Gaming Under the Influence
[Podcast]
E.61

Disco Elysium vs Cyberpunk 2077

Lore, Concepts, Mechanics

Drinking this week: mash up the jam- collective arts

Playing this week: Disco elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, final fantasy xv &

pokemon shield

If you've followed our December coverage, you'll know we are big fans of Cyberpunk 2077 and the dystopian vision it conveys. It is a delight to explore the impact of technocommodification on human nature and consciousness, through a narrative packed with interesting concepts: digital ghosts, reincarnated CEOs, AI superminds & cybermadness. There is some significant conceptual overlap: both games take as a primary concern the total effacement of human identity, dissolution of the subject position as the Real encroaches (due to technosingularity or alchoholism). But Cyberpunk wraps all this in conventional AAA open world package that can detract from the very worldbuilding that makes the game special. Disco Elysium is an enlightening counter-experience, demonstrating that the same caliber of worldbuilding is possible with mechanically-streamlined, experimental gameplay inspired by tabletop RPGs.

• Your character's failure of identity is a smaller picture (microcosm, instance) of DE's obsessive focus: a vision of reality (Elysium, classical/humanist/even modern ontology) itself is "failed" and internally inconsistent (from the perspective of the humanist subject, this-distinct-from-that). Between its human participants, seething parts and incomprehensible (essentially-varied) bottom layer, reality exhibits the same polyvalent, swarming difference (or "thwarted" nature) that occurs in Harry's mind.

• Elysium: in recognizing its failure, Harry "traverses the fantasy", experiences a "second death", but not of the body (though evidently that looms). The whole symbolic texture he has occupied so far, his entire understanding of reality, including the very composition of his identity, has been effaced. Harry has unreservedly embraced the "death drive": the tendency to extinguish the sociosymbolic network imposed over the Real (our inscription in which is the result of "desire" that can never be sated, only "hysterically" circled). It is a sort of "passion for the real", to penetrate Elysium and its fictions and attain the "real basis of things". This is described by Harry as his personal mission on multiple occasions, with the conceptualization stat governing his ability to query others on the subject.

• "Little pieces" of this swarming, polyvalent real crop up everywhere in the game to thwart not only the murder-mystery (with Harry's role as an extrinsic knower compromised and abundant, unsolvable inconsistencies), but also the course of all ideology and human progress in Revanchol. We bear witness to history itself embracing the death drive, losing all coordinates of meaning and collapsing back into a homeostatic state. The game is here to depict this collapse in great detail.

Thanks to @Kybitzed (on YouTube) for the following incredible video, which inspired the train of thought we pursue in this episode https://youtu.be/1YNYVfES7BA