The World’s Memory of the World

By Gabriel Winslow-Yost

The first version of Disco Elysium contains about a million words. In our latest issue, Gabriel Winslow-Yost parses some of them and turns to the novel the game was built upon: Robert Kurvitz’s Sacred and Terrible Air.

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.

“You play games long enough, you start to yearn for a little genuinely great writing. It’s not impossible, after all.”

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.”

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.

Continue reading “The World’s Memory of the World,” an essay by Gabriel Winslow-Yost, on our site.

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