Why does Disco Elysium let you be racist?
I knew right from the beginning what I wanted to do for my second playthrough of Disco Elysium: I wanted to be a fascist meathead.
When I shared this intention with my friends, they were horrified. Why would you want to roleplay a racist thug? Especially now, at a movement when there are so many of them taking more and more positions of power — why would that be fun? Why would a game even let you do that?
These are, of course, fair questions, especially considering the video game industry’s especially poor track record of handling important issues, both in game and out. For example: just as I began my second playthrough of Disco Elysium, a video game company sponsored an event where members of the media could pretend to shoot actors dressed in stereotypical depictions of muslims (yes, really). It’s bad enough when games like this always choose brown people with muslim-sounding names for villains, but they don’t stop there. The video game hegemony, especially the notorious and mammoth Call of Duty franchise, maintain that there’s nothing political about this choice. Video games, on the whole, often contain some of entertainment’s plainest examples of racism while using a misunderstood doctrine of “apoliticism” to try to avoid having to confront that racism and its implications.
Against this backdrop, it makes sense to hear that Disco Elysium contains depictions of racism and be… skeptical. If it were most other games, the end result would probably be pretty ugly. But, Disci Elysium is not (just) a game that happens to contain racism (or Politics more generally), it’s a game that actively chooses to stop and interrogate a wide range of political or social beliefs (both “good” and “bad), their sources, and their meanings.
Pt. 1: “Craniometric Perfection”
At the beginning of the game, you’ve trying to meet with the head of the local dockworker’s union. You’ve been told can the union boss can help you investigate the central murder mystery and help you recover some of your missing memory. But in order to reach the union boss, you have to get through a door that’s blocked by a towering behemoth of a man named Measurehead.
Measurehead is an unabashed bigot obsessed with phrenology (get it?) and, according to his hierarchy, the features of your character’s face mark you as degenerate. The game presents a few different options for getting past Measurehead, but because I modeled my first character after my real-world self — lefty politics, skill points dumped into intellect and psyche, body like a dry noodle (you know, the one that snaps easily) — my only option was talking to this creature.
After much taunting, Measurehead agreed to let me pass on one condition — I had to study his racist philosophy. And to make sure I wasn’t just thoughtlessly repeating his own hateful words, Measurehead wanted me to come back and tell him something new I’d learned about racism.
In the mechanics of Disco Elysium, your character can “internalize” various thoughts or philosophies. Many of these ideas are political (including versions of nationalism, liberalism, marxism, centrism, and feminism), though just as many are delightfully absurd (such as the belief that you’re an artistic super-star, or the harbinger of the apocalypse). Thinking these thoughts, though, takes time. Internalizing Measurehead’s philosophy required a time commitment of a few in-game hours and would leave the theory ingrained in the limited space of my character’s “thought cabinet.”
On this first playthrough, where I was trying to play a decent person, this wasn’t exactly an attractive offer. But, I was too weak and slow to beat Measurehead in a physical contest, so this was my only option for progression. I reluctantly went along, but I didn’t want to leave this hateful thought permanently ingrained in my character’s brain, so I spent a limited skill-point to unlearn it. Thanks to thoughtful, heart-felt writing, this scene was challenging and surprisingly funny (when else have you ever seen something like that in a game!).
While most games avoid explicitly addressing race, all are full of mirror-like reflections of our own beliefs and biases. This interaction with Measurehead showed that Disco Elysium doesn’t shy away from the hard conversations, instead using them to comment on the real world. Disco Elysium plays to its strengths as a game, forcing you to mechanically interact with the idea that good people still can pick up bad ideas, and that unlearning those ideas takes effort. Hopefully your job will never require you to study phrenology to appease a militant racist, but we all live everyday in a system that confronts us — willingly or not, consciously or not — with all manner of racism (and sexism, and on and on).
Disco Elysium is by no means the first game to pull a trick like this, to use game systems to explore artistic themes. But — it’s a short list of games that have done it in pursuit of so explicitly political an end, and have done it so successfully.
As I finally passed Measurehead and entered the union’s headquarters, I was left wondering how the game would have responded if I’d held onto that racist thought. Just like my character had done with Measurehead’s ideas, I took that question and internalized it in my real-life thought cabinet. The breakthrough came in the next interaction, with the union boss.
Pt. 2: Wait, the union’s a villain?
In another game, your conversation with Evrart Claire would be fully telegraphed as a boss battle. His name would pop up over a massive health bar across the bottom of the screen. It’s subtler in Disco Elysium, but only a little. There’s still a long, dramatic approach to Claire’s “boss arena” through the union headquarters. Your conversation with Claire is physically and mentally taxing for your character and presents several opportunities for “Game Over.”
Claire presents as friendly, but it takes just a few dialogue boxes to see through the veneer. Claire is the type of union boss that every union-busting campaign puts on its posters. He’s selfish, corrupt, ruthless — and he doesn’t appreciate outside authority presenting a challenge to his stranglehold on power.
Some have interpreted details like Claire’s villainy as evidence of the game’s shameful fence-sitting, as a different flavor of COD’s political denialism. Disco Elysium wants to be political and presents a full spectrum of political beliefs but is afraid to actually pick one, or so the critique goes. After all, why would a game that’s otherwise fairly leftist include make a union your primary antagonist? In both the real world and the game’s world, labor unions represent the type of decentralized power that leftists purportedly value. Does the game want you to sympathize with its union’s aspirational slogan (“Every worker a member of the board!”) or does it want you to see that as a naked power grab by a corrupt goon? In the context of mainstream gaming’s resistance to “taking a side” and aversion to earnestness, it’s understandable that some would mistake this nuance for hedging.
This read misses the mark. Rather than undermining the game’s fundamental critique of power systems, the “boss battle’ with Claire is a clever example of those politics in action. Labor unions are among the most historically successful examples of large-scale shift toward people power, but these unions don’t fully destroy power centralization and instead themselves create a new centralization of power. They take the single-axis workplace power system (where power comes from the employer) and replace it with a two-axis system (where it is shared between the employer and union). A good union will use that centralized power in service of workers’ interests — a radical act, to be sure, but still a radical act performed by a new centralization of power. As such, a union is vulnerable to the same abuses of power as any other nexus. Or, in the parlance of the leftists, “a union boss is still a boss.”
This is the true meaning of Evrart Claire. By positioning the corrupt union boss Claire as a villain, Disco Elysium forces the attentive player to consider subtle, uncomfortable nuances of power and politics. [The game pokes fun at leftistism in other, more-direct ways too. My personal favorite is that the description for the game’s marxist philosophy acknowledges that only 0.000% of the idea has actually ever been translated to reality.]
There’s a tendency at this point to throw a(n admittedly deserved) neg toward the medium by observing “wow, that’s awfully deep for a video game.” While true, this observation misses the point. The heights of Disco Elysium’s first chapter are only possible because of the polyamorous marriage of theme, plot, character, and interactive mechanics. Disco Elysium isn’t a good story that happens to be a video game; it uses the unique possibilities of its medium to make its points in a way that only a video game ever could. Right out of the gate, Disco Elysium establishes itself as a unique virtuosic artistic achievement built upon a foundation of honest philosophical inquiry.
If Disco Elysium is so willing to challenge its sympathetic ideals, how does it approach the unsympathetic ones? Perhaps more importantly, now that the game has your trust, does it squander that trust?
Enter: my fascie meathead.
Pt 3: Why would any game let you be evil in the first place?
Okay I lied, before we get to my fascie meathead, we need to stop for a quick “side quest.” To answer my titular question of “Why does Disco Elysium let you be racist?” we first must ask a pair of broader questions: Why should any game portray racism at all? Why would any (non-racist) game let you choose racism?
If a game wants to examine racism (as Disco Elysium clearly does), it will clearly need to represent racism in-game somehow. After all, anti-racist art is not art without racism (which would only recreate our beloved colorblind fallacy), but rather art that critiques racism . That doesn’t mean, however, that all anti-racist games must (or should) offer racist options to the player. The interactive nature of games offers new pitfalls for an anti-racist work to avoid.
This general problem, though, is not unique to games. Other media have navigated the problem for centuries. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (aka Lilith’s Brood) — my all-time favorite book, by the way — is a broadly anti-hierarchical, anti-hegemonic masterpiece of fiction. Among other things, the book explores how racist systems dehumanize the people they subjugate. And to do this, Butler created a creepy alien species that not-so-accidentally does a new, more-ambitious colonialism to humanity. Here, the racists are firmly positioned in an unsympathetic, antagonist role and, while some readers may think their tentacles are “cool,” the book doesn’t let you see the story through the aliens’ eyes.
Of course, games work differently than books. Specifically, a traditional novel offers a fixed look at a fixed narrative. Games, on the other hand, are interactive, meaning they allow far more options for presenting narratives.
Despite that freedom, some games still choose a linear narrative structure. One such game, which quietly happens to be my favorite game of all time, is Caves of Qud. Though the player has almost unlimited options for building their character and completing the game’s objectives, the story is largely immutable. One of the consequences of that decision by the developers is that the player doesn’t get to choose which faction to join. To progress the story, every character, regardless of background, ends up playing for the same team.
There are still other factions, however, including a bunch of religious zealots who want to exterminate all mutants (oh yeah, there are mutants and it’s the far, far post-nuclear future and maybe we’re all aliens? its unclear). You can choose to play as a human or a mutant and, though you join one of several in-game factions, you cannot choose to play as the genocidal zealots. No matter what you do, the weird cult is always positioned as “other,” as with Butler’s space-colonial aliens.
Some in the Caves of Qud community are upset by this choice, vocally complaining that Caves of Qud’s developers are “all “furry communists” on the development team are “censoring” their “free-speech” “right” to play as weird-scifi Nazi crusaders. But, rather than engage with the political substance and implications of Qud’s choice, the critics instead choose to lament “politics being brought into video games.”
Developers could make the reverse of Freehold’s decision — that is, allow players to make key choices throughout the narrative. For decades, roleplaying games have had some form of a “good” and “evil” system, allowing the player to pick their moral alignment. Some have tried to wrestle with the implications of those systems, but more common by far are the games trying to cling to the veneer of “apoliticism.”
Even better than the ubiquitous case of Call of Duty, the moral alignment systems make clear the flaws of “apoliticism.” By virtue of its interactive nature, a game could still textually reject racism while accidentally supporting it mechanically ( ̶I̶ ̶b̶e̶l̶i̶e̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶r̶n̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶”̶l̶u̶d̶o̶n̶a̶r̶r̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶s̶o̶n̶a̶n̶c̶e̶”̶). If being a racist removed obstacles from the game, in effect serving as an “easy mode,” then the game would be encouraging racism (and clearly we don’t want pro-racist art!).
Perhaps the most famous examples of this come from Star Wars games such as Knights of the Old Republic, which often let the player choose between Jedi and Sith paths. These systems became notorious for, intentionally or not, incentivizing the Sith path through more-exciting rewards (force lightning, anyone?). Meanwhile the original Mass Effect trilogy labeled their axes “Paragon” and “Renegade” in an attempt to justify the protagonist’s continued role as “hero” and military leader (this system famously resulted in such uninteresting choices that virtually no one chose the “bad” options).
The Star Wars and Mass Effect examples both reflect (some of) the problems gaming’s historical refusal to engage with its politics. Many have explored how these game systems fail purely from a game design perspective (much better than I ever could), but it’s worth noting that solving the mechanical issues doesn’t necessarily solve the narrative and artistic issues. Disco Elysium tacks a rare course into the wind of politics, creating a unique opportunity to address this second class of issues.
Disco Elysium, as a computer roleplaying game out of the “old-school” tradition (think: Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and oldschool Fallout, through Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect to more-recent entries like Dragon Age), clearly has a respect for the history of the genre. But like all true respect, it is grounded in understandings both of what worked in that history and of where improvement is needed.
Much has been written about how Disco Elysium updated the dialogue-driven character exploration of Planescape: Torment. While Planescape: Torment similarly offered the player great moral freedom, it was much more explicit than Disco Elysium in confronting your character with the consequences of his bad actions from before the start of the game. If a player still chooses to do bad, those choices become a cynical answer to the game’s central question (see: option 15 in Figure 6).
As we’ll see Disco Elysium iterates on this legacy in a unique and thought-provoking way. Even if we choose to mirror the game’s decision to ignore the implications of serving as a police officer under a flawed and unjust decision, there were clearly places where Disco Elysium could have gone further or been clearer in its exploration of its political themes. But, on the whole, it’s hard to see Disco Elysium as anything other than a monumental achievement, an unprecedented artistic masterstroke. Few games have ever found such success (critically or commercially) pursuing Disco Elysium’s goals, especially its face-first dive into politics.
Anyway, so now: enter my fascie meathead. For real this time.
Pt. 4: My fascie meathead
Even though Disco Elysium earned a pretty long leash for the reasons explored above, I’ll admit that I still had some uncertainty as I went through character creation. Even if a game wasn’t actively desiring to be racist, the option of even a single nativist line seems like a one-way ticket down the slippery slope to edgelord. How could the game still be earnest, be honest, be kind, while allowing its player to be the opposite?
Well, let’s start again with our old friend Measurehead. This time around, we were both “free-thinking” muscle-slabs, so I expected to have no problem winning his approval. Measurehead felt differently. Sure, I’d traded the ideas in my head, but I could change the features on my head, and that’s what truly matters to a racist. Just as he had the first time, Measurehead took one look at my character and assigned him to a low-middle rung on an imagined racial hierarchy. No matter how enthusiastically I agreed with his bizarre racial declarations, Measurehead still deemed me degenerate.
While there’s plenty of real-world history to philosophically justify this interaction (fascists have been plenty willing, after all, to form alliances when out of power and then “purify” their coalition after taking power), the larger importance of this moment is mechanical. This outcome was determined by the “ludo-“ (or gameplay) needs shaping the “narrative” realities. The need to avoid the “racist easy mode” trap backed the game into the narrative decision of the player-character’s race.
But because of the pre-determined, immutable assignment of the character race feels somewhat arbitrary, the exchange with Measurehead feels somewhat empty or forced. After all, plenty of would-be racists are lucky enough to be born into the race that their racist pals have determined is “superior.” If Disco Elysium is going to honestly critique racism, it’s going to need to do more.
Fortunately, it does.
After I’d selected a few dialogue options about the need to preserve the nation of “Revachol for Revacholians,” the game presented me with the thought of Revacholian nationalism. Naturally that was right up my fascie’s ally. Just like every other thought in the game, the nationalism thought, once fully internalized, provided a boost to certain statistics. Unlike those other thoughts, the boost from nationalism was negative. Now, every time I chose a nationalist line for my character, I took one point of damage to “morale.” Elsewhere, damage to in-game morale health stands in for any number of mental displeasure: embarrassment, insecurity, sadness, and so on. This was a serious problem since my all-brawn character had only 2 points of morale health, meaning that saying a nationalism would put me one bad dice roll away from “dying” mid-conversation.
The game had recognized that I had an inclination toward nationalism and had lured me in with the reward of a philosophy to internalize, one that would hopefully come with a stat perk! Clearly the thought served instead to punish and mechanically disincentivize nationalist dialogue, but it also suggests a pair of interesting narrative explanations.
I first came to a literal read of the mechanic, suggesting that the game is arguing that on the personal level nationalism hurts nationalists. Since good art uses characters as stand-ins for larger ideas, this could be extrapolated to the societal level: nationalism is self-defeating. Being anti-immigrant actually hurts the country that the nationalist supposedly wants to “defend.” This, of course, matches the research-backed leftist worldview that diversity strengthens society.
On its own, this would be a decent avenue of critique of nationalism, but it’s ultimately not (fully) a leftist critique of nationalism. Rejecting nationalism because it’s bad for nationalists is still prioritizing the well-being of the nationalists. What if nationalism actually helps nationalists? What if we found out that inhumane border policies actually improve the economy (or whatever it is that nationalists care about)? Should we be willing to accept a society that prioritizes some at the expense of others? No, we should seek a society that seeks to uplift all. A better leftist critique would be that we must reject nationalism because it’s bad for society as a whole.
The more I played, though, the more I saw another interpretation. Namely, this mechanic explores how ideologies of hate perpetuate cycles of pain, Just as many great works of art have highlighted violence’s cycles of self-perpetuation. Nationalism takes pain as an input, and produces pain as output, both on the personal and societal levels.
Let me explain. Disco Elysium’s protagonist is canonically a dumpster fire, regardless of what choices the player makes (ed. note: perhaps this is a record for the longest anyone has talked about the game before making this observation that’s basically central to the game’s advertising copy). The main character is a depressed alcoholic whose wife tossed him out and whose colleagues openly ridicule. Though he’s a good detective, he’s been such an unreliable jerk that he’s burned all the bridges in his life. If the player chooses to try to make good decisions and be a kind person, the game frames these choices as turning his life around (or, “changing the nature of a man,” to borrow a clearly inspirational phrase). Or instead, the player can choose what I chose the second time through the game: to fall deeper into misery.
Some of the impacts of choosing to be a fascist meathead are pretty straightforward, though. In particular: you’ll lose the respect of your partner — Lt. Kim Kitsuragi — the one person who still believes in you. Kitsuragi, while still having a few character flaws of his own, is the brightest beacon of light and humanity in the game, giving you unearned second chances and gently nudging you in the right direction. Even when he’s not directly on the receiving end of your misbehavior, he will let you know when you’ve disappointed him. For me (and most people, I’d imagine) this was actually the hardest part of doing a “bad” playthrough. Eventually the game started damaging my health for saying bad things, but it was easy enough to keep a stock of healing items on hand. Sadly, though, those in-game morale boosters had no effect on the real-world morale damage of knowing I’d hurt Kitsuragi’s (virtual) feelings.
So back to the nationalism. Presumably, my character (in-universe) is saying these things because he believes them, because he wants to advance these ideas and hopes to find reward and validation through their pursuit. Out-of-universe, I eventually kept choosing these dialogue options out of a sense of stubbornness. It became a sense of perverse pride to willingly choose an action I knew would hurt me and not actually provide any mechanical benefits (as far as I could tell). Indeed, the more nationalist ideas I put out into the (game) world, the worse things became for everybody.
Rather than confronting me with a logical refutation of the (il)logic of nationalism, this penalty mechanic ended up gamifying the cycles of misery that drive (and are produced by) ideologies of hate. The value I found here was not a deeper intellectual understanding of nationalism (something that could be more easily taught in any number of other genres or media), but an emotional understanding through a game’s unique opportunity for choice and consequence.
Still other possibilities present themselves. Perhaps the morale penalty is meant to represent the discouragement my character feels when espousing “Revacholian superiority” while seeing the sad truth of his rotting home. Perhaps the mechanic is simply a straight-forward slap on the wrist for doing bad things (this option is far too boring).
Pt. 5: tl;dr
Good art asks more questions than it answers. Good anti-racist art reaffirms our commitment to antiracism.
Anyway, why does Disco Elysium let you be racist? Because it wants to explore the origins, impacts, and flaws of hate. Because it wants to do what few role-playing games have done before, and embrace the philosophical consequences of allowing the player to choose an evil alignment. Because it’s a historically-profound piece of art.
