(if you'd be willing to share them, i would love to hear your thoughts on disco elysium 👀)
Nothing hugely smart or original, given that there's been a ton of essays written and recorded about it that say a great deal more!
I guess one aspect that I fixate on a lot, and which I haven't seen discussed so much, is how Disco Elysium fits into (and through its medium, invigorates) the tradition of what I think of as abject - or undignified - action.
For me, all of the most memorable action sequences from the past 20 years are based around watching our protagonists clumsily scramble about, just barely dodging disaster at every turn. They’re not hopelessly foolish, but they’re deeply vulnerable and completely out of control of the situation.
Pretty much every scene that features Theo losing his shoes in Children of Men
Max capering about, pratfalling and being thrown off the War Rig in Fury Road
Barry in...Barry, scrapping frantically in the aisle of a pharmacy or through the rooms of a suburban home
These sequences aren't slapstick, exactly. But they understand the slapstick tradition and how it humanises the hero while enlivening the action. They know how to undercut the hero's efforts in a way that strengthens our sympathy with them and our fear for them without ever undermining the stakes of the scene. The humour flows in and out of the tension, and the two elements strengthen each other.
(In other words, they're very much the opposite of, say, Thor making a pompous speech about he's going to save the day, and then he gets punched by a big monster, goes flying into a cliff and makes a '...or maybe not' quip. That's a moment of tone-shattering bathos that, while it may demonstrate our hero's fallibility, actually serves to remind us that none of this matters and Thor will be just fine by the end. I don't think there is a specific Thor scene like this, it's just an illustration. Sorry, Thor.)
But these sequences are also the exact opposite of the slick superhumanity that action cinema has spent a good few decades fixating on as the ideal. The endgame of much of the most popular Western 80s and 90s action cinema is the lame, sterile vanity of Vin Diesel or the Rock in 2022, squabbling offscreen about making sure that they get to land all the perfect punches on camera, perform all the coolest stunts and never once lose their dignity.
I see undignified action in modern cinema as a very pointed response to that, and deeply humanistic in its intent. It's absolutely crucial to Fury Road that Max, Furiosa and the Wives embody heroism by running frantically about trying to to save each other, and that villainy is embodied by deluded kids calmly and boastfully carrying out macho acts of violence that must display a certain level of skill or be dismissed as 'mediocre'. (Nux symbolically swaps sides from the baddies to the goodies by...pratfalling.)
It's a principle I've tried to stick to in both of our shows so far, where heroism is generally divorced from skill, and is better represented by even fumbling or clumsy efforts to help the people around us. (And where completely unchallenged success, in fact, usually generates thoughtless confidence that results in damaging consequences later on.)
Disco Elysium goes one further by putting us in control of the character who's never in control of the situation, whose skills are comically lacking in most aspects, and who always has the option of making the worst possible choice.
I think that the story-driven computer game has undergone its own comparable crisis of humanity to action movies over the past couple of decades, due to a similar drive towards slick action, ‘complex’ ethical dilemmas, and over-earnest melodrama.
You have great games like Fallout: New Vegas - which I love - which work so hard to create a reactive world based on choices, but which to me always end up feeling like something is missing at its heart. Because the ultimate result of a bad decision or a dialogue failure is that everyone in the room starts shooting at you and you get to feel like a badass as you mow them all down.
Sometimes the enemies are really tough and you might have to reload, sure, but you never truly lack control or competency within the game itself. You can be a superhuman talker, or you can be an embarrassing buffoon in conversation who conveniently and nonsensically turns out to be a superhuman killing machine.
That genuine in-character vulnerability, that real possibility of personal failure within the narrative, is always largely absent.
There's also been this obsession over the years with 'complex' ethical dilemmas as a pillar of storytelling - where there’s a ton of contrivance employed to ensure that every choice is merely kind-of bad and which actively undermines any sense of heroism. (Will you side with the faction that's apparently good but maybe not-that-good, or the faction that's apparently bad but maybe not-that-bad? God, who cares?)
Which is all very ironic, because some of the most memorable choices in older video games that people talk about decades later are generally far less meaningful in gameplay terms and far less ethically 'complex'.
In Planescape: Torment, it doesn't really affect much in the game if you say something devastatingly cruel or wonderfully kind to one of your companions, and there's no attempt whatsoever to justify the former as an option. But you fully understand the narrative stakes as a participant in the drama and you feel the impact of making that decision.
A lot of story-driven games since PS:T have aimed for that same kind of character-focused emotional resonance, where making the wrong choice or disappointing a fictional character is meant to be a punch to the player's gut. In my experience, they still almost all fail at what they’re attempting - either because the characters aren't compelling enough or because, again, the melodrama is massively over-earnest, flimsily 'complex' and contrived.
In these games, the consequences of failure generally feel hollow because they feel like they’ve been worked up artificially to try and make us feel bad. (Oh, no, I rescued the prisoners and Companion 1 has lost 15 influence with me because one of the prisoners had murdered their mum so they wanted me to kill the prisoners instead!)
And just like in my fictional Thor movie, these are also works that also tend to only understand comedy as a periodic aside that undermines the wider narrative - let's cut to a quip every so often from Comic Relief Companion as they comment on the action, etc.
I'd argue that all of these flaws are connected in their own way, and Disco Elysium leaps over them - thanks to better writing, certainly, but also thanks to its deployment of an abject, debased protagonist who keeps fucking up at every turn, and for its far smarter use of comedy as an integrated part of the narrative to help us understand the consequences of failure.
The first meaningful choice we make in the game, after all, is one where we're highly encouraged to say something taboo, awful, funny and ridiculous, just to see what happens ("I want to make fuck with you").
I made that choice, laughed incredibly hard as Harry embarrassed himself - and then was horrified a few hours later as he almost screwed up an interrogation thanks to his own internal panic about the decision I’d made.
It's just a fantastic trick all around - by goading us initially towards dialogue choices that lead to slapstick and social embarrassment, the game ends up making the later decisions feel far more grounded. We've caused Harry to say the wrong thing and cause hurt, confusion and anger in a dozen different characters, which is the only reason why we care so deeply about the stakes of saying the wrong thing in front of the woman who's lost her husband.
By opening up possibilities of limitless failure, the occasional display of keeping-it-together feels like an absolute triumph for humanity. (The humour bleeds into the tension, and both strengthen each other.)
And that's why the best action sequence (and possibly the best narrative sequence) in video games over the past twenty years isn't out of any action game.
It's an incompetent, eccentric middle-aged drunk and his long-suffering partner standing up to a pack of heavily-armed, well-trained and murderous mercenaries who are on the verge of committing a horrific massacre.
It's the player sweating as they click through a simple dialogue sequence in preparation for a fight to the death, in the full knowledge that two in-game days previously, they tried to run away from a motel bill and tripped on an old lady's wheelchair.
The possibility of failure and slapstick is ever-present, it feels like the most likely outcome for Harry (no matter what the percentages onscreen tell us), and that possibility has turned horrific.
There are no real attempts at intricate moral choices in the scene (imagine how many games would have given you the option to win over the mercenaries or side with them), no actual combat, a limited amount of empowerment for Harry even at his most effective, and aside from Kim's presence or absence afterwards, no huge gameplay consequences.
But you hold your breath as you experience it. It's just utterly fantastic work in its medium.
Heroism isn't competence, power or dignity. It's running frantically about, trying to to save each other.
