Video games don’t need writing, really. Great games have been made with almost no words at all—just score in the corner of the screen and maybe a sentence or two explaining the controls—or with the most grudging, minimalist kind of writing imaginable, the merest gesture at narrative: thank you mario! but our princess is in another castle! But it’s a magpie medium and can take in almost anything, including vast quantities of writing. There are games with more words in them than Infinite Jest or War and Peace.
Most of it is bad, of course, not just because writing is hard but because writing for video games is even harder. Every word needs to fit within a larger system of interaction and repetition: not just dialogue and narration but endless descriptions of items, variations of what an enemy might shout when they spot you or are injured, justifications for what the player can and can’t do within the game’s technical limitations, and contingency plans for when the player skips part of the story or manages to go through it out of order. But here we have another thing games don’t really need: good writing. Brilliant games have been made that are stuffed with purple prose. Deus Ex, say, is intricate, astonishing, and almost every sentence in it is ludicrous pulp.
Still, you play games long enough, you start to yearn for a little genuinely great writing. It’s not impossible, after all. In the past decade or so there have been at least two games that managed it. Starting in 2013 there was Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic, magical-realist adventure game. It is an exercise in restraint and evocative delicacy, offering up a few brief lines—a cockeyed joke, an unexpected image, a sudden glimpse of tragedy or banality—and letting them sit quietly, surrounded by minimalist graphics and gentle, humming sound design.
2019’s Disco Elysium is exactly the opposite, a word-drunk profusion of excess and outrage. The first version of the game contains about a million words, and the Final Cut edition released in 2021 adds more: insult upon joke upon reverie, politics and prophecy and memory, alcoholism and communism and cryptozoology, all mashed together in the story of one very shambolic murder investigation. It’s a CRPG (for “computer role-playing game”), a genre that flourished in the 1990s as an attempt to re-create the experience of playing tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons on the desktop. Tabletop RPGs are essentially very long, very weird conversations, and CRPGs in turn are essentially long conversations with the computer—implemented in branching, multiple-choice trees of written dialogue but nonetheless fundamentally concerned with words and sentences. They combine that text with graphics, music, and sound effects, but the text is the core of it, and in the best of these games—like Fallout or Planescape: Torment, both explicit influences on Disco Elysium—it can subsume everything else, as if you were moving through a vast, interlocking network of words, with the rest of the game just a container.
In the classic CRPGs, the text and dialogue are balanced with combat, a matter of stats and loot directly adapted from tabletop conventions. Disco Elysium simply lops off the fighting and replaces it with more dialogue. Everything, seemingly, is now a conversation, from reading a book by yourself to using a mailbox to trying to roundhouse-kick someone in the head, with occasional dice rolls to determine success or failure. And half of these conversations are with yourself, or aspects of yourself: with your “Ancient Reptilian Brain,” which greets you at the beginning of the game by declaring, “There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness” (your detective, it turns out, is trying to wake up from a drunken stupor); with your “Horrific Necktie,” which loudly demands you drink and do drugs; with your “Empathy,” sense of “Esprit de Corps,” and twenty-two other numerically rated skills.
Those skills are yet another RPG convention, but here the traditional attributes like “Strength” and “Wisdom” are supplanted by woolier notions like “Inland Empire” (“the unfiltered wellspring of imagination, emotion, and foreboding”) and “Half Light” (“your fight-or-flight response”). And, even less conventional, these skills also become characters of a sort, piping up to advise, criticize, or debate you, or to fight among themselves. More than just a novel way of writing a CRPG, it’s a novel way of depicting consciousness: not a stream or a continuity but an evolving argument, with “you” stuck in the middle. These voices are a constant accompaniment as you move through the world, a cacophony that occasionally becomes, unexpectedly, movingly, on those rare occasions when you all get your shit together, a choir. The result was “a magnificent literary experience,” the novelist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah wrote in Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. “Via the precise use of language, it changes the reader.”
The First Death Is in the Heart
Disco Elysium is also the rare game that was built upon—but not adapted from—a book. In 2013, Robert Kurvitz, the game’s lead writer and designer, published Sacred and Terrible Air, a novel set in the same fictional world as the eventual game but with an entirely different story and characters. It sold only about a thousand copies, and Kurvitz considered it a failure—thus the turn to game design. Disco Elysium sold millions, and soon enough fans were looking to read the novel. The only problem was that, while the game was in English, the novel was written in Kurvitz’s native Estonian, a notoriously difficult language to translate. Kurvitz and ZA/UM, the company that produced the game, announced an English translation, but then ZA/UM fired Kurvitz and several other creators of the game under dubious circumstances; they sued the owners of ZA/UM for various financial misdeeds, who in turn accused Kurvitz of workplace misconduct; most of the other people who’d worked on the original game eventually quit or were fired; and nothing more was heard. (The lawsuits are still ongoing.)
In 2023, however, two unauthorized fan translations of the novel were posted online. One, by a group calling itself Truri and the Translation Team, was completed by an unnamed “professional translator and an English editor.” The other, by Group Ibex, used a “machine translation” that was then “heavily edited . . . including at all levels by Estonian-speaking members of the team.” Both declared that they were only meant to fill the gap left by the missing official translation—of which, so far, there has been no sign.
Disco Elysium is the rare game that was built upon a book.
Both the book and the game are set in “Elysium,” an off-kilter remix of contemporary reality, with nations and historical figures combined and rearranged yet almost recognizable. Communism exists, for instance, but it was invented by “Kras Mazov,” seemingly an amalgam of Marx and Lenin and perhaps a bit of Allende, who led the “Antecentennial Revolution” in the nation of “Graad,” then supposedly shot himself when the counterrevolution triumphed. France and Belgium seem to have become conjoined as “Sur-la-Clef,” the Netherlands turned into the heavily militarized “Oranje” (or occasionally “Oranjerik”), the People’s Republic of China into “the People’s Republic of Samara” (with a little India thrown in as well), and so on. Technology, too, is subtly but pervasively altered: computers run on elaborate arrangements of magnetic tape, cars are “motor carriages” controlled with “steering levers” rather than a wheel. Notably absent are any obvious analogues for the United States or England, as if in quiet rebellion against the international lingua franca in which the game would be written.
In fact, neither Disco Elysium nor Sacred and Terrible Air is the original expression of Elysium. It began its life as the setting in which the teenage Kurvitz and his friends played marathon multiday tabletop RPG sessions. Elysium was initially a more traditional pseudomedieval fantasy world (hence, perhaps, the name), but as they got bored with that it crept up toward the present, with the fantasy version relegated to the world’s half-forgotten historical background. And as Elysium moved from game to book to a very different kind of game—apparently with an aborted attempt at a comic book somewhere in between—it became only more elaborate.
Elysium is, appropriately, a primary subject of both the game and the book. (Kurvitz has said that the name Disco Elysium means “I learn Elysium,” though a socio-musical movement called “disco” gets mentioned repeatedly in the game as well.) Both are structured around investigations. “Murder mysteries are good” for exploring alternate worlds, Kurvitz explains, because they have to “talk about the material reality” of that world, however outlandish. Sacred and Terrible Air focuses on the disappearance of four young sisters, the Lund girls, and three schoolboys who become obsessed with trying to find out what happened to them. The book’s chapters skip freely through time, but the two main threads follow the boys’ growing friendship with (and romantic interest in) the three oldest sisters during a summer vacation just before they disappear and their attempt, twenty years later, to finally unravel the mystery.
Taking place mainly in Katla, Elysium’s equivalent of Scandinavia, it often feels like a mirror-world Nordic noir. The Lund sisters are almost impossibly alluring and mysterious, creatures of sun and sand, sparkling in the memory. The three boys age into three variations on haunted, stunted adulthood: ungainly Inayat has become an expert on disappearances of all kinds and still lives with his mother, fussy Jesper has become a successful interior designer who dates only extremely young models (his current girlfriend has a name very similar to that of his favorite Lund), and gung-ho Tereesz has become the classic short-tempered, self-destructive policeman, cutting corners and beating up suspects, on his way to being kicked off the force or worse.
Disco Elysium has you playing as a rather different version of that stock character: still an unraveling cop, but older, sadder, less grim and determined than abject to the point of clownishness. You join forces with the by-the-book but spectacularly tolerant Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi to investigate what appears to be a political lynching in the midst of a dockworkers’ strike in a crumbling working-class neighborhood of the city of Revachol: instead of Nordic noir, a rambling, dissolute, left-wing rendition of a buddy cop movie.
Revachol—mentioned but never seen in Sacred and Terrible Air—is one of the hardest parts of Elysium to pin down. It’s a postrevolutionary city under uneasy occupation, seemingly a mix of Paris, postwar Berlin, the Tangier International Zone, 1970s New York, and probably more. Communists overthrew the corrupt monarchy that controlled it a half-century ago and were themselves overthrown by the Coalition, a group of rich nations that invaded to restore it to capitalist order and have, by the time of the game, been occupying it for over forty years. Martinaise, the dockside district on which the game focuses, is strewn with remnants of that violent history: decrepit bunkers, walls pocked with bullet holes, bombed-out apartment buildings still only half repaired, bitter ex-soldiers from several defeated armies.
Revachol is a far cry from the seaside vacations and glittering restaurants of the novel. But they are very much in the same world, with the same evocative derangement of history. It’s just that the novel’s characters are, at least at the start, able to ignore that history in favor of their “spacious apartments,” “vitamin-rich food,” and private obsessions, while the people in Disco Elysium have to pick their way through history’s detritus every day. The two works approach that world, in a sense, from the top and the bottom, even as they express the same sensibility through two very different mediums.
Evil Apes Dukin’ It Out on the Ball
That sensibility, importantly, is not entirely Kurvitz’s. Disco Elysium credits five writers, along with several editors and several more writers for the Final Cut version. Kurvitz has estimated that about half of the game’s million words were written by him, but at least one of the other writers thinks that estimate is high to the point of being “crooked,” and elsewhere Kurvitz has discussed the game as an immense “cowriting challenge—incorporating ten writers’ voices into a single text.” Several of the video game’s characters were based on ones created by players of the original tabletop RPG. In any case, the process of writing Disco Elysium, in which chunks of text drafted by one writer would be subjected to group critique and revision, often multiple times, makes any individual authorship impossible to pin down. The book, meanwhile, was written by Kurvitz but also credits him along with three other writers (two of whom then worked on the game) with “worldbuilding” and a number more with “mass editing.” Elysium, it seems, is both Kurvitz’s baby and a group emanation, a result of conversation as much as individual creation.
The game, simply put, is much better than the book. Some of this is down to translation. I found myself preferring the machine-assisted Group Ibex version (alas), but both are more functional than fluid, with periodic obscurities and infelicities. It helps to flip back and forth between them occasionally to triangulate certain meanings. Is this mysterious geographical feature “Rodionov’s Deep” or “Rodionov’s Trench”? What does it mean when one of the sisters “lifts herself up on her wing bones”? Ah, perhaps she’s just “ris[ing] on tiptoes”?
Even the most mundane events can suddenly open out into the wider world of Elysium.
But beyond that, the game is warmer, looser, and funnier, even with the oddity and tragedy of its setting. Sacred and Terrible Air begins with a clinical announcement: “It was a popular vacation area just outside of Vaasa that swallowed the four Lund girls. Along with their little bones and tan-lined skin, an entire era vanished.” The book never quite abandons that coldness. Even its main characters are held at a bit of a remove, glimpsed in passing as the action hurtles forward or backward. The game, though, offers your detective a whole conversation with his “Limbic System” before he even opens his eyes about how the world that awaits him is just “this giant ball there. And evil apes. And the evil apes are dukin’ it out on the ball.” “How big is the ball?” you might ask, or “How small are the apes?” Or you might say, “That’s sad,” and be told, “Yes it is. And you drowned in that sadness a long time ago.” And then, at last, your day begins.
In its attempts to both tell the story of an investigation and display the world of Elysium, the book resorts to an elaborate contrapuntal structure, moving back and forth between decades, continents, and characters, sometimes within a single chapter. We might ping between Inayat’s childhood and adulthood for a few pages, then suddenly turn to a monologue by Ambrosius Saint-Miro, an avatar of “pessimism and nihilism” from another part of the world entirely, whom we never see directly again. Especially in the later chapters, it can be genuinely hard to follow, breaking apart into allusive fragments as its characters disintegrate.
The game gets to have it both ways. Its story is linear and contained, even conventional, a single investigation that takes place in just a few blocks of Revachol over about a week. The mystery has some twists, but they are easy enough to navigate, and the central questions, at least, are resolved by the end. But at the same time, it is full of moments like the opening discussion with the Limbic System, looping digressions through strangeness and tragicomedy, fragments of backstory, history, parallel stories lurking behind every person and thing you encounter. You might wander into a bookstore and find a copy of Suzerainty: The Board Game, from which you learn about the old kingdom centered around Revachol, which was a trading center for apricots, marble, sugar, and “unprocessed cocaine leaves.” You might start up a conversation with a truck driver stuck in the traffic jam created by the dock strike and find yourself improvising poetry to impress him.
Even the most mundane events can suddenly open out into the wider world of Elysium. One of the first tasks the game presents you with is to simply look at your face in the mirror. You are horrifically hungover, so that’s not quite as easy as it sounds, but once you manage it you realize your face is involuntarily locked in “The Expression,” a strained, shit-eating grin. “I think it’s meant to look *suggestive*,” you speculate. “I’m afraid it’s meant *for the ladies*.” Just another detail in the dissolution of this particular cop, but if you pass a dice roll you can eventually get more information on The Expression: how it is an imitation of the signature grin of a disco star named Guillaume le Million, who became famous during “The New—the third decade of the current century,” several decades before the events of the game, when “enough time had passed from the Revolution that, for a fleeting moment, free market economy seemed like the ultimate, uncontested way of life for our species.” And that “it’s a different world now. The Expression is a relic.” (Guillaume le Million, you might also learn, died toward the end of the next decade, either of venereal disease or autoerotic asphyxiation—“And yes, you can take this as a metaphor for Revachol in the Thirties.”) All that from looking in the mirror.
The comparatively limited digressions in Sacred and Terrible Air make it feel experimental and opaque, yet the game’s constant profusion of them feels completely natural. Video games are almost always digressive, whether their designers want them to be or not, because players can’t be trusted. Given the slightest freedom, they’ll wander off, focus on side quests and minor details, avoid the main story entirely, or skip through it at maximum speed. Disco Elysium simply embraces that inevitable waywardness, seeding every corner with the possibility of revelation. And even some of the most outlandish side activities—trying to catch a windblown flower, indulging the delusions of a nice lady you met in a bar—are neatly tied back into the central mystery by the end. In the process, it makes the case for video games as the great digressive medium, Laurence Sterne’s wildest dream come to life and given a lynching to solve.
It also eases your way into Elysium using a hoary old video game trick: amnesia. Gaming is full of amnesiac player characters, because they offer a tidy solution to the problem of controlling a person who knows things the player doesn’t. If by some plot device the character has forgotten all those things, they have a reason to ask for information about the setting or even about themselves, and the player has more narrative leeway to define their personality. Planescape: Torment turned this trick into the central mystery of the game, putting you in control of an immortal being who wakes up on a mortuary slab, having lost his memory in the process of cheating death, and setting you loose to figure out who you are and how you got this way (and why, as you quickly discover, you have so many enemies). Disco Elysium, whose designers have been effusive in their praise of Planescape, uses a kind of gutterpunk equivalent. Harry, as you eventually discover your detective is called, wakes up from a bender so immense he not only can’t find his badge, gun, or green snakeskin shoe, he has no memory of his name or history, or of the details of the case, which he’s supposedly been working on for several days already, or even of basic facts about the world he lives in. Investigating the lynching also means piecing together who you are, what you’ve been doing for the past few days, and how you reached this sorry state. This also gives you an excuse to pump everyone you meet for information about Elysium. (The game notes, in a sly leftist joke, that everyone is a little scared of a cop, so they won’t object to your outlandish questions.)
Sacred and Terrible Air must bear the burden of its characters’ functional memories, so that same information has to be slipped in allusively around the edges, far less densely and with much greater risk of confusion. Nor, of course, does it have recourse to the game’s other advantages in creating an atmosphere: the painterly graphics, sliding between gritty detail and near-abstract expressionism; the gravel-voiced narration; the soundtrack of mournful, degraded horns.
Still, it is not the case, as Kurvitz once speculated, that “maybe the book just isn’t that good.” It is certainly much more accessible if you’ve already played the game (and it’s hard to imagine anyone encountering it in English except through the game, anyway). And its central mystery is both more expected—another batch of vanished beauties, as opposed to a murky execution in the midst of a labor dispute—and less satisfyingly resolved. But it is also truly unsettling in a way the game never quite attempts. As its mystery becomes more opaque and baffling, it also spreads out, embracing the whole world; it becomes less about what happened to these particular sisters and more about how everything fades and disappears, how the years claim all of us, eventually, even our memories, how “the most violent sound in the world” is “the terrible noise of time.”
The book also deals much more directly with the strangest element of Elysium: its geography. The cities and countries of our world have been not just renamed and reconfigured but divided up into isolas, isolated pockets of land and water separated by vast swathes of a supernatural white fog called the Pale. The exact nature of the Pale is unclear, but it seems to be a physical manifestation of that “noise of time,” “an avalanche of the world’s memories” that can swallow up anything, even continents. Whatever its true nature, it is extremely difficult to travel or communicate through, and prolonged exposure to it can drive people mad. Those who venture too far within it disappear. Or perhaps more than that: their image might fade out of photographs, people who knew them might begin to forget.
In the game, this mostly functions as deep, weird background—you have a few conversations about it and not much more—but the book confronts it head-on. Several late chapters are set within the Pale, where time stands still but a few creatures survive, and the story climaxes, or perhaps shatters, with an “entroponetic catastrophe,” an apocalyptic expansion of the Pale’s boundaries. And yet the Pale continues to resist all but the most abstract definition. It is “made of the past,” someone declares. “The pale is the world’s memory of the world.” In Disco Elysium, one character—a committed communist—reports that some believe the Pale “is actually a manifestation of nostalgia and historical inertia. . . . Those same theorists have hypothesized that revolution may in fact create a *counter-force* that prevents the Pale from expanding.” Another character says that it is “a nervous shadow cast into the world” by humanity, “eating away at reality.”
More than anything, the Pale seems to be a metaphor that has broken containment. It is a literal embodiment of the destructive power of time, or the endless oblivion of history, or perhaps the fictionality of Elysium itself—or all the above at once. Argo Tuulik, one of the writers of Disco Elysium (and credited for both “worldbuilding” and “mass editing” on Sacred and Terrible Air), has said that Kurvitz “has this uncanny ability to conceptualize things that already exist in a way that they seem completely fresh and new.” And in one sense the Pale is a particularly powerful, amorphous example of that, an estrangement of the crushingly obvious fact that everything around us is flimsy, transient. That history is just a vast, destructive assemblage of our forgotten mistakes. That it could all be different, we could all be different if we wanted to be—or could have been different, if we had chosen differently. The Pale and the inhabited isolas, perhaps, are the manifestation of those two tenses, the could be floating in an ocean of the could have been.
A Radio in the Distance
That ocean of lost possibilities is a metaphor that is built up by the book and the game together, and completely expressed in neither. Both Sacred and Terrible Air and Disco Elysium are, in fact, explicitly incomplete. The original Estonian edition of the novel had the number zero on the spine to indicate it was the beginning of a series. Disco Elysium 2 was apparently planned from the beginning, and Kurvitz wrote after the first game’s release that it “managed to show you” only “a tiny, insignificant corner” of its fictional world: “I can not begin to tell you how introductory it is.” The book series never got past volume 0, of course, and the video game sequel was officially canceled earlier this year, long after most fans had given up on it.
In another sense, though, neither could ever really be complete, even if the Estonian readership had been more intrigued or the ZA/UM suits had left well enough alone. Both were expressing something beyond any individual book or game, or even any series, something that is, in its purest form, meant to be endless.
The game notes, in a sly leftist joke, that everyone is a little scared of a cop, so they won’t object to your outlandish questions.
Worldbuilding often has a slightly unsavory ring to it. One hears it invoked as part of “shared universes,” a crucial ingredient in the production and maintenance of “IP.” Or it is a kind of narrative wallpaper, the background “lore” that fills in the gaps between shoot-outs in a video game. The idea behind it is much more common in genre art than in ostensibly serious literature: that the invented world itself could be the primary work, the expressions of it secondary. Its most influential practitioners are confined to fantasy and science fiction: J. R. R. Tolkien, George Lucas, George R. R. Martin, Iain M. Banks, and so on.
None of that means it can’t be a vehicle for genuine artistic expression. Kurvitz’s vision of worldbuilding is not remotely commercial or pragmatic; it is deeply idealistic—or, in his words, “messianic.” Worldbuilding, he has said, is “a vital psychological service to your fellow man.” It is Elysium, not the book or the game, that he calls his life’s work. And Elysium “was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality.”
More prosaically, Elysium is “a collection of ideas in the form of another world,” and “a tool for analyzing ours.” Most of it is not nearly so nebulous as the Pale. One of my favorite Elysian inventions is the Moralintern. Formally known as the Moralist International, it is a centuries-old sect of what might be called evangelical centrism, an organization devoted to gradual progress and “a normal, stable world governed by democratic values.” Its subsidiary organizations include EPIS, Elysium’s equivalent of NATO (or perhaps the EU—although what is the difference, actually, in a world without the United States?), and the Coalition that invaded and occupies Revachol.
Much of the game’s depiction of the Moralintern is scathing. The democracy the Coalition allows Revachol, almost fifty years after the revolution was defeated, is limited and, as one character puts it, “market driven.” If you spend a few hours thinking about the group—the game has an elaborate “Thought Cabinet” mechanic, in which thoughts can be allowed to develop over time—you come up with this: “Moralists don’t really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. . . . Centrism isn’t change—not even incremental change. It is *control*.” (It should be noted that most of the writers of Disco Elysium, Kurvitz especially, subscribe to a kind of mordant communism.)
That control is unequivocally violent. You might, on a rotting boardwalk in the most decaying section of Martinaise, come across a wall still covered in bullet holes. You can use your “Visual Calculus” skill to reconstruct the scene: a mass execution, decades in the past, or maybe several such killings. The game shows you their ghosts: a line of men against the wall, a line of soldiers facing them, a commandant off to the side. But the thing you can’t see is who is executing whom. Is it communists, early in the revolution, executing fascist loyalists? Or centrists, as the revolution was crushed, executing communists? The one thing you do know is that no one from the Moralintern died there: “They were always the *last* ones against the wall.” One of the most clarifying elements of this concoction is the reminder that centrism, too, can be a form of extremism, hidden by our usual metaphors of left and right.
And yet the portrait of the Moralintern can also be oddly touching. Their color is blue, standing for “a blue forget-me-not, a piece of the sky.” Kitsuragi, the most purely good and endearing character in the game, says that he was once a Moralist believer, and though “the years have changed that . . . they’re not all that bad.” Kitsuragi also, when asked what his position is on the revolution, replies, “My parents got ripped to shreds. . . . I was saved by being two years old. That’s my position—the abattoir.” There are worse things than to dream of incremental progress or that, at the very least, things won’t get any worse.
The unofficial motto of the Moralists, we are told, is “For a moment, there was hope.” For a moment, there was Elysium—or a couple of scraps of it, anyway.