Disco Elysium, the infinite replay

I don't remember if I've written about Disco Elysium before. It's the kind of thing I'd do, but my memory is blurry these days. I feel like I'm looking at time through a shorter lens. What's in the background is soft and blurry, an effect that I learned the other day on Bluesky is called "bokeh."

I spend my time on Bluesky now because Twitter and Substack, where I originally built a readership outside of my books, have come out as hostile platforms for trans people. There was an argument for staying and fighting, but fighting for what? What were these platforms for? They were videogames, places where a writer could reach a new reader and get a hit of dopamine; they were addictions; the score and the achievements turned out to mean nothing once I hit "quit." Don't get me wrong – I felt a real bond with the people I met on Twitter. I met my spouse there, I've met close friends there. I've exchanged deeply felt letters with people who've found my work. But for me as a writer, Twitter was primarily for marketing stuff using my jokes and observations. And look: it didn't even change much. While on Twitter, I released a book that a lot of people read, and another that very few people read. I was the same guy doing the same things. All I got was a vague sense of accomplishment when people liked me without knowing me, and I could get that in high school.

Anyway, Disco Elysium is a game about addictive cycles, along with one of the very few genuine noirs to be about cops. Noir as a genre is very cynical about police, rightly so; noir and its close cousin, hardboiled detective fiction, feature them mostly as antagonists. Raymond Chandler's Marlowe is always getting taken up to the station and roughed up, made into a suspect or a would-be snitch, because as a detective he happens to be near a crime. The few cop protagonists in good noirs, like McPherson in Laura (1944), are deeply troubled men who show the psychological impacts of a brutalizing career. McPherson's constant dissociation, symbolized by his obsession with a handheld puzzle game which looks for all the world like a modern phone, results in a film whose whole second half seems to be the hero's fantasy of a world he finds more comprehensible than this one.

Harry du Bois, Disco Elysium's antihero, has lost his memory in an ambiguous incident, apparently caused by a night of suicidal drinking – though from the beginning, various characters throw doubt on this as physiologically unlikely. We know a few undisputed things about him. An alcoholic whose ruined party-beast persona is more an attempt to alienate others than an actual personality, his interests include systematically destroying friendships, karaoke, and detecting. Disco Elysium is an isometric game built around text, as below:

Most of the game is about choosing dialog options, of which it offers many – you can lean towards different personalities, political orientations, and even genres (I'd generally describe the game as a tragicomedy, but I've certainly played it as grander or smaller, supernatural or prosaic, idealistic or loaded with realpolitik). I've played Harry as tense and uptight, the kind of person who's very controlled until he snaps. I've played him as frighteningly volatile, capable of a gentle touch or of nihilistic rage. I've even played him as 100% apologetic and kind, although if you do that, his friends will snap that he's tried it before. The game is an infinite scroll, Twitter-like, although unlike Twitter it was put together by humane writerly minds. They hate each other now, and will never work together again.

And I've played it a lot, as you've gathered. Once you've played through one infinity, you can move on to the next one, a mobius strip printed on receipt paper and never torn off. The game will keep on giving. I used to feel a lot of anxiety about playing a Harry other than my original one – the communist who honestly believes that he can start his life over again – but I've freed myself of that. The wonderful and horrible thing about the game is that you will always become yourself. The variables allow for as many stories as you want, but you'll always be the same guy. No Harry will ever make up for the trust he's lost, no Harry will ever break free of the cycle of corruption, and no Harry will ever lose hope, his greatest vice and one that always infuses his ending. The only difference is just how much dread you feel about the hope being misplaced.

The game's actual plot is complex but approachable. There's been a murder in Martinaise, a down-at-heel working-class neighborhood which bears the scars of centuries of history; communism, fascism, capitalism, and an unfeeling centrism have all left their mark. Martinaise is a place where revolutions have happened, and there's a lot of restless anger in it still. Disco Elysium originally didn't, I thought, do that well by its politics – it was too determined to be cynical about every possible orientation, although it was pretty clear that the critique of the left was coming from inside the house. I think a lot of this is just Estonian political culture, informed by centuries of being traded between empires, but it didn't necessarily translate to me as an American player. Shortly before its implosion, the studio released a massive DLC package, called The Final Cut. Among other things, it deepened the political storytelling, made it more about how idealism breaks our hearts – and some of the places self-loathing leads us, if we don't curb ourselves.

We play videogames to hypnotize ourselves, or at least that's why I do it. And in retrospect, one reason I've been driven to replay Disco Elysium lately – to meet all the Harries I could, to run up against their limits – is the surfeit of political despair that I've woken up to every morning for years. I could handle the bad years, up to a point, but these last few years, relatively "good" but increasingly dangerous for people like me, have broken me. Why write? Why speak? Trans people today are devalued, deplatformed, frightened, and reduced.

But I've come around to something that generations of queer people have figured out before me. Listen, we have to believe that we can win – that we will live on, safe and free, and that when the nightmares are over, everyone will pretend they were on our side all along. We have to believe that we will personally be the ones who make it. We may be wrong, but we have to trust with all our hearts that something is coming after this, because we have no other psychological option. The hypnosis of Disco Elysium's widening gyre is to this effect, and that is part of why I have had it on my mind. We won't break the cycle without believing we can.