ZA/UM’s masterpiece Disco Elysium (2019) offers a reminder that uncertainty, while painful, can also encourage us to have compassion for one another.
I’ve started a tradition of replaying Disco Elysium when the weather turns bleak and grey at the end of November.
Disco Elysium is a role-playing game set in the fictional Revachol—an impoverished seaside town that was decimated by a political revolution that occurred decades earlier. You wake up at the beginning of the game with amnesia but soon discover that you are a detective named Harry, recovering from an alcohol-fueled bender. You also learn that you have a murder case to solve.
Over the course of the game, Harry explores Revachol, trying to piece together his own identity and solve the murder of a mercenary who had been hired to break a local union strike.
Disco Elysium has enjoyed commercial and critical success since its release in 2019 (winning PC Gamer’s game of the year). The game’s most stellar achievement is the way it tells its story through a creative dialogue tree system: you spend the game talking to NPCs and to different facets of your own damaged psyche.
For example, Empathy might remind you that the rotting corpse in front of you was once someone’s child. Perception, on the other hand, might notice something hidden in the corpse’s throat.
These competing voices are often at odds with each other, and the player gets to pick which aspects of their psyche to listen to. But these choices do not always have clear right or wrong answers: pay attention to Empathy and you’ll become emotionally unstable. Ignore Empathy, and you’ll become a callous monster.
The game encourages players to sit with the idea that good people sometimes act badly, and that mistakes cannot be easily undone. Between allocating skills and dialogue options, there are a seemingly infinite number of choices Harry can make. It’s clear these choices matter, but it’s not clear how they will shape the story.
For example, early on in the game you encounter Cuno—a kid who hangs around hurling cruel insults at you as you try to get the murder victim’s corpse down from a tree. Cuno is possibly the most aggravating character in a video game, ever. You can ignore him, but you can also punch him in the face.
If you punch Cuno, he starts to respect you. As a result, he opens up to you, revealing that he was abused by his father. As Stacey Henley notes in her review of the game “There’s no right way to go about the situation, and that’s the point.”
The result of these types of interactions is that Disco Elysium furthers intense feelings of uncertainty. Like other media that takes experimental risks (think Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon) Disco Elysium uses storytelling to raise tough questions about the world: are people Rational? Knowable? How confident can we be in the choices we make?
Uncertainty can be painful, but it can also be beneficial. The mathematician Dr. Jacob Bronowski described uncertainty as a key component of science and ethical action. For Bronowski, human knowledge is “personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.” Certainty on the other hand, can be dangerous. As Bronowski observed, Hitler was certain.
Disco Elysium gets this idea across through both its story and mechanics.
Disco Elysium’s brilliance was driven home for me after I recently played Wolfenstein: The New Order. In the game, set during an alternative history in which the Nazi’s won World War II, a protagonist observes, “I cannot believe with such certainty. For me, in everything, there must be doubt. Otherwise, there’s no room to question.” In character dialogue, Wolfenstein like Bronowski, links certainty with fascism.
However, the above statement is deeply at odds with Wolfenstein’s mechanics—the game encourages gratuitous violence with little reflection. The point of the game is to take satisfaction in killing with moral certitude. The player character is an undefeatable bullet sponge whose choices are always right.
Disco Elysium on the other hand, excels at exploring the moral complexity of uncertainty. Harry is filled with doubt. He is imperfect and shaped by personal trauma. As we play out several days of Harry’s life, we do not always know how our choices are shaping the world. This uncertainty makes Disco Elysium’s characters memorable, relatable, and moving. It fills us with compassion not only for Harry, but for the broken world he inhabits.
