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I would like to write a little about Disco Elysium. I played it a couple of weeks ago, and it stuck with me quite a bit. This first part will be my criticisms of the game, and my take on the message. However, I wish to post a Part II soon. In Part II, I’ll walk through my specific version of the main character’s story to show the lessons and morals from my playthrough.

Summary

I’ll give a brief summary. In Disco, you play as a detective who awakens from a drug bender with no memory of his past self. With your new partner, you are left to solve the literal murder mystery you should have been investigating the past week, along with solving the mystery of who you were. The world is a capitalist society post a failed communist revolution. Getting a handle on the political happenings of the world is essential to the game, but too much to discuss in this short review.

First, it’s an amazing game. Actual art. I struggle to “rate” it, as I’m not very familiar with cRPGs. I trust others when they say that it’s the best of its genre. I suppose that makes it a 10/10. I don’t know if I could handle many other cRPGs, and those kinds of games might not really “be for me.” So I might lean towards a 9.5/10 in terms of my personal enjoyment. Disco’s faults were the genre’s faults.

There is plenty of discourse on Disco. I was somewhat unimpressed with the “mainstream” analyses on YouTube. Smaller content creators that popped up only after watching those mainstream ones were of far better quality. Interestingly, a nice compilation of academic articles called The World Politics of Disco Elysium was recently published. It’s not really my cup of tea (i.e., it’s not analytic philosophy but rather that “other stuff” like social theory and politics… ewwww). Evidently, Disco transcends being an “amazing video game” and approaches some definition of greatness.

Of course, there are some critiques to make. Mine will be somewhat picky. There is value in thinking about these criticisms, I think. So let’s jump in.

Criticisms: Too Much Text? On the Thinker Archetype.

Even for a text-heavy game, I found it oppressively text-heavy. I should mention here that I played as the Thinker pre-set character. Consequently, I was presented with so many encyclopedia interactions that it made me sick. There are times in the game where it is totally permissible to ignore text, like when reading some of the denser communist literature. But having the flow interrupted so much by encyclopedia checks detracted from the main happenings in the world.

As a counterpoint, perhaps the idea of playing a thinker is being “in your head.” To this effect, the game’s multitude of encyclopedia checks did spectacularly. But player fatigue should be considered too. The thinker is the first archetype on the list, so I think for the vast majority of players who stumble into it, the litany of checks detracts from the overall experience.

Is there an elegant solution to this? Making clear that the encyclopedia checks are, in general, unnecessary might make players less inclined to go down encyclopedia rabbit-holes. So if the player is ready to get down to business, they feel freer to discard their intrusive thoughts. To make the point painfully clear: I think there’s a balance to strike here in the thinker archetype–between engagement in the story and player fatigue–that the game straddles well, but could be improved.

This criticism arose from my contingent decision to play a certain character archetype. I suspect there are other issues with each archetype, or certain combinations of skills. To speak more about this, I would require a few more playthroughs–something that I don’t have the time or energy to do. Naturally, one might assume there are inevitable problems with games trying to do too much by creating distinct, unique-feeling character profiles. Therefore, I think my gripe is minor.

Criticisms: Thought Cabinet Mechanics

Part of this game’s genius is the RPG-ifying of thought, personality, and thinking. I quickly picked up how to allocate points to redo white checks, developing a personality suited to my goals in the game. My only gripe with this process was the thought system, as it wasn’t clear what was happening when a thought was internalized. I’ll use the “Advanced Race Theory” (ART) as the main example, and even if my critique only applies to ART, I think enough players internalize it to make it a pressing one.

The only non-stupid way (I maintain) to get the body out of the tree is to have someone else do it. And fighting the racist isn’t viable for the thinker. So the best way to get past this barrier is to internalize ART. But despite making it very clear to Kim that I was doing this instrumentally, and then, throughout the game, making a point to avoid racist dialogue options, Kim still mentioned that Harry was a racist at the end of the story. The game, I suspect, treats internalizing a thought as a deep internalization: something like integrating it into your character. And having certain dialogue options appear, despite not picking them, is still part of the character you helped create.

This is fine, but maybe some more exposition about what internalization actually is would have made this clearer. It isn’t just (what I, as a philosopher, see as) a mulling over of things, but something much closer to integrating a way of thinking into Harry’s character. These two things naturally come apart to me, so I was a bit disappointed about what the game deemed Harry’s character to be at the end of the game. I much prefer my “headcannon” of Harry.

A counterpoint here: Many of the thoughts are of a “way of thinking” form, so there was enough to suggest that they are “deep” internalizations rather than “shallow” ones.

To this: even if they are “ways of thinking,” I can learn a way of thinking while not endorsing it. For a philosophical example, I understand the methodology of ordinary language philosophy and am very proficient in it. But I think that it is a false method.

Another response: ART is presented more conceptually or propositionally than as a way of thinking. So my objection applies to ART, at the very least. To pile it on, many thoughts felt like rememberings, like where you are from, not ways of thinking.

All this aside, the thought system is genius. But it could have been clearer, and, as I’ve been suggesting, improved upon. Imagine if there were two kinds of “internalizings” with different effects! Some are more mundane, like specific memories, whereas some are new ways of looking at things, like as a racist, as a communist, as an apocalypse cop, etc. Now, this raises natural philosophical questions about where technical expertise fits into the picture. Like, if there was a mechanic thought, is that just knowledge about cars, or is it a methodology about fixing cars? The lines between propositional knowledge and how one thinks are fuzzy, but further development on this could be very interesting.

Game Meaning and Political Messaging

Now I am going to move on to a bigger topic. What is the point of the game? What is the message? Is there one? I’m going to stick to an orthodox interpretation here: Disco about figuring yourself out. Harry has memory issues, a complicated past, and current bad habits he must reconcile. Disco is designed to develop Harry into a full-fledged person, however that turns out. For this reason, we must discuss political ideology and copotype. Both these topics are broadly connected to one’s self-identity, at least in current politics. It would be better to argue that the game’s political elements are not essential to its message, clearing the way for the game’s “self-discovery” message. However, I have far more to say about ideology than copotype, so I will leave that out as a disappointing omission.

The expected course of the political quests was fairly obvious. I immediately picked up on the “all the ideologies are stupid” bit and the idea that following any of them would lead to disappointment. Some YouTubers online mentioned that this ties into the broader story about developing your personality, and that having a political ideology as a “fill-in” is not going to do the trick (or at least not the whole trick). But this wasn’t a rug pull. Upon reading the dialogue options, I clocked that they were all brain-dead takes and I, at least, wasn’t going to be having any of that.[1]

But if this is true, as the YouTuber said, perhaps Disco’s message is decidedly apolitical. To flex a critical theory muscle (*sigh*) this is in itself a political message. I considered following this line of argument, but (as I should have guessed the moment “critical theory” graced this page), this is a bad argument.[2]

First, I would like to resist saying that it’s a leftist game. I think it plausibly is, but much discussion of Disco starts with the assumption that it is leftist. It is very true that the political critiques are the typical ones found in leftist circles, and that the criticisms of leftism are well interpreted as self-criticisms. So, insofar as it is a game created by leftists reflecting some leftist attitudes, it’s a leftist game. But this does not necessarily make it a leftist game. For example, it isn’t, at least without further argument, forwarding its own argument for leftism. In a similar way, capitalists making a game doesn’t make it a capitalist game.

Ultimately, whether it’s a leftist game should be determined by which analysis of its themes and messages is best (or, more liberally, by which set of analyses of the themes and messages we can agree are among the best). If there’s an analysis or interpretation that requires a certain political messaging, then the game does contain this political messaging. This, I think, will prove hard for Disco. Before pressing on, I will acknowledge how I stuck a meta-philosophical or methodological assumption into my argument–an assumption that I will not quite defend. It is a plausible assumption to hold when we try to determine what makes a piece of media political, but I’m sure many will disagree. But I digress.

Disco’s message is decidedly not political. Disco discusses politics, as the world it’s in is full of politics (as is ours). But the message of Disco is not political. The YouTuber misspoke, I think, when he suggested that all of them are bad for the soul. All the political ideologies, as represented in the game, are made up of flawed individuals in a complicated world, so we might not take any of it as a proper critique of ideologies per se.[3]

How do they fit into Harry’s self-discovery? Harry looks to others and the broader societal currents to find a sense of self. But all of these end up in failure. The communists are overly intellectual stuck-ups, the fascists are man-children, the moralists are corrupt, and the capitalists have you playing a silly game for their own benefit. All of them are engagements with the broader public that leave you empty. But that’s the point. At the end of the political quests, you might still endorse the values of a particular ideology. It’s plausible that by the end of each political quest, Harry is dissatisfied, but still endorses that ideology. The point: one’s having those values and seeking solace in them alone will not do the trick. The game suggests that this is simply not how “figuring yourself out” works. This message isn’t inherently individualistic; or it isn’t more inherently individualistic than figuring out who, as an individual, *you* are.

Now, I suspect that Disco didn’t want to portray fascism as plausible, so an “all ideologies are stupid” angle was (kinda) necessary. Leaving fascism out would be a shame too, given that it makes sense that there’s a fascist strand running through the Disco world (like in ours). But they could have baited the player more, having them buy into an ideology, then throwing it in the player’s face. Because each ideology was an obvious parody, I (at least) nearly avoided the quests. But I think this could be easily fixed with a bit of *deception*. And maybe fascists playing the game are already so stupid that they bought into the fascist ideology option right away, so no change is necessary.

If I were to replay the game, I would look into the copotypes a bit more. Having Harry’s job as a large part of his person is, at first glance, a political choice. I can muster up an interpretation to elide this, but I would need more research. Of course, succeeding in his society requires that anyone has a job. Perhaps Harry’s rejection of the status quo as a hobocop, or his leaving the police force, can ensure the player avoids job-centered characters. This is just a first glance line of argumentation I can *plausibly* make. Perhaps there is an essentially leftist point lurking in the copotype storylines.

Conclusion

I will end here for now. However, in a future post, I would like to describe my Harry’s journey. To make something explicit that has been implicit so far in my review, I think that Disco’s world aims to be a genuine simulation, and that one’s journey through it, controlling Harry, shapes Harry’s personality. So, as I journeyed with Harry, what did I find?

Footnotes

[1] For another point, if the internalization of thoughts creating dialogue options that are irrevocably “part of you” is to be maintained, having all political dialogue options available throughout the entire game is a weird choice. There is a hint of “old RPG” option-giving here that isn’t grounded in the thinking-system. Is a fascist and communist voice part of my character? Is it a part of every Harry? No. To be clear again, either all dialogue options are a part of Harry and the devs are letting old RPG character development slip through, or it’s not the case that all dialogue options are a part of Harry. I suspect the former. So consider this a minor critique.

[2] The centrist position is apolitical, not non-political. It seems to try to make everyone happy, accept the status quo as the “starting position” for debate, etc. So, with Disco containing the apolitical path in the story and showing that to be dissatisfying, Disco is at least trying not to be political, as strange as that might sound. If you have antecedent views that everything is political, and will not waiver from them, I do not wish to engage with you.

[3] Let me write this down just for my own sake and to avoid brain-dead critiques. First, all these are lumped into politics, but the economic and political dimensions are blurred here. That might just be a problem with how the game presents things, but it’s understandable. Second, that the “world” is flawed is a problem for all political ideologies. Now, libertarians might try to elide this problem by free markets and self-interest. But keep in mind that people are not just flawed and self-interested; the world only has so many resources to spend. The world might not be made for capitalism to be the end-all, be-all, at least not now. The point is, instantiating a political structure is, at least very plausibly, going to be imperfect. That’s all I want to say.