Disco Elysium

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0:00:06.0 Landry Ayres: There is nothing, only warm primordial blackness. And three insightful guests, here to join me in dancing through the dark deluge of ideology that is Disco Elysium, are Aaron Ross Powell…

0:00:22.0 Aaron Ross Powell: Hello.

0:00:22.8 Landry Ayres: Features editor at Reason, Peter Suderman…

0:00:25.0 Peter Suderman: Hello.

0:00:26.0 Landry Ayres: And host of the Epoch Philosophy YouTube channel, Ian Bennett.

0:00:30.0 Ian Bennett: Hello.

0:00:31.6 Aaron Ross Powell: I am so excited to have this conversation about this game because I’ve thought about it a lot, and I believe Disco Elysium might be my favorite artistic work of all time in any genre or any medium. And, Ian, in your… In the video that you put together, which we’ll put a link to in the show notes on the Philosophy of Disco Elysium, you don’t… You’re not quite as hyperbolic as I am. But you do, I think at the beginning of that video, say, “This game does a better job of proficiently conveying a multitude of things than almost any other work of fiction and artistically applied philosophy.” What is it about it that makes it so successful in that regard?

0:01:10.9 Ian Bennett: I mean, it’s like a really, really broad game, you know? I suppose, the one of the first things I noticed was when the game first came out, there was like game reviews, right? I’m a gamer. I play games. And when new games come out, especially weird, interesting ones like Disco Elysium, I had no idea what it was. Everyone was talking about the political commentary. Everyone was talking about sort of the sociological or philosophical commentary behind it and stuff. And I was like, “Oh, this is interesting. Okay, well, I’ll give it a try.” But when I played it, it’s not… It’s… It’s not so… It’s not as apparent as what a lot of reviewers or anyone would be saying. It’s actually kind of the facade, in a way. It’s not necessarily a facade, but sort of a facade. It’s almost like a comedy, like it’s funny, it’s hilarious.

0:02:00.9 Ian Bennett: And so you’re like, “Wait,” for a second you’re like, if someone wasn’t really totally paying attention, there would be a lot that they would be glossing over. And that really shocked me, is that they were so good at conveying these certain ideas over this sort of comedic facade, that everyone who talked about the game didn’t talk about the comedy. They talked about the actual commentary behind it. And I just think that sub-​text… It is sub-​text, right? The philosophical commentary? But it’s so good it almost isn’t, if that makes sense. And I was just kind of just baffled by that. I was like, “Holy crap.” This is… You know, it’s just… It’s wonderful, it’s great. So I think that was probably one of the biggest things I would say.

0:02:45.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah, one of the things that struck me was that the… So as a role-​playing game, you mentioned in your video that the game is ostensibly all about choice and choices we can make, and how instead of grand narrative choices… There are big moments that happen in the game where you’re making choices to do an action that could have dire consequences. But the entire game, there are almost no mechanics other than stat sort of placement, and picking up items, and choosing dialogue options. It is like a lot of people have said, “interactive literature,” and a sort of a visual novel in that sense, rather than a traditional role-​playing game.

0:03:33.8 Landry Ayres: And the developer specifically talked about how they focused on what they called micro-​reactivity, which are these small acts and decisions that the player has to work through such as a slightful comment or trying to insinuate certain things to certain characters that you’re trying to get information out of, and how all of those build upon one another in a much more cohesive way than in a lot of role-​playing games, where you’re making a lot of dialogue choices and sort of building up a character in your mind, but the decisions that actually affect gameplay and what happens in the story usually come down to one or two choices that are just sets of branching paths.

0:04:20.7 Landry Ayres: Whereas this isn’t… It’s much, much more of a dialogue tree scenario, and different choices are building upon one another in ways that you really do not always see the connections between. Which I think is interesting when you’re specifically talking about ideology, as you had brought up. Which is a core component of the game, not just thematically, but mechanically. When you talk about things like the thought cabinet, which I think is a really, really good example of Ludonarrative harmony as opposed to dissonance. Like you have a mechanic in the game, how it’s played, the sort of acquiring bits of ideology and thought processes and new ideas. You don’t just stumble upon them in locations. They are learned gradually from other characters based on interactions that you’ve have and choices that you make, such that you cannot receive them all in a single play-​through. It is not a completionist’s game in that way.

0:05:26.3 Peter Suderman: For the folks who don’t play or read super nerdy video game commentary, we should probably explain the concept of Ludonarrative dissonance. Which is, basically, that a lot of video games rely on in-​game game mechanics that seem to conflict with the story.

0:05:43.4 Peter Suderman: And the classic example here is the Uncharted games, in which you play like a really nice kind of heroic Indiana… Modern Indiana Jones-​esque guy named Nathan Drake. And you’re supposed to like him. And he’s just like a central, like a sort of pulp hero who you are… Who is very likable and does the right thing. And yet, the gameplay is all about you just shooting people in the face. And you just shoot people in the face. Constantly you’ve murdered dozens and dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people over the course of these games. And yet, you know, then you get to the cut-​scenes. And the story is there and he’s like, yeah, he’s just like a nice, heroic, essentially good, like he could be at the center of a Marvel movie starring a guy named Chris, and you would like him and it’d be funny. And then you just shooting people in the face because it’s a video game with a lot of action that like in games, this is a thing that games do.

0:06:34.1 Peter Suderman: But if you think about it, there is a conflict there. And what this game does is it tries to integrate the gameplay mechanisms such that they are with the actual story. And so, I mean part of the interesting thing, though, about this game is that it is… It’s not, in a lot of ways, a traditional game because the mechanisms are not, in a lot of ways, all that game-​like, and they’re not really all that… I mean, it’s… And the more game-​like they are, the less essential I think they are to the story. This is Ian’s YouTube video, called this “interactive literature,” which is I think a better way to think about what this game is, right? It is… It’s just a very, very complex branching story. It borrows from some sort of RPG role-​playing game mechanics, in particular, the conversations with non-​player characters. And so this is something that we’ve seen in games for decades now, and video games for decades now. You see it in… Also in tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s really common in very popular video games like the Bethesda role-​playing games, and the Fallout, Elder Scrolls, also things like Mass Effect, right? You just… You see this a lot.

0:07:51.0 Peter Suderman: And so you have these non-​player characters, these players that are controlled by the game mechanism. And you, typically in these games, you go up and you ask them questions, and they kinda serve as information kiosks. And they might tell you a little bit about themselves or a little bit about the world. But mostly, what they’re there to do is provide you with pretty low-​level exposition. It’s like, “You gotta go fetch three magic hats from three different caves.” And then you go fetch the magic hats from the caves, and you return to the NPC, and they’re like, “Great. Now you gotta go to three different mountaintops and get three magic socks,” right? And it’s just sort of mechanical, telling you what to do. But here, the RPG… This game treats all of these NPCs as kiosks, but they’re… They’re like ideological kiosks, right? Each one of them is like a portal to some sort of political, interpersonal worldview that you can just interrogate in great, great depth. And so it is this… It’s that the game is built around just going around and talking to in-​game characters, who… All of whom have a story to tell you about what they’re doing in this world, and who they are, and why they’re standing where they’re standing, or what they’re thinking. But also about how they relate to the game’s politics, and how they relate to the game’s various complicated ideological and political worldviews.

0:09:28.7 Peter Suderman: And so this game… The question we started here with was, “How does this game managed to do so much?” And I think part of it is just that it’s structured around really deep, quite complex, fairly weird conversations, with constructs that you’re supposed to think of as characters, but in fact are these sort of idiosyncratic kind of sly, kind of wry ideological kiosks, right? And so it uses the kiosk mechanism from other video games as a way to give you an extremely deep, and yet also, as you said, often quite funny, and like personal and idiosyncratic way, in way to explore a particular worldview.

0:10:24.8 Aaron Ross Powell: I think the one thing that’s… Makes this particularly interesting is that it is such a political game, but the politics of it… And it’s… And it may be the most deeply political and informed about politics and political ideology game I’ve certainly ever played. But it’s not ultimately about politics, or the role that politics plays in this is not about the… What should… What institution should we have? What steps should we take? What freedoms are not? Which should we have? But this is more a game about ideology as identity formation, and the way that that ideology is about deciding kind of who we want to be in a given moment, and then the disconnect between identity and the world that we find ourselves in, and the psychological trauma that that inflicts.

0:11:16.2 Aaron Ross Powell: And I think that’s where… Going back to the Ludonarrative harmony, the absolute brilliance of the thought cabinet, is it takes a mechanic that is present in a lot of games, which is like every time you go up and level, you get some points that you can assign to a talent, and those talents give you special little abilities or bonuses, but you can only take so many of them. But in this one what it says is, “No, these are… You learn… ” You come across the things, the talents are not things you just get when you go up and level. They are things that you come across in the world. Someone mentioned something, and it’s an idea that hadn’t occurred to you and is potentially interesting. And now you’re going to put it into your head. You’re gonna decide to put it into your head and mull it. And then after a certain period of time, it becomes part of who you are. Except you can then go and say, “I want to remove this from my identity.”

0:12:01.7 Aaron Ross Powell: And so it’s not about whether these ideas are true or effective. It’s about who is the person I wanna build, and what beliefs do I need to go out in the world and find to assemble in that. And then you have all of these characters who are then just trapped in these belief… These, as Peter… You mentioned like these incredibly deep and weird belief systems, but they’re not so much about effecting change in the world, as they are about just who do I wanna present myself as.

0:12:30.9 Peter Suderman: And they’re often about tribal and communal loyalties.

0:12:33.7 Aaron Ross Powell: Yes. But they’re also… I mean, there’s a realism. I will say the moment this game when I was like, “Oh my God, this game gets me,” is when you are stuck in a dingy apartment and the weird guy is talking to you about monetary policy. And I was like, “Whoever wrote this has been the Libertarian DC happy hours.”

0:12:48.8 Peter Suderman: Well, but what’s… Part of what’s interesting about the… Again, the way that they employ this mechanic is that it doesn’t in some sense, allow you to play the game better. And so you traditionally in a role-​playing game, you level up. And you can put points into a skill or something like that. And there’s different ways that these constructs work. But let’s call it, put points into a skill. So you can choose that you’re gonna get better at archery, or even there are sometimes conversation-​based skills. You can unlock additional conversation options, become better at convincing people to let you… Which usually is just like, “Well, I can convince this person to let me go through this gate without a fight.” That’s like the most common way of using a conversation modifier in a role-​playing game. And here, it’s like, “Well, if you pick the right one, you can get a little bit more money.” And that is, I guess, a little bit helpful. But mostly it’s just sort of that it changes the conversations. It’s not that you are suddenly better equipped to do the things that the game requires you to do in some certain part. Because the game doesn’t even require you to do all that much, or at least not in the way of a traditional video game.

0:14:05.9 Peter Suderman: It’s just that as you are doing the things that you can do in the course of the game, you will do them differently. And the conversations will unfold in different ways. And sometimes even your own reflections to yourself will then unfold in different ways. You will have different thoughts about the conversation or about an object that you find, about the space that you have encountered. And so it’s not that you are using these… The thought cabinet that you’re using these things in the traditional way, which is, “I wanna build a character that can kill all the monsters.” There’s no monsters to kill. There’s just weird interactions to have with game-​based characters who are going to ask you questions and maybe, or maybe not try to explain themselves to you. Possibly, they’ll do a good job, or possibly they will also be kind of deluded about who they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing.

0:15:08.6 Ian Bennett: Yeah, it’s like… One of the things that I found was absurdism itself seems to be kind of built into the very fiber of the game. Not necessarily… Or not only narratively in a lot of senses with how the story unfolds. And you’re grappling with ideology. But just like that, what you were explaining, the way that the game functions itself. Like there is no right or wrong way to do it. By definition, the game is sort of chaotic in how everything unfolds. There is no right or wrong way. It’s like you are in this weirdly infinite world with infinite choice. And there’s just this overwhelming sense of absurdism everywhere. And I actually think the actual aesthetic of absurdism, the weirdness of the game, they definitely highlight it there. But that’s definitely one of the biggest markers of Disco Elysium, is that absurdism in my mind.

0:16:04.6 Peter Suderman: I mean, it has quests and task lists, which drove me mad. Because there’s no way to figure out how to do them. It’s just like you’re supposed to go find your gun. And you’re like, “How would I do that?”

0:16:15.4 Aaron Ross Powell: And it tells you. It just says, “This could take a while.” It acknowledges that it hasn’t given you any information.

0:16:21.2 Peter Suderman: But it’s not like there’s a location marker where you go. And your defeat a couple of small enemies. Then you defeat a big one. And like I said, you’re gonna find a hidden door. And pick up a plus 10 sword. It’s none of that. It’s like, “Go find your gun. I don’t know, talk to some people. Maybe somebody that’s… As you’re doing whatever it is you’re gonna do, you should ask around about it, I guess.”

0:16:42.7 Ian Bennett: It’s like a really well… It’s like a really well-​organized detective thought, like list. They’re just writing everything down, even to the mental thing. That’s all it does. It’s not really like a quest log, even though it is. The only reason it says quest log is that’s just our language around sort of mechanics like that in a game, right?

0:17:02.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah. It certainly works for me. I’ve been playing Elden Ring a lot lately, which has been getting a lot of press lately compared to the UI and HUD in that game, which is extremely sparse, just as you know favors. And this is sort of in that vein.

0:17:22.5 Peter Suderman: And yet in Elden Ring, you can build a character that is more effective, or at least more effective at important types of tasks. It hasn’t completely abandoned the idea of tactical superiority and of in-​game strategy. And Disco Elysium effectively says, there’s many different ways to play. But there is no better way to play. And in fact, this game almost doesn’t really even expect you to keep playing. It just sort of allows you to, if you would like to. Whereas every other modern video game, even quite artsy-​fartsy indie games, they’re designed around the expectation… Around getting you to engage with things. And this is, I think, a very engaging game. Just ’cause it’s inherently interesting. But it doesn’t try to induce you to play more. There’s no reward system here, except for the experience of communicating with all these other people and finding out what they’re about.

0:18:31.0 Ian Bennett: Yeah, with Disco Elysium, it’s one of those rare games, like Elden Ring, like the Soulsborne series, that it not only respects the players and how they navigate everything. It doesn’t have markers everywhere and stuff like that. But the game also, oddly, what I’ve noticed is it respects itself. Like it knows… At least with the developers and the artistic way of doing things, it knows what it’s trying to do. And it doesn’t go above and beyond. You compare that to the worst Ubisoft titles. And it’s just… It’s like this mess of just unasked for guidance. And it’s almost insulting to what the game… To the game’s narrative, to the writing, the writing people behind the scenes and developing companies and stuff like that. And a lot of games aren’t made like that. I’m a big gamer. And games like Elden Ring, like Dark Souls, like Disco Elysium, I really like. I like games that allow themselves to exist, simply. [chuckle]

0:19:39.4 Peter Suderman: To the extent that there is an inducement, it’s the murder mystery. It’s that you wanna sort of solve the story. And yet even there, so much of the information you get is not obviously in service of the story. And I think even… It’s fair to say that as you progress, a lot of it is just sort of like interesting stuff that you encounter that adds a huge amount of appealing texture to the world, but ultimately isn’t like, “Here’s the clue,” that you then decode and then provides the answer or at least the next step. Some of the information you get is sort of along those lines, is a little bit more of like a traditional detective story clue. But a lot of it is just like, “Man, what are these guys thinking? And why?”

0:20:27.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it strikes to me, a lot of the influences that this game has, it kind of wears on its sleeve. But one that I don’t see listed a lot, but totally jumps out to me as we talk about it, is it seems more like a Cohen brothers movie than anything. It has this sort of Fargo vibe, the absurd, very sort of dark farce going on at the same time. All these clues and the very tightly woven plot, it very much strikes me like that.

0:20:55.2 Peter Suderman: You can totally imagine their version of this in which the detective… The drunk detective wakes up and doesn’t know who he is or anything about himself, and stumbles through an inverted detective story where none of the clues actually really work. And then that’s the… Yeah, that’s a very good reference point.

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0:21:18.5 Landry Ayres: Peter, something else you said jumps out at me, and it makes me very, very curious, you talked about there is no better way to play. And these sort of different roots that you can take throughout this game based on your choices eventually lead you to the point where you have to lean into these ideologies that the game presents to you, the moralist, ultra-​liberal fascist, and is it communist?

0:21:48.3 Aaron Ross Powell: It’s communist.

0:21:48.4 Landry Ayres: Is communist the other one?

0:21:49.6 Peter Suderman: Yeah.

0:21:49.7 Landry Ayres: I believe so.

0:21:50.5 Ian Bennett: Yeah, they call themselves The Communards.

0:21:52.9 Landry Ayres: The Communards.

0:21:53.0 Ian Bennett: But yeah, it’s communism still. Yeah.

0:21:55.1 Landry Ayres: Right. And mechanically, it does seem in a Ludonarrative sense, like we talked about. There is no better way to play. But a lot of the reception to this game I have read and seen, it’s been called pro-​communist, which I don’t necessarily buy. But I don’t also… I do get a sense that it does come off as anti-​capitalist or at least anti ultra-​liberal or moralist, which are two of the identities that are presented in this, which… Because you’ve got the conflict overarching in the world of Elysium, that you have this failed somewhat revolution, and the remnants of this sort of communist community that are resisting the moralist and ultra-​liberal forces that are trying to come in. But does the game come down on one side, even outside of plot events that happen, but via the mechanics and the world-​building about ideology? Is there a right way to play, a best way? Where does the game land on those types of questions?

0:23:14.5 Peter Suderman: So I don’t think the game comes down on one side or the other. I guess what I think it does is, in some ways, it critiques and tries to deflate all of the ideologies. But it is particularly harsh on the ideologies that it portrays as more extreme. And extremism in this game is often seen as something a little bit… Is often portrayed in a somewhat more negative light. And I think it’s telling that in many ways, the most appealing character in this game, the most decent character is Kim Kitsuragi, who is your partner character, and basically is just there to… As a gameplay function, Kim is there to keep things moving and keep you on track to the extent that that is possible. But also he’s there to remind you that there is decency in the world. And his decency is really important to this game because it doesn’t rely on him being an extremely ideological person. That’s not ultimately why he is good. He’s not good because he’s like a hard core communist. He’s also not good because he’s not a hardcore… A Three Marketer type. He is somebody who is decent to other people. And it is essential, small interpersonal decency, as well as the fact that part of that means he’s the one character who just consistently helps you, the player character, out.

0:24:48.8 Peter Suderman: So to me, if I wanna say that this game sides with anything, it’s against ideological extremism and in favor of small interpersonal decency. And that’s not like a… The game doesn’t have an ideology that’s present, that’s like small interpersonal decency that’s what you can choose. And yet there is… Like you can often choose to be better or worse. And what the game just sort of shows us, is that like goodness comes from those small moments and from Kim-​like decency.

0:25:23.7 Ian Bennett: Yeah, I think I might almost flip this in a way. ‘Cause that makes sense. On the surface, I think it’s… There is sort of a constructive narrative where it seems like they’re trying to deconstruct extremist ideologies. And I kind of had that idea for the longest time. But I think the more I thought about it, I think actually almost what the game does is… And I think I’d imagine… I’ve done a little bit of research with the writers and stuff like that, like the Estonian. And they are a bunch of… I think they are a bunch of essentially very left-​wing sort of like what we would call in today’s world, Blackpilled communist, kind of. But that’s kind of important. But I think what they’re almost doing in the game that I think is really smart, is they’re actually ironically showing the extremism of every ideology within the game. So it kinda… At least me being kind of a theory nerd, it reminds me a little bit of… Slavoj Zizek talks a little bit about this, about how… Especially in his book, Violence, how…

0:26:34.2 Ian Bennett: The concept of extremism is very, very hard to map because it’s only in relation… Extremism is different among a certain established order. And our world being kind of a liberal democracy, we’re all Western liberals. But something that can be easy to forget, ironically, is how even historically, liberal democracy was very radical at one point. And then even in today’s context, there has to be radical steps taken to ensure liberal democracy. And that can exist in a number of ways. We might say in the past, imperialism or war or stuff of that nature, austerity perhaps. I think I definitely was landing there as well. I was like, “This game is absolutely destroying every political ideology in very smart ways.” And it does. But it almost… I think it almost paints ideology in general as something that is so extreme. Because it’s so almost like absent from us, like a very communal nature of human beings. ‘Cause kind of what… I don’t know if you guys got this. That’s kind of what the game sort of does to me. It’s like you interact with people on such a human level. Politics is always there. But it’s always like some weird mask. For example, the fascist guy, Gary the Cryptofascist, he’s like this kind of insecure sort of… I don’t know if that makes sense. He’s like this insecure, bothered guy.

0:28:05.7 Ian Bennett: I know if you press him on his fascism, he kind of like, “Oh well, you know.” And then Harry is obviously absolutely distraught from his ex-​wife and a lot of the hardships he’s gone through. And it’s like the game pierces through those ideological veils. And it gets at a very human level. Everyone in that game is like a very real person. And I almost feel like the sort of narrative point to me was showcasing the extremity of ideology as a whole, maybe.

0:28:40.0 Aaron Ross Powell: But I think it does present that extremity, as you said, like a mask for underlying very human feelings. And I was struck. I never got any of the four political vision quests that were added in the director’s cut. Because I guess I never committed enough to a particular ideology to trigger one. But they’re on YouTube. And I was watching them.

0:29:02.9 Peter Suderman: Very suspicious.

0:29:04.7 Aaron Ross Powell: And the fascism one, I think is the best one from that human perspective. Because it is all about… It’s not defending fascism. Nothing in it makes fascism look better. But it’s ultimately just very empathetic to the kind of people who end up in fascist ideologies. So there’s the Gary, the Cryptofascist. But there’s just this sense of underlying sadness and lack of meaning that drags into this. And I love… There’s the line in there. I think it’s Measurehead says it to you, where it’s talking about fascism. Because you’re trying to figure out if there’s a way to travel back in time. It’s the crux of the quest. And someone has told you that fascism… These fascist people have figured out time travel. And Harry just dives head first into that possibility. And ultimately what you get out of Measurehead, is he says that fascism is time travel. Because the line he uses is, “He who clings to the past controls the future.” And that’s this kind of getting at this deep lack at the center of the fascist psychology of just like, “I wanna control the future. But all I have is this imagined reactionary past.” And it comes away deeply sad.

0:30:23.5 Aaron Ross Powell: And that’s the general sense I get. Even the communists, their revolution failed. And we don’t have the full story of how it failed. It seems to be just kind of a overwhelming force. But when you find the Deserter at the end, at the Sea Fortress, you find the murderer, who it turns out is just kind of a guy who got left over from that revolution and just hung out by himself on this island after being… Did he run away or he was left for dead? I don’t remember for sure. But it’s just this deep sense of sadness that the Revolution was an attempt to take these extremist ideologies that we held on to, then we build our belief around and operationalize them in the world, to make the world conform to our ideology. And it failed. And it just destroyed this guy to the extent that he spent decades hanging out by himself, by a campfire on a cold and windy island, watching people have lives in the city.

0:31:24.9 Ian Bennett: Yeah, I definitely think at the forefront, and how they approached the sort of ideological commentary, especially the fascism and communism, is it’s just like an utter destruction of political futures. That’s something that if you read a lot of contemporary critical theory, it’s almost trying to examine that sort of extremely depressed nature and how we approach the future. There’s a lot of critical theories, is relatively left-​wing. And a lot of theory that’s made in the 21st century or written or even stuff post the sort of neoliberal revolutions we saw in the ’80s. It’s such a grappling of what to do with the future. So one of the most popular theorist right now, I’d argue, is sort of Mark Fisher. And that’s his entire thing, it’s like grappling with art and media and how do we envision an actual future. Disco Elysium does that, I think, with the communist and the fascist, and in some respects sort of like the moralist or the ultra-​liberals. It’s just almost not to the same extent, I would say. And I think that’s almost reflective of the developers, I would imagine. ‘Cause I believe the developers come actually from like a pretty left-​wing progressive extent. But it’s very smart. Because they acknowledge that every sort of left-​wing endeavor has monumentally failed. And in many respects, I would completely agree with that, in reality.

0:32:58.0 Ian Bennett: But the game also reflects that. So it’s like this extreme dark depression. But it tries to get to the kernel of humanity underneath.

0:33:09.5 Peter Suderman: This is a game that does a better job than almost any other piece of fiction I can think of, of capturing the contingency of governments and social order. And it is a game that, unlike basically every other story and virtually all political discourse, does not treat politics and government as something that exists inherently, or at least particular forms of it. What it does is it says that the form comes out of what people choose and what they do, and the coalitions and associations that they sort of make for themselves, and it all ends up being… It ends up working in this messy muddle, but it’s not something that someone just sort of… It’s not designed really all that much, it just comes out of a lot of atomized interactions, and it’s also… It’s not stable. It’s not this thing that you’re always… In some ways, it’s sort of a game that does say that politics is always around us, and a lens through which we are… Through which all of our interactions are taking place, at the same time it’s also… There’s this perception in so much western political commentary that governments are always here and always going to organize a lot of our lives.

0:34:45.4 Peter Suderman: And this game sort of says, “Well, they kinda do, but only just because people perpetuate them all the time.” And they perpetuate these different forms of them, and it’s just like… The particular way that I think this expresses itself most is just with the policing situation, where you have these police who have been given limited powers in another district, come down to this district, but there’s conflict because the local union expects to basically do their own policing to some extent, and it’s like, “Well, do police have authority here? I mean, someone says they do, but that doesn’t actually mean that they have any authority, and that doesn’t mean… ” It’s a system that is contingent upon other people accepting it. And the game often sort of extrapolates from there and says, “All of these systems, every single system of social order and organization, they’re all contingent on enough people accepting and choosing to work within them and all of these… ” And that’s what ideology is, but that’s also just like institutional social organization, from unions to corporations, to literally the bar that you wake up in. The bar hotel is itself a kind of political social institution within this game and within this town. It serves as a hub of information, a gathering point, all of these things, it plays a function. But it’s self-​organized. And this is a game about how people self-​organize often in conflict with each other.

[music]

0:36:21.0 Aaron Ross Powell: Arguably the happiest people that we meet in this game, but the best… The ones who just seem to be the most content or excited about their current state or the world are the dice maker, who just is this completely pleasant and serine and just seems to love what she’s doing, and then our hardcore guys starting their disco. And so out of all of the people, the happiest are the ones who are just starting or running their own businesses. And the only other entrepreneur that I think we meet is the bookstore owner.

0:37:04.5 Peter Suderman: The pawn shop owner.

0:37:04.6 Aaron Ross Powell: Oh, the pawn shop owner, yeah. But it does seem that these people who are just kind of are focusing on their own thing and creating this thing…

0:37:11.5 Peter Suderman: And there’s that other little storefront where you can get chemicals over by the [0:37:16.2] ____.

0:37:17.0 Aaron Ross Powell: Right, but that’s just a clerk. That’s the bored teenager, that’s not… She’s not the person who started that store. But it does seem like these people who just are starting… The entrepreneurs are the happiest people.

0:37:29.6 Landry Ayres: I’m curious about the hardcore people specifically, because I wonder if they consider… ‘Cause I don’t know if they would consider themselves entrepreneurs though, so much as like community leaders. They wanna create a gathering place where people can listen to music and dance, but I don’t know if they would necessarily wanna charge for that type of thing, or if they just want to blare hardcore to the mega music and invite people to dance the whole time. Just the one exception I can see to that.

0:38:00.0 Ian Bennett: Yeah. I think it’s almost… The people that are happiest in those entrepreneur-​type positions is it’s almost like they have imagination. I feel like this game is just there is a world where the revolutions have been crushed, political futures have been decimated to the point where imagination just doesn’t really work anymore. Hope is just… It’s not really a tangible thing. And it can’t be, except if you do the things that you sort of enjoy, like make dice and you just think simply and think small. And then you do really weird stuff, like the hardcore people who just wanna fuck around and make music or listen to music and just do dumb stuff. It’s kind of funny, it’s kind of beautiful, but yeah… [chuckle]

0:38:53.7 Landry Ayres: Like you said, “Imagination,” some of the people that have hope, that are persistent… And while they may not fully appreciate what’s going on, there is some hope and happiness in the crypto zoologist and his wife who pursue something that one of them, if not both of them, in some part of their mind acknowledges is probably not real in searching for the Insulindian Phasmid, which becomes this kind of magical realist.

0:39:24.7 Landry Ayres: Almost love, crafty and entity that you encounter at the end of the game that you find out has literally been influencing the sniper over on the sea fort, but this imagination that they have this… It animates them and gives purpose to their life outside of politics, and it’s like this weird moment of joy and sort of zaniness that we get in the midst of all of this, I don’t think either of them discuss any politics with you at all, if I recall Gary, the crypto-​fascist is with the crypto-​zoologist, but they’re not really discussing that much, and there is a bit of… It seems bleak at times, and you end up sort of thinking that maybe it doesn’t exist at all, but then it shows up right at the end.

0:40:20.9 Landry Ayres: But you get this weird conflicted… It’s a sense of hope because none of the conflict amongst these people matters in the grand scale of the natural world that has existed long before any of these people, but it is also bleak in that aspect, so it is kind of nihilistic in a way, but depending on how you take it… I was just really curious because the Insulindian Phasmid made me feel a lot of things, but I didn’t come down with a clear answer from the end, and like that, and the presence of the pale and the sort of magical realist elements going on in the world, were much more interesting to me than any of the political conversations, as interesting as they were, but we only get this sliver of them, so I was really curious what other people thought about those aspects of the game.

0:41:20.6 Peter Suderman: I guess the most interesting thing to me was how, in some ways, uninterested the game was in them, just because this is a fictional universe in which that sort of thing exists like and so in the way that we don’t question the existence of Rhinoceroses, ’cause they just seem normal to us, even though… Like if Rhinoceroses did not exist, and suddenly you saw one running across the plane, you’d be like, “What in the hell is that crazy fantasy creature? Why is Guillermo Del Toro directing my life?” And yeah, and we’re just like, “It’s a Rhino. It’s kind of neat. I’ll go to a zoo and sea Rhino, but I’m not that excited by one, and I don’t really feel the need to learn the deep history of how they got here, ’cause they’re just Rhinoceroses,” the game’s treats its magical realist elements, I think, in that way.

0:42:09.8 Ian Bennett: Isn’t that kind of… I thought it kind of exactly like that with Disco Elysium a little bit, especially with the Phasmid, is that kind of similar to our own world, I think sometimes I think we can be a little bit too dogmatic in how we look at really weird things, like things we might think that are oddly like, I don’t know, paranormal or we don’t have… I feel like the world’s weird, right? The world’s really, really weird. I think… I really disagree. I think Friedrich Nietzsche said that, “The world is bland and every weird thing that happens, there’s an explanation that’s really boring, and only whenever you understand the boring nature of the world is whenever the world can ironically be interesting,” and I kind of take the reversal.

0:42:53.1 Ian Bennett: I kinda take the reversal of that, I actually ironically think the world is really, really weird, and I still think there’s still stuff… This is kind of, I guess, why I’m in to philosophy, in general, because it’s sort of an endeavour into the weird stuff that might be. But that can exist within quantum mechanics. When you really read about physicists, they’re… Constantly, there’s a debate about what really exists within a certain type within String theory, or they’re like… There’s these theories that are scientifically concrete, but they’re also kind of not, and they’ll conflict with each other and they’re just like, “Man, I don’t know what’s going on here,” and I can’t help but think that might actually be an actual metaphysical reinterpretation of our own world in some respects, like the pale or something like that.

0:43:48.7 Peter Suderman: Just on the happiness question, my understanding is that the game makers started this after periods of failure and depression involving long periods of abusive relationship with alcohol, and that this game came to some extent out of dark periods in their own lives, and so I would imagine that if they were imbuing this game with some of their own values that like part of what they realized out of this, it seems to suggest, is that the thing you do to pull yourself out of a dark place is to make something that is wonderful and weird, and share it with the world and hope that other people respond, and as it turned out, they did.

0:44:37.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more pop and lock content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like a philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. And please rate and review us if you like the show, we look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, and is produced by me, Landry Ayres. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.