boss, Everett Clare, is a big part of your investigation, and he has the goods on Harry. Now, I'd like to set your mind at ease about one other matter, your lost gun. Let me assure you, union people are on it as we speak. I've got my best hounds Heather used to be a union rep, so she wasn't thrilled that the union boss was unsavory, but she was impressed with the way that the game incorporated politics into the murder mystery. The reason that people feel that the politics of Disco Elysium are so present is because A, the game refuses to let you not engage with them, and B, because the politics are so essential to understanding the conflict that's at hand in the world. The reason why

the killing that you are investigating matters so much is not because it's just a moral wrong. It's because it presents an opportunity for a variety of political interests to use it to their advantage one way or another. Paul Walker Emig is a game critic and a podcaster who's covered Disco Elysium. If you want to think about politics, if you want to think about capitalism or communism or whatever, we're thinking about systems and games are systems. They're systems of rules and interactions. So I think they're actually a really good medium for thinking about politics because, yeah, you're building systems. You're encouraging players to interact with systems and see how they work. Politics are always going to alienate somebody.

More conservative players have complained that the game is too critical of capitalism and presents communism as a noble idea that failed. At the same time, critics on the left have argued that the game is too skeptical of socialism and its ability to solve the problems in that world. But Paul likes the fact that the game presents us with more questions than answers. A lot of people have called the game cynical and I kind of see that in a lot of aspects, but I'm wary about calling it cynical because I feel like the game wants you to believe that we're not at the end of history, that change is possible.

Maybe there's a sense that there's so much focus on kind of skewering the kind of hypocrisy in capitalism, in bringing to light the corruption of the old communism and kind of pointing out all these problems. There's so much focus on that, that perhaps that's kind of overwhelmed some people's perception of what the game's trying to say politically. Exactly. Even if I didn't know that the game developers were Estonian, I would have guessed that they were from a former Eastern Bloc country, which had seen the collapse of communism and was overrun with capitalism in a way that totally upended their lives. But it made me wonder, why does this game feel so relevant to people around the world,

especially in the West? Paul thinks we may be at a similar breaking point in history. There's a sense that something has to change and something's going to give at some point, but we don't quite know what that is. And it's difficult to imagine an alternative to capitalism. Like, it's really difficult to know what would a significant change look like?

Where would we go next? So we're kind of in that same sense of uncertainty as Disco Elysium, I think. One of the complaints that a lot of people had about the first version of the game is that the politics of the city, while they're interesting and important for all the characters that Harry's investigating, they didn't really affect Harry personally. So in the new version, the final cut, Harry has to make a decision and go on one of four possible political vision quests. Now I knew this was going to be part of the final cut before I played it. So I went in with the plan that I was going to have Harry go

on a communist vision quest to become a man of the people. But when I got to that point, playing the game, I felt like the version of Harry that I had been playing would actually go for capitalism, to pump himself up, win back his ex-wife, and fill that giant hole in his heart. And my vision quest turned out to be a hilarious satire of Silicon Valley-style thinking, where I bought shares of a dubious company, and then I hired one of the town drunks, whose name is Idiot Doom Spiral, to be my brand manager. You see, net worth means nothing to the people of Martinez. Nada. No. For them to see your wealth, to really respect that, you need to convert it into something real, something tangible. The bigger the better. And that's another interesting aspect

of the game. It shows how much people's politics are motivated by what's going on in their lives and what systems they think will help them or anyone else having the same personal issues. The game's really concerned with showing us the outcomes of any particular system on the people who are kind of caught up in that. We see a lot of the poverty, we see alcoholism, we see child abuse and things like that. And the game doesn't try to excuse like any of the people who are engaged in that behavior by kind of saying you know it's not their fault because look at the system they grow up with but it wants to make clear if you make people live in these kind of conditions these are the kind of outcomes you're going to get like these

problems are going to emerge. And Heather thinks all the different political factions in the game are motivated by the same thing, a fear of decay. The buildings are old and crumbling. There are a lot of empty stores and failed businesses. I think the deterioration of systems, I think the ways that we see the deterioration of Harry's relationship with his ex-wife, the way that we have an understanding of the ongoing deterioration of his body through aging and the fact that he is not the person he once is. more disturbing, Harry eventually discovers there is a parallel dimension called the pale,

which is slowly eating away at the edges of their world. So reality itself as they know it is deteriorating and nobody knows what to do about it. I think a great thing that motivates a lot of our understanding when it comes to pain in art is the looming specter of climate change. You could probably write an entire dissertation about analyzing the pale through that lens, right? You could do a whole environmentalist read of this game if you wanted. Now, I have replayed video games before because I wasn't happy with the choices that I made the first time around, and I wanted to give my characters a better ending. But Disco Elysium is the first game that I've played over, not because I failed too much the first time around.

I actually wanted Harry to fail more, because he's so entertaining and so poignant. But mostly, I felt a really strong connection with this world. Even though it's full of melancholy, I missed being there, and I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of it. But with any role-playing game, the version of this world that I got to experience is a reflection of the version of Harry that I played. I mean, this is true for any art, right? The truth that I find from a book will not be the same as the truth that you find from a book. But with a game, especially these, those truths are highly divergent when placed into systems that encourage divergence to begin with. Those moments can be small or they can be very big.

shooting down that corpse at the start, or they can be the difference between my Harry managing to find some sort of peace with the memory of his bad marriage or not, right? And that fundamentally changes the way that we intellectualize and interpret the story. For some people, this will be a story that's even more about failure than other people, and they will learn certain different lessons from that. Whereas for others, it might end up being more hopeful or more about catharsis in ways that it wasn't for other people. That divergence, that difference, is ultimately one of the things that games can do very well. The final cut might be the end of Harry's story, we're not sure, but the developers have said they don't build a world like this and leave it to one

game. There's a lot more in the pipeline. I will definitely play whatever they have planned next. In the meantime, I feel like I now see layers of Disco Elysium in the world around me. Although if one of my neckties begins to talk to me, I might start to worry. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Justin Keenan, Heather Alexandra, and Paul Walker Emig. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds pod. And if you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon.

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