Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

Abstract

Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely connected, detective fiction typically follows a trajectory in which the history of the central mystery becomes progressively clearer through the accumulation of information and detail, whereas the Gothic traditionally seeks to maintain and heighten a sense of disorientation. Exploring the tension between Disco Elysium’s Gothic elements and its status as a detective game allows for a richer appreciation of the political and social commentary that emerges from both its narrative and gameplay.

“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne

“…The PC's position as a "false hero" is also reinforced by the fact that the three possible conclusions of their journey are marred with a sense of inconclusiveness and ambiguity whether to be interpreted as "positive" or "negative" outcomes. Novitz (2021) asserts that the Gothic prevails in the narrative of Disco Elysium because the aforementioned investigatorial attempts fail to sustain a sense of stability and order in the world, as well as a linear teleological trajectory in the unraveling of the mystery. Similarly, in Bloodborne, the game world continues to exist in a state of flux despite the player's efforts as I will elucidate further on.…”

“…Novitz (2021) asserts that the Gothic prevails in the narrative of Disco Elysium because the aforementioned investigatorial attempts fail to sustain a sense of stability and order in the world, as well as a linear teleological trajectory in the unraveling of the mystery. Similarly, in Bloodborne , the game world continues to exist in a state of flux despite the player's efforts as I will elucidate further on.…”

“…The Pale is composed of a simulacrum of memories and repeated exposure to this place can lead one to completely lose their identity, to be metamorphosed into another person from the influence of re-living the memories. Novitz (2021) identifies this element in the game among others that disrupt “the boundaries between past and present and the personal and the political within its narrative (…) and subverts the comforting expectations of order, rationality, and fairness in detective narratives, in ways that embrace Derrida's perception of the Gothic” (41). In a similar vein, in Bloodborne , the player is thrust into the world that functions as an unreliable narrator by disrupting the dichotomy of “reality” and “unreality.” Here, as in Disco Elysium , the past takes on a hauntological aspect, reinforcing the Gothic spatiotemporality.…”

“…In her analysis of the Ravenhearst video game series by Big Fish Studios she asserts that the structure of the gameplay revolving around locating hidden objects "in a space of never-ending mess seems fitting for the Gothic-a genre built on excess" (395). There have been various recent studies, analyzing the manifestations of the Gothic in video games-from Gothic configurations of the ludic and formalist elements such as the in-game avatar (Kirkland, 2009) and game soundtrack (van Elferen, 2012); analyzes of monstrosity (Gardner, 2015;Piitinen, 2018), doppelgangers (Hancock, 2016), and memory (Novitz, 2021); Lovecraftian elements and the narrative structure of the "weird tale" (Corstorphine & Crofts 2022;Krzywinska 2020); and extensive studies of the intrinsic Gothic tendencies of the survival-horror genre of video games (Fuchs, 2013;Kirkland, 2012;Krzywinska, 2002Krzywinska, , 2015. My analysis of Bloodborne at a foundational level employs Krzywinska's "coordinating nodes of the Gothic" (2015, 59) to locate the Gothic elements in the ludic and the narrative layers of the game.…”

A Framework for Exploring Player Perceptions of LLM-Generated Dialogue in Commercial Video Games

“…In this paper, we directly evaluate the player experience by asking video gamers to interact with LLM-generated dialogue injected into Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, a highly-acclaimed dialoguecentered video game (Kurvitz et al, 2021). 3 To mitigate difficulties with evaluating open-ended text generation (Karpinska et al, 2021), we specifically examine a constrained dialogue generation task in which an LLM must decide how to update a dialogue to match the corresponding game state.…”