#11: Dancing on Our Own
A guest post by Fred Maynard about the perfect escape of the game Disco Elysium has provided this year.
“Is Disco Elysium judging me, the player, calling me out? Yes, and I agree with it completely.” - Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Judicial Opinions
‘Mindless escape’ is a tricky phrase when it comes to videogames, a trickiness that the pandemic year has brought into neat relief. Mindlessness is the traditional criticism of games for good reason, which is that it has an element of truth. Games do allow us to simply sink hours into meaningless tasks, pursuing those dopamine hits from the arbitrarily increasing numbers of scores, fortunes, kill counts, experience points. I have always considered playing games something to be guilty about, not because it is a ‘guilty pleasure’ but because the waste of time without gaining any enlightenment or enrichment seemed criminal.
Yet the option of spending endless hours doing a nothing that feels to the body and mind like a something has been a lifesaver in a year where ‘nothing’ has been the word that has come to dominate people’s lives. Four billion people were locked down at the height of the pandemic. Uncountable millions were furloughed or fired. Days upon days of nothing stretched before us. And for millions, the mindless escape of games was the balm that kept giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, because that is what they are designed to do. Marx said religion was the opium of the masses, but he didn’t mean that as a criticism. Opium isn’t fun; it’s a painkiller.
It is odd, having said that, that this year marked the first time I played a videogame as good as a novel, and that pressed the same buttons in my head. I don’t believe that Disco Elysium is something that can be easily replicated, and nor should it be. The tortuous story of its creation - full of alcoholism, depression, failed Estonian prog bands and disappointing debut novels - could make a novel of its own. And in any case, games don’t need to be novels. They have their own function. Ecstatic though its critical reception in 2019 was, Disco Elysium is not the fabled moment when games learned to be art. Its significance and uniqueness is greater than that.
I’m not reviewing the game here, as that has been done by many far more qualified than me. In the Critmas spirit I would to recommend the extraordinary 70 minute video essay on the game by Noah Caldwell-Gervais, which takes the politics, the pain and the painterly art-style of the game extremely seriously and in so doing produces a genuinely beautiful bit of criticism. It does, though, have many spoilers in it, which is another reason I won’t review the game. It is a whodunit, and a fine addition to the canon at that, and it is almost impossible to talk about a whodunit without gouging out the very spine of what makes the genre work.
I would simply like to recommend it to those who don’t play games and won’t have a clue what to expect. It may have worked for me because it plays all my particular favourite thematic hits: regret, ageing, moral torpor, and political disillusion (and returning to Marx for a moment, he features in the gameworld as Kras Mazov, a long dead figure with bits of Lenin and Salvador Allende thrown in. Caldwell-Gervais points out in his review that anyone who considers themself apolitical when playing games will find themselves maddeningly drawn back to Mazov over and over, just as no matter how dead enlightened types think his ideas may be today, they will have to contend with Marx anyway).
Yet I think it will work for anyone who enjoys a good story, this year of all years. The heart of the game is about the insufficiency of every solution we can muster to the chaos of life. ‘Everything we were told about communism was false; everything we were told about capitalism was true’ is now the mantra of the post-communist world. And whatever approach you adopt in the game, as a ruthless libertarian egoist, as a rock-ribbed communard, as a mushy centrist liberal, or just as someone whose empathy and contrition leaves them to apologise loudly for themselves and the world - nothing makes any headway against the roll of a dice and the lethargy of human society.
The format of a videogame gives you the ability to feel this repeated, multifaceted failure of every option in a way a single novelistic protagonist cannot. The potential failure of every possible approach is going to continue to be resonant in 2021 as we try to remain chipper in the face of what is coming. Because the game also presents an option, at almost every turn, that absolves you of responsibility - that of disco. You can always pick the disco option, which simply embraces the moment, the fun, the music, the chaos, even in this gritty murder investigation at the end of the world. It is mindless. And it is that option that may save us when the time comes for dancing together again.