Disco Elysium is a beautiful and bizarre game that puts you into the boots (or stolen ceramic military sabatons) of a complete trainwreck of a human being and amnesiac who claims to be a cop. It sees you bumbling around the fictitious city of Revachol, solving a murder, hunting cryptids, opening dance clubs, and becoming entangled with the political forces at work in the city. It is a game with a lot of lessons, and left me thinking about what it had to say for days. I highly recommend you play the game for yourself. This article will go into the lightest of spoilers. It will leave all the biggest plot points unspoiled - but if you want to go in completely blind, you’ve been warned.
As I mentioned, this game left me mulling over a lot of different themes and lessons. At some point I might dive into some of the more deep and heady takeaways from this game about politics in our broken world, personal discovery, and existentialism. However, today I wanted to touch on a small takeaway that felt especially relevant to something I’ve seen in modern political discourse on social media. I’m not sure if this is a lesson the developers intended for anyone to learn from this game. In fact, I suspect it mostly arose from a limitation imposed by the rigidity of the digital RPG format.
Disco Elysium plays much like many other isometric RPGs or point-and-click adventures. The game leans heavily on the text, and the vast majority of content comes out of your conversations or introspection written out in a text window. As with other games of this type, Disco Elysium has an alignment system that, through your actions and choices, categorizes you into certain groups. You have your “copotype” - a representation of your personal philosophy and approach to life and your job, and you have your political alignment, which is primarily what we’ll be discussing here.
The dialogue system features a fresh and amusing take on traditional RPG skill systems. Based on your scores in skills, they will offer suggestions, context, or general goading to guide you in conversation. They are the “voices in your head.”
At many points throughout the game, you will be prompted to take political stances on various issues. Your possible opinions fall into four broad political categories:
Communism - socialism, power to the people
Facism - authoritarian nationalism
Ultralibralism - basically capitalism
Moralism - supporting the status quo
When playing most RPGs, you are not being asked to make these decisions personally, but on behalf of a character that you are shaping to be their own kind of person, separate from yourself. In Disco Elysium however, the combination of the amnesiac blank-slate, and the laid-bare nature of these political ideologies pulls the player towards reflecting their own ideologies in their character, and I definitely found myself doing that. Looking at the options above, I know pretty clearly where I fall in my personal politics. In a vacuum, my left-leaning beliefs would leave me picking the communist philosophies the vast majority of the time. Workers rights! Equality! Revolution!
But that’s where Disco Elysium throws a wrench into the works. You are rarely just spouting a context-less political opinion (if there is such a thing). Instead, your political choices are rooted in the struggles of the various political forces at work within Revachol. In the case of the communist viewpoint, this political force is the Union, run by Evrart Claire. Evrart is a smooth-talking, overly-congenial snake who quickly asserts his social dominance over you and who runs the whole town with his knowledge, resources, and man-power. He is a mob boss.
The Union boss Evrart Claire
That’s not to say that Evrart or the Union are all bad. Throughout the game you see many examples of how the Union is helping the workers and the people (though, always at some cost). They provide physical protection to the less-fortunate … through an extralegal squad of vigilante goons. They are striking for workers to have an equal share in their company … and so that Evrart can gain more control. They are building a youth center for the children of Revachol … by paving over a poor district in town. They are going to support some workers, but at the cost of others. Ultimately, Evrart and his “union” (mob) do not represent my personal socialist ideals, and I didn’t feel comfortable endorsing them in the game. Evrart and his Union were not my kind of revolution.
But the format of a digital RPG doesn’t leave room for the nuance to express my own personal opinion and how it might differ from the game’s portrayal of the ideology. Most of the time in dialogue, you get four options - one for each of the four political ideologies, and each supporting the corresponding faction in the game. But then, where does that leave me if I don’t want to endorse Evrart and the Union? Do I support fascists? Do I support capitalists? No thank you. I guess all that’s left is to support the status-quo with the moralists?
That brings me to the real-world takeaway from this in-game interaction. Yes, real life leaves us open to express our own opinions at whatever level of nuance we desire. But, when it comes to actionable things you can do to meaningfully enact change based on your ideology in your political system, your hands are nearly as tied as in Disco Elysium. You may have a nuanced view of how you want to see liberal policies change America for example, but if you don’t choose and support the candidate supported by the DNC, your vote is unlikely to lead to much change. The DNC’s candidate is your only option, even if they don’t exactly align with your view or they’ve done objectionable things in their past.
So, what are you left to do? You can broadcast your beliefs through your own personal activism or art. You can support small candidates who aren’t going to win but might bring about an incremental change if their policies gain enough traction. You can talk of guillotines and revolution from the safety of your couch. But in the end, when it comes to actionable change from your vote, if you don’t support the objectionable power-holder - if you don’t support Evrart and his Union - are you any better than the “Moralist,” than someone actively supporting the status quo?
I know this looks like I’m leading you into my thesis statement of how Disco Elysium taught me that anyone who doesn’t “vote blue no matter who” isn’t any better than a moderate. But that’s not exactly how it played out in the actual game for me. I didn’t support Evrart and his Union. I held back, not endorsing the communists, the fascists, or the capitalists. This caused me to end the game with the “moralist” political alignment, but also to end the game with the “art cop” copotype due to all of the small acts of artistic revolution I had enacted throughout the game. When I fundamentally couldn’t get behind the established power that was ostensibly supporting my ideology, I chose to instead enact small expressions of my personal ideology, hoping they might spark a future revolution I could actually get behind.
I might not have been any better than a moderate to the other political players in the game, but to myself, and to the individuals my art touched, I was revolutionary. And on a personal scale, maybe that’s enough.