Reaching the Pale

18 Jun, 2020

Or: Connecting Player and Game in Disco Elysium

In 2019 the developer ZA/UM released the dialogue-based isometric roleplaying game Disco Elysium, in which you play an absolute disaster of a cop trying to solve a murder in the down-beaten city of Revachol. Its main appeal is, that your dialogue-choices can strongly shape what character the main protagonist is going to be: a man on the road to redemption or an absolute moral and professional failure.

To that effect, the game employs an often-used trope to start you off: the amnesiac hero.¹ Having our protagonist forget even the most basic concepts of life not only lends itself to witty and absurd writing, but also accomplishes an important storytelling trick: the feelings of the player and the character converge. To understand how that trick works, we have to look at what goes into experiencing a story like Disco Elysium in the first place.

Layers of Storytelling

I think that, for better or worse, video games are works of art and if we think about art, the audience has to be considered, as most theories about that subject. ² So, for the sake of investigating the topic in question, we can assume that there are two layers to the experience of art: On one hand there is you, the audience, and the physical and mental space you inhabit and build your identity in. The chair you sit in, the thoughts you have while you play the game etc. On the other hand there is the story, the art: what happens to the characters on the screen, what they say and do, how they look etc.

Most pieces of art, especially those that tell stories, try to connect these two layers at some point. They try to pull you in and get you to live inside the them, identify yourself with its characters or themes and attach yourself to them. But if art succeeds in this endeavor is entirely uncertain and depends on both you and the story. If you can’t find points to connect or if the story does not offer points that you can find, there is no connection made.

This is different, however, when the medium of the story is interactional in nature, like video games in general, but roleplaying games in paticular. Here you are assigned a character, taking their place (and role) in the story and influencing the decisions and actions they take in that story. The story can still fail to make its point or affect you emotionally. It can still be badly written and/ or executed. But a connection between player and story, between audience and art, is a systematic part of this medium of storytelling.

To achieve this connection there are a plethora of different techniques to employ. It can be argued that the controlling scheme (be it with controller, keyboard or touchscreen) is a first way to connect player and game on a tactile level. But for a game primarily constructed from text, literary tropes like the amnesiac hero in Disco Elysium take an important place in that toolbox of techniques.

The Amnesiac Hero in Disco Elysium

The main character in Disco Elysium is, as with most roleplaying games, a vessel for the players actions. To immerse said player in his state of absoult shit-faced-drunkeness, the developers gave him amnesia: a complete reset of memories and knowledge. Which causes player and character to both share (I) a starting point and (II) their emotional states.

(I) The shared starting point is perfect for the complex world of Revachol that the game throws us in. If you want to educate the player about your world, you can do it through a codex, explaining everything to your player in great and excruciatingly boring manner, or you can do it through dialogue. Amnesia gives us a neat reason for characters to explain even the most basic truths (like money and the associated concept of rent) of the world to us like we’re complete idiots. Because, in this case, we are. Both character and player start out with the same amount of knowledge: zero. In Disco Elysium, there is a great scene between Joyce, a corporate representative, and our main character, where she explains the worlds complex socio-economic relationships to us. Which leads us to effect No. II:

(II) Shared emotional states. Joyce explaining the world to the main character, and me by proxy, was incredibly confusing. There was so much information! Most of the time, Disco Elysium does a fairly decent job at giving you enough context to make informed decisions despite the lack of memories and knowledge. But Joyce overwhelms you, both the player and their character. The audience shares the emotions with the art that portrays them. And the game gives you the option to express this in dialogue options: you can ask questions again, dig deeper if you have additional ones or even take a break and come back later. ³

And that scene is not the only one, where this overlap of emotional states happens. When I first encountered Evrart Claire, the union-leader/ mafia-boss, I had barely played the game more than an hour and both I and my character were still coming to grips with the world. And then Claire mentioned my lost gun, and that he would help me find it. In that instance I not only found out that I hat lost my police-issued gun, but also that I had asked the mafia-boss to find it! I felt mortified and, again, was given the tools to express that emotion throug my character, who was only one skill check away from fainting.

There is a reason, why the amnesiac hero is such a strong trope in roleplaying games. But for the trope to work, the game not only needs to maintain the momentum of shared experiences long enough for us to grow accustomed to our character, so that we can identify with him even when we have regained (most) of our memories. It also needs to give options to express these emotions in-game, both of which Disco Elysium manages to do extremely well.