yeah yeah yeah libertarians are dum dums and plot twists are unexpected, who cares

here's my own very personal gripe with bioshock. think about the storytelling in major games released shortly before this, like half-life 2 or psychonauts. what was it driven by? the characters and the environment -- pay attention to what's around you, listen to what people are telling you, and you'll get some part of the story. some parts you just won't get, ever, at all, because they've been left that way, or maybe because you've missed some non-obvious detail; maybe you'll come back to the story at a later time and it'll still surprise you with something you missed. it's up to you to wonder and interpret and use your imagination.

how does bioshock tell its story? through fucking audio logs. everywhere. everyone in rapture is constantly journaling their innermost feelings and secrets. why do they do this? because system shock 2 did it first. but that was on a god damn space ship in the space future, where you could easily believe personal audio recording devices have been commonplace and a part of life for generations, and besides, it was referencing a similar storytelling method from preexisting scifi like star trek: tng, which itself makes a great deal more sense because space naval officers on a journey of exploration would have both the time and the professional motivation to keep journals regularly.

bioshock takes place in like 1960 or so. magnetic tape recorders were "common", sure, in their industrial applications like radio, tv and the music industry, but they were not common household appliances, not until the introduction of cassette tapes in the second half of the 60s.

okay, let's say rapture's magical super technology driven by waves hands led to the creation and popularization of personal audio recording in less than the uhh two decades this city is supposed to have existed for. still doesn't explain why everyone is keeping a damn journal, except that it's for the player's convenience!

okay, so maybe it's a popular hobby, everyone's doing it, it's an expression of unfettered bourgeois individualism to treat your every insipid thought as worth recording for posterity (much like this review), sure, whatever. but then, in the game's timeline, the bad government starts cracking down on dissenters at one point -- you think that wouldn't have led to people destroying both their recorders and the recordings en masse? even people who probably had nothing to worry about but wanted to stay on the safe side anyway?

there's a guy who's supposed to be an ESL speaker doing a funny accent -- why is he recording these very private messages in broken english, instead of his first language? i guess it can be for practice... but come on! you don't really believe that! it's just because audiologs were established as the main storytelling method by the time he appears in the story, so he has to be audiologging for your convenience too.

why is it like this? well, in my personal opinion, vindicated by later developments in the series, it's because ken levine thinks he's a fucking genius among mortals and the rest of us mere jesters and bumblers need every background detail explained very slowly and carefully.

what's worse still, i think bioshock audiologs can be pointed to as one of the first occurrences of the dreaded phenomenon called "lore", which to me is not synonymous with worldbuilding and background detail, but background detail done badly -- i.e., the ubiquity of in-world information that you have no reason to have obtained, but that is given to you anyway, just so you can understand what's going on.

you shouldn't understand what's going on in a place that's gone to hell and eaten itself alive! it should be a lot of work to piece it together! it should be cryptic and disorienting and maybe nonsensical on your first go! but just like the profound moral choice of kill little child vs don't kill little child, this entire game was made for a certain intended player, one that exists solely in ken levine's imagination, and who is a gormless fucking fool. that's what this game thinks you are.

you don't even have to hand it to ken that he's right about the libertarians or whatever. of course the most extreme and ridiculous expression of american free market ideology is extreme and ridiculous! now if he'd managed to examine the same ideology as it expresses itself in more moderate, everyday, "normal" forms and still find the nightmare embedded within it... then maybe he would have made night in the woods instead. but i doubt that's something he's capable of.

Disco Elysium is a game about radical acts of humanity.

That’s the game in a single mission statement, but if you want the game in an overlong essay, read on: it is almost certainly the most human videogame I’ve ever played. (I would like to say the most human videogame ever made but so many games are made- most less famous than Disco- that may be just a little more human than it.) Of course it is about more than that, but I feel that expresses the core better than anything else. Because whilst Disco Elysium is about radical acts of humanity, it’s also mostly about the everyday mundane human ways we relate to each other.

This essay is about four men, whose ideas and works help me connect with Disco Elysium, help me draw a story out of its texts. I take 5,000 words to do this because I’m verbose. You can skip to the end if you want, where I elaborate on what I mean by “Radical acts of humanity”.

Whenever I play Disco Elysium (three times, which is uncommon), I always think of (at least) the four same men and their ideas. Four real life historical men, unequally influential, equally important, all men because, unfortunately, generations of patriarchal culture do be like that. Let’s look through Disco through the lens of these four fellas.

The first man I think about when I play Disco Elysium is Karl Marx, obviously, who just as obviously founded ‘Marxism’. Marx is already influential on Disco- the developers gave him a shout out during a victory speech at the Game Awards, because Daddy ZA/UM didn’t raise no quitters- but to me, the themes that leap out aren’t the in-universe parallels, but rather how Marxist thoughts inform the world and the game itself.

Marx is famous for writing of the ‘spectre of communism’, but much of his writing was about the vampire of capitalism and its effects on people in it, with communism depicted as a reaction, a natural reassertion of humanity in the face of capitalism’s inhumanity. When Marx talks of ‘alienation’, he means Capital’s power forces people to live by Capital’s rules, and Capital’s rules dictate that one must have money to live; and so people are divided into classes, where one class owns everything, and the other is coerced to sell their labour to the first. Capital’s desires must be met before yours can even be considered. Your time is spent on work your mind considers nonessential, foreign to its wants. Your existence as a self-determining individual with the power to decide your own destiny is trapped within the confines of Capital. The system takes your labour and sells it for a dollar; you get ten cents, and if you complain there’s a man down the street who’ll work for nine cents instead. You are alienated from the produce of your labour because it belongs to another; you are alienated from your fellow human for now they’re competition; you are alienated from your very will because you must satisfy Capital’s by default.

When I think of Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, I think of Lieutenant Double-Yufreiter Harrier ‘Harry’ ‘Raphael Ambrosius Costeau’ ‘Tequila Sunset’ du Bois, the human howitzer shell of poor life decisions who acts as our intrepid protagonist, is an alienated human being, his psyche scarred with the relentless toilsome existence of living in a world full of people just as alienated as he is. Marx talks of the alienated worker existing in a state of annihilation, of non-existence of the self. As Disco begins, our protagonist wakes from a state of oblivion- and it feels good. He doesn’t know his name or his face or his role, and yet Oblivion whispers to him in the cadence of seduction, of a lover inviting one back to a warm bed. Come back to nothingness, honey.

Almost immediately we learn that this was not an accident. When Detective Du Bois of the Revachol Citizens Militia, the Molotov cocktail who walks like a man, arrives on the scene of a murder, he does not do what he is supposed to do, which is retrieve the murder victim from a tree and question witnesses. Instead he flails his gun around, makes passes at waitresses, makes passes at a witness, trashes his hotel room, punches a stuffed bird (albeit one that, we are assured, had it coming), sings karaoke so atrociously that the hostel he haunts institutes a NO KARAOKE rule on the spot and drinks to such driven excess that when he comes to his brain has been purged. His job, address, name and face: annihilated. A question bubbles to the surface: what was reality like for this man that he would go to such drastic lengths to forget it?

There are many answers to that question, but one of them is that Du Bois is a cop, and doesn’t want to be a cop anymore, again for many reasons (Revachol’s police force is more an awkward compromise between a citizen’s neighbourhood watch and a police force than a top-down authoritarian force, so he doesn’t even have the near-unchecked privilege and power of your average real-world cop!). As we explore Du Bois’s past we learn that during his rampage, despite being smashed he manages an impressively systematic erasure of his cop-ness, flushing his papers down a toilet, throwing a clipboard in the trash, selling his gun and driving his police car with badge and uniform inside into a river.

Curiously, we also learn that Du Bois was good at his job, effective, disciplined, restrained and more efficient than his peers. He was driven and skilled and yet at the end he hated being a cop so much he performed an act of ego-annihilation so complete that he literally doesn’t remember his own name. We can speculate as to why- no doubt his having untreated personal issues and an intensely stressful job compounded somewhat, as does the poor pay and lack of time to address his own issues. It is sobering and ironic, then, that despite this immolation of the self, the very first detail we learn about Du Bois is that he is a cop. Indeed, we might not learn his name until much later (and often then only by finding his police badge). Everyone in the hostel Du Bois has disgraced with his presence know him as a cop, but not one of them can tell him what his name is. Du Bois is defined by his labour, and he has so little control over that status that not even hard fragging his brain can shake it off.

As we learn more of the city of Revachol’s dilapidated quarter of Martinaise, in the infamous Jamrock district, we learn more about Du Bois as well, and about the traumas they both share. That they share them is not coincidence. Martinaise is pockmarked by the craters and bullet holes of an old war fought and won against the old communist regime; these literal scars exist alongside a deeper marring of the soul of the city. The buildings are shabby old relics, if they’re whole at all; many are in half-ruin, rib-cages exposed to the winter wind’s keening. There is only one thing in the whole of Martinaise that has value to Capital, the docklands through which a stream of trade flows. The docklands are also consciously the cleanest, most functional locale in Martinaise. At the same time, the docklands are separated from the rest of the town by a wall and gate that turn it into a fortress. Despite their cleanliness, the docklands are sterile, unwelcoming, unnatural. They are alienated from the living decay that vibrates through the bones of Martinaise. This relative largesse does not extend to the depressed urbanity that rings it; that area is Not Valuable to Capital and so is allowed to rot.

The people, too, are depressed- a thread of sorrow, despair and bitterness worms its way into almost every personal narrative in Disco’s cast, compounded by the never-ending burden of Capital’s demands, generation after generation. The little girl who stands outside the bookshop, nervous and freezing, too busy hawking goods instead of receiving an education, is only there because her mother needs her to work now so the business doesn’t go out of business, and she’s a nervous wreck because her husband is always away on work, leaving her to raise a child alone. The countless oblivion seekers who talk of the legendary Tequila Sunset. So many people who spend their money on alcohol instead of fixing their own lives but at the same time it is Capital that gives them less than they are worth and makes oblivion seem appealing. Du Bois has to pay rent and damages to the hostel despite being broke and troubled because they need to pay for repairs because they use renting that room to live, but Du Bois is only there because a man was murdered there, and that only occurred because that man was there because Capital needed that man to literally kill a labour union.

Joyce Messier, the very avatar of Capital- a corporate libertarian (dios mio!)- is on the winning side. She is secure and powerful and wealthy. She is slowly having her ego literally obliterated by her work because Capital alienates everyone, even the wealthy, although not in quite the same ways. Joyce reflects on her life and experiences doubt and sorrow, on whether the end of history, brought about by the victory of her ideology, was ever worth it.

The second man I think about when I play Disco Elysium is Francis ‘History-Killa’ Fukuyama, a tragically intelligent American academic noted for his 1992 dancing-on-the-grave-of-the-Soviet-Union essay “The End of History and the Last Man”. He is the only one of the four men who isn’t dead yet.

The End of History is a concept posited by the likes of Hegel and Marx describing the culmination of human social evolution into an ultimate, final government system that, once achieved, would never again face serious challenge. Fukuyama’s essay says it’s liberal democracy. The Cold War is over, Communism is deader than disco, and (parliamentary) democracy (with a free market) was here to stay, babyyyyy!

Fukuyama copped a lot of ‘feedback’ for his essay, some of which was dopes misinterpreting what the end of history meant (it means that liberal democracy is the final, endpoint system for organising human societies, not that things will stop happening), others argued that liberal democracy had failed as a system and thus could not possibly be the endpoint, whilst some felt he had undervalued the existential threats of rival systems, like Islamic fundamentalism (lol). Fukuyama, a rising star of the neoconservative scene in the heady days of the 90s, defended his thesis rigorously, observing (correctly) that Islamic fundamentalism didn’t pose an existential threat to the Liberal west at all whilst observing that even the autocrats of China and Russia had to pay lip service to democracy.

When I last checked in on ol’ History-Killa, it was 2016, he was voting democrat and felt a lot more anxious about the nature of liberal democracy, because 2016 hit different but it hit everyone exactly the same.

When I think of Francis Fukuyama’s theory of the End of History, I think of Joyce Messier and Evrart Claire, the opposing poles in the ideological cold war raising the heat in Martinaise. Evrart serves as the boss of the Dockworkers’ Union, whose strike has shut down the precious Martinaise docks. Joyce is a negotiator for Wild Pines, the company that owns the docks themselves; however Evrart refuses to meet her. The unresolved situation and the tension it builds underpins everything in the story, but also springs in the backdrop of the city of Revachol’s historical context, in which Capital’s power is unchecked. Revachol is a political void, its revolutionary communist government being smashed decades ago. The smashers- an international alliance of humanist democracies- didn’t fill the void. Instead, it was left as a deregulated state, run by corporate interests and policed by international militaries. These nations are firmly unchallenged on the world stage, and the idea that anything could topple it seems inconceivable- the end of history.

Evrart puts on a leftist front in his methods and goals, but the prospects of him ever succeeding seem bleak. His goals are audacious. The dockworkers want a seat on the board; later they decide to take full ownership of the dockland itself. Joyce, meanwhile, is polished, elegant, charming, likeable and all too aware of how murderously ruthless her lot- libertarian capitalists- can be. Yet where Evrart moves brashly and loudly, Joyce and Wild Pines are subtle. They hide their hand. They attack from different angles, all at once, undetectable and secretive: Joyce is there to negotiate, but at the same time the company sends scabs to protest at the dockland gates, whilst also having hired a squad of secret psychopathic mercenaries as elite agents, each equipped with heavy weapons and armour worth years of cop salaries, to put the union back in its place. Even Joyce’s status is hidden- far from being a mere employee, she is in fact one of the owners of Wild Pines. The big guns are here. Capital’s power is overwhelming, financially, legally, militarily- but obfuscated. Cover stories. Disguises and lies, red tape and shell corporations, a thousand different subtleties. Capital does not like the spotlight and will do anything it can to obscure just how powerful it truly is. And it is this, I believe, that the tragic genius of Francis Fukuyama comes to light. When Fukuyama predicted that the end of the evolution of human social systems was here because one had become unassailably powerful, he was half right, but had misread who the winner was at the end of the cold war. Democracy had not triumphed; Capital had, and democracy was simply the host of the parasite. Buying into Capital is tempting: Capital is incredibly adept at extracting resources and wealth and turning that into power. But Capital does not need democracy- it will adapt to fascism and autocracy just as easily.

Revachol is not a democracy, and the only power in town is Capital.

And then Wild Pines loses. Evrart was anticipating everything from the start. He knows that at the end of the day, he can lose a thousand dockworkers and still live it, whilst the moment Wild Pines shows weakness the market will tear it apart. Wild Pines’ plans dissolve practically on contact, with the mercenaries going murderously rogue and the union holding firm. When Du Bois tells Joyce of Evrart’s plans, she realises the cost-benefit doesn’t favour Wild Pines and when faced with that, plus realising that people will die, she evacuates, and gives the Union everything they want. An unconditional surrender. Capital loses.

But this is a setback, not a total defeat. Capital still controls the city, Revachol is still a libertarian free zone, and international Capital’s airships control the skies with enough artillery to flatten every building in the city. The realisation that Capital is practically impossible to topple as a system is an open belief to all in Revachol, especially the bitter deserter- a veteran of the Communist revolution- who says that the basis for revolution has been lost, and will never come again.

But when I think of Fukuyama I also think of the Pale. After all, Disco is not just a story of dry politics- it is a game of symbolism, of abstract ideas and imagery explaining the feeling of an event more than the recitation of it will (The secret fifth man of this essay is Roger Waters, co-founder of prog rock band Pink Floyd, whose rock opera The Wall is a great companion for Disco; alas, I don’t know enough about the topic to really engage with it as it deserves. The Deserter has definitely watched The Wall though). For the end of ‘history’ is not just a wishy-washy higher concept in the world of Disco; it is a very real and horrifying inevitability.

Disco’s world exists alongside a phenomenon called the Pale, a property-less separative tissue that divides the world into islands of reality. The Pale cannot be described positively, only by what it isn’t. It is anti-reality, a space where even mathematics ceases. Travel through the Pale is possible albeit awful to experience, and it leaves radiation on you- long enough exposure affects you permanently. You unmoor from reality, experiencing events out of time, out of your time, other people’s memories, even maybe memories from the future. The Pale is timeless entropy, where all of human experience is expressed in a single formless mass without start or end. The Pale covers two thirds of the planet’s surface. The Pale is growing. The Pale is the product of humanity: pollution of the past, human history leaking into reality itself. It is a refutation of the idea that any human product can be eternal except nothingness, but also an embracing of a future where the universe itself is made up entirely of human history.

When Du Bois speaks to the phasmid at the game’s emotional climax, it’s not clear whether it is true communication or whether Du Bois is hallucinating mega hard. It doesn’t matter. Either way, the phasmid expresses terror at humanity’s incomprehensible consciousness, that it created the Pale that will annihilate everything around humanity as a side effect, whilst admiring humanity for being able to tolerate being inside its own head at all. The End of History may come, but whilst we may be done with history, history is not done with us; it pursues us, defines us, puts us into boxes and causes us to harm others without even being aware of it.

For Harry Du Bois and the people of Elysium, history is a prison, and the end of history an extinction.

The third man I think about when I play Disco Elysium is Carl Rogers, an American psychologist who founded the humanistic therapeutic approach. Rogers is a man who’s had a huge influence on me- because I am a therapist, and his shadow looms large in the field. Most therapists incorporate at least a little of his approach into their work. The core elements of Rogers’ approach do not emphasise specific techniques or interventions, but rather a philosophy. For Rogers, humans change when exposed to humanising interaction. Rogers teaches the power of listening, empathy and caring. You are there with the client, genuinely in the moment, not acting or hiding behind empty therapist personas. You try to understand the client and see the world through their eyes without being lost in their world. And finally, you practice unconditional positive regard: you accept the client as they are, without judgment, disapproval or even approval. The relationship begins then and there, and is not informed by the past: the Rogerian therapist treats the criminal client no different to the crisis survivor, and trusts in these simple human connections to transform a person.

When I think of Carl Rogers’ humanistic approach I think of Kim Kitsuragi, the long suffering detective sent by another precinct to assist you on the case. Kim is a consummate detective. He is thoughtful, attentive, highly disciplined and absolutely incorruptible. He arrives on the scene to solve a crime and leaves having saved Harry’s soul.

I love Kim more than any other fictional character ever made. I have an official ZA/UM copy of his aerostatic bomber jacket hanging in my wardrobe. It is warm, comforting and surprisingly practical. Kim made me want to be a therapist- and I was already a therapist.

Kim does not arrive intending to save Harry’s soul. He is there to perform a job; Harry, as his partner, is there to perform the same job, and Kim expects Harry to do that job; he won’t do it for him! But he sees Harry as more than a job- he sees a person. A person in indescribable pain. This is already generous: Harry’s antics have set the investigation back, impacted measurably on Kim’s ability to close this case. Yet Kim does not linger on it. He does not belabour Harry with criticism on how Harry’s personal issues have hampered the case. Kim simply moves on to asking ‘what do we do now to fix it?’

Kim approaches Harry with an opinion free of judgment. When they meet, Harry is hung over, dishevelled, hated by the locals, feuding with the hostel’s manager, missing a name, a gun, a badge and hasn’t even fetched the body out of the tree. Yet if this affects Kim’s opinion of you, he hides his judgment magnificently. Kim’s offers Harry unconditional positive regard, free of pre-judgment. He allows Harry’s actions in the moment, and they alone, to define their relationship and in doing so he offers Harry an incomparable and rare gift that no one else in the game can give him: a relationship free of the past that haunts Harry. Harry obliterated himself with alcohol and meth to try and be released from that past and the monster it turned him into. Kim gives that to him without asking and for free.

Harry is a man, not a monster. Kim helps him realise that radical truth through entirely mundane and simple human kindness.

Kim is not blind to Harry’s faults. But instead of condemning him, he finds an equilibrium with Harry, he moderates him, and knows to trust him. He knows when to step in and rein Harry back, to point out when he’s crossing the line. Kim treats Harry like a partner, but also as a hurting human being, and he tends to both in the exact way Harry needs. It’s a wonderfully mature relationship and brimming with the exact kind of simple human patience and empathy Carl Rogers hoped to see from therapists.

In the emotional climax of the game, the phasmid- a cryptid that Harry has been fruitlessly chasing the entire game, much to Kim’s disinterest (he is not one for the paranormal)- appears. At that moment, I felt my stomach drop out of my body. One of the dialogue options is for Harry to proclaim that this is it, he has lost his mind completely and utterly. That is how I felt. I selected it and felt miserable.

Then Kim says, “I see it too.”

In that moment my fear and sadness was transformed into joy and relief that Kim, sober, professional and rock-steady Kim could see this postmodern fairy tale creature, the same as I could. My world view was not out of hand. I- that is to say, Harry- wasn’t alone.

I wept.

At the end of the game, Harry meets with his former co-workers who he told to fuck off for ‘cramping his style’ before the game even begins. These are his colleagues, but also his friends, pushed to breaking point by Harry’s terrible personality as he loses his struggle with his demons. They are weary and exhausted and wonder why they should take Harry back. If you wish, you can play Harry becoming a better person. No alcohol, no drugs, no bribes, superlative cop work, kind and helpful to those around you. Embracing the second chance your self-obliteration gave you. Your colleagues then point out, horrifyingly, that this isn’t even the first time all of this has happened, and that you ‘went good’ in the past as well, only to break again. Why would this time be different?

I think it will be. I hope it will be. Because now Harry has Kim.

The fourth man I think about when I play Disco Elysium is Terry Pratchett, British author responsible for the Discworld series, a fantasy series about a disc-shaped world balanced on the backs of four colossal elephants standing on the shell of an astronomical turtle. It is, as one might guess, a series full of the whimsical and the absurd. The geography is eccentric, the people more so. The narration is irreverent and self-unimportant and peppered with off-hand references and gags. His style has been endlessly mimicked but never replaced. They are the single most shoplifted book series in Britain.

There are very few settings as human as Terry Pratchett’s. This is a writer who can create a world where the natural laws are more like natural guidelines, where the home of the gods is a joke to retirement communities, where the first protagonists were a terrible, cowardly wizard and his too-fearless, too-naïve, too-curious tourist companion. Yet the setting’s absurd unreality doesn’t make its occupants less human. Pratchett’s incomparable gift was that he created a setting full of parody and satire and nonsense and used it to draw out the human in his characters, even if they weren’t human. A golem who embraces reasonable, rational atheism in a setting with jealous, living gods. A dwarf woman whose interests and expression of gender run counter to her society’s expectations. A vampire who overcomes their addiction to blood by sublimating it into a fascination with photography. Many of these ideas, when introduced, unfurl from parodical ideas to genuine explorations of the human condition, as silly, petty and as beautiful as it is. Humans are human, even in a flat world on the back of a turtle.

Pratchett had a gift for making his characters seem like gags at first, exaggerated and archetypal, yet revealing their complex, often contradictory, very much human natures to you over time. I think that sense of exploration, of hidden depths, is what helps make them seem so lifelike and resonant. In reality, people are rarely everything they seem to be at first. That isn’t to say that their exterior is false- a person who is boring on the outside often just has a boring outside. But people always keep something back, something hidden, and simply becoming aware of that makes us think of them as people.

When I think of Terry Pratchett’s complex characters and absurd world I think of Elsyium, the area of Martinaise and the people who live there. Elysium as a setting is more grounded and ‘philosophical’ than Pratchett’s, but it has its quirks of the absurd that reflect human nonsense. The statue of the deposed king in Martinaise, for instance, installed after a revolution in a district that hasn’t been rebuilt from the war that deposed him, by careless corporate overlords who were soon kicked out but managed to prioritise a statue being built that is immediately vandalised. Or the grim comedy of a chain of quests dealing with the ‘Doomed Commercial District’, a district where all businesses seem supernaturally cursed to fail, with an exception determined because her tower is technically outside of the boundaries of the district.

So many of the people in Martinaise seem like archetypes and stock characters at first. Union boss Evrart Claire is a classic corrupt union boss, more mob godfather than working class man. Joyce Messier is polished and clever and unflappable, an elegant woman who grew up rich and remains so. Plaisance, the careless bookshop owner who runs her daughter ragged in the cold to Teach Her a Work Ethic. Even Kim is a stoic, utter professional, dedicated solely to his work.

Then you learn a lot, or a little, and the façade falls and you realise the truth. Evrart may be running a criminal operation, but when he expresses his hatred for Capital and his leftist beliefs he is being bluntly sincere. Joyce fully acknowledges the inevitable power of the international forces ruling Revachol and her complicity in them and their crimes, but dig a little, and she spills how she truly feels: that Capital has failed people, that it was all for nothing, and that Revachol was disgraced by surrendering- that it should have burned every building to the ground before ever letting the coalition take it whole. Plaisance isn’t careless, she’s anxious, run ragged at the responsibilities of caring for a child and running a business whilst neglected by her husband and repeating the traumatic lessons of her mother. And when Harry says something and Kim has to turn away because he’s too busy hiding his laughter, it’s beautiful. When Kim is easily swayed into breaking for an hour to play a board game, he admires the pieces, sets the board, read the rules then (usually) runs rings around you before declaring triumphantly, “Nobody fucks with Kim Kitsuragi.”

Nearly everyone in Martinaise is like this. So many of them have contradictory hidden depths that serves to make them painfully human. The story of Rene, the hateful old royalist, and his affable friend Gaston, is wonderful. Childhood rivals for the same woman (who died before she could make a choice), Rene wears his old royal uniform and expresses his hate for foreigners and communists. He expresses contempt for the apolitical Gaston (fence-sitters are cowards), who cheerfully returns it. When Rene dies of heart failure halfway through the game, Gaston is heartbroken. Buried beneath layers of trauma and hurt and memory is genuine affection between the two. The Deserter on the island- a lifelong militant survivor of the communist rebellion- despises Rene as a memory of the royalists, hating him, savouring the idea of one day shooting him dead. He never does, and he too feels grief at the death of Rene. He hated the royalist, but he was a foe he could kill, a remnant of a dead ideology. He cannot kill Capital.

There are few characters as beloved in Discworld as Death. The literal anthropomorphic personification of mortality, Death is the psychopomp humans see when they die. He guides them to their afterlife. He is very fond of cats, and muses on the nature of humanity with fondness. He is not human, but he has a boundless empathy for life. He isn’t to be feared. This kind of anthropomorphism is common in Discworld, where the world is alive, the gods are alive, and cameras are boxes containing little demons that paint really quickly.

When I think of this, I think again of Harry Du Bois. Harry is a living contradiction, to the point where his skills argue and fight with each other. Harry is also incredibly sentimental, not only for the past, but for everything. Sentimentality is that thing that allows a human being to imbue lifeless things with life and meaning and feelings they don’t have. Sentimental people hesitate and feel bad about throwing out a computer, or worry about the hurt feelings of a doll. One of the first things Harry can do is gently stroke the hair of the murder victim; the victim thanks you for this. At the same time, he can gently pat a mailbox, and call it a ‘good box’. This makes the box happy. It heals his morale; it makes him feel better. Sentimentality, kindness to the lifeless, is rewarding and good and the product of Harry’s vast soul.

Harry sentimentalises and anthropomorphises everything. He has divided the voices in his head up to represent his compartmentalised skill sets. They then quarrel and fight and work together and encourage him. Some are communist. Some are fascist. One of them wants to get high and bone down.

Throughout the game, Harry can claim to ‘commune’ with things telepathically. His horrible, garish necktie. The city of Revachol itself. A giant insect. This is probably the ravings of a man experience alcohol withdrawal and psychological trauma, yet at the same time offer information he could not possibly know. At the very least, their viewpoints are beautiful. Revachol loves him; he is a son of its soil. The necktie calls him a good man. And the insect expresses its fear of humanity and its Pale even as it admires Harry for having the ability to comprehend existence without going immediately insane.

When Harry finds the Phasmid, a cryptid that a married couple have spent their lives looking for so fruitlessly that Lena, the gentle and adorable wife is doubting her story of seeing it- the story that attracted her husband to her in the first place- he talks to it. It talks back. He asks- are you the miracle? It says that he is the miracle. It encourages him.

“The arthropods are in silent and meaningless awe of you. Know that we are watching — when you're tired, when the visions spin out of control. The insects will be looking on. Rooting for you."

Harry can respond to this in several different ways. My favourite is this one:

“Of all the creatures I’ve met you are the kindest.”

That Harry has love and softness to spare for an insect in a world so cold and hostile is a testament.

I once met Terry Pratchett at a Discworld convention. I spoke to him and shook his hand- he was unwell at the time, and his grip was very gentle. I hadn’t read many of his works by then, but I’d liked what I read. I was there with a friend who saw Terry as his hero. I told Terry, “Thank you for writing these works. They inspire me to write as well.”

He said something very much like, “Good. If there’s a story in you, and you have that want to tell it, take that want with you. That’s what I hope those books do for people who read them.”

I cannot be sure, but I think he would have liked Disco Elysium very much.

The only one of these four men who I can be absolutely certain influenced ZA/UM’s writing of the award-winning Disco Elysium is Marx. The other three are more translators between the game and myself, ways of discussing my own experiences, ways of understanding how the game makes me feel.

I began this essay by discussing how Disco Elysium is a game about radical acts of humanity. I then clarified that by stating it’s about the basic, everyday ways humanity relates to each other. Then I talked about four men with ideas, and also mention the power of Capital a lot, which doesn’t seem human at all. I do talk a lot about human kindness and nature and relating to each other and our own alienation from it.

Disco Elysium is a game about radical acts of humanity. Or rather, the game is about normal acts of humanity, in a world that has made such things a radical act. To care about others, to sentimentalise the lifeless, to give irrational meaning in a rational and inhuman world run by a rational and inhuman machine is as radical an act as any. And yet the ordinary can triumph over, or at the very least push back against the extraordinary force arrayed against it.

Disco Elysium is a game about humanity, and acknowledging its flaws and misgivings and giving you space to hate it if you like, but if you dig a little you’ll find beauty there. Radical beauty in ordinary things.

If you have ever suffered, ever wanted to stop being you anymore or felt helpless, controlled by a machine or a substance or the vast uncaring world, then Disco is made in honour of you.

“It is made in honour of human will. That you kept from falling apart, in the face of sheer terror. Day after day. Second by second.”