How is disco Elysium leftist? Didnt play it, so honestly asking
It’s very leftist; the dialogue is full of political speak with honest critiques of different ideologies. The story itself is set in Revachol, a place where a communist revolution was crushed by the Coalition (a foreign capitalist military alliance of the most powerful countries and somewhat of a stand-in for NATO), similar to what happened to Libya and the USSR.
The game centers around you (a cop) trying to solve a murder mystery that has something to do with the local Dockworkers’ Union striking for overtime pay, workplace democracy etc from a megacorporation.
Alot of the creators are also communists, as you can see from one of the (ex) writers for the game recently saying that the workplace culture after the recent lay-offs of alot of the writers was like “transitioning from the Soviet Union to the fascist Russian Federation”
How’s that different from call of duty being a capitalist mouthpiece
Because the quality of Disco Elysium comes from it feeling like a piece if art that stays with you, it is absolutely written by left leaning writers but it’s mature and elegant in it’s storytelling tbaf happens to revolve around those ideologies.
Call of duty is a for-profit propaganda tool of the US government that is rimarily a multiplayer arena shooter designed to optimise profits due to gaming addictions while passively normalising American world police imperialism.
Apologies for any typos I wrote this while drunk.
Themes and dialogue? It pretty clearly favors the more anti-authoritarian forms of socialism while heavily criticizing communism and fascism. The ultra-liberals come off the best of the lot but it’s also made clear that they offer no solutions to the problems the city has and capital will always call the shots at the expense of workers.
Also, on a meta level, the creators got screwed over by capitalists because that’s just what a scorpion will do if you give it a ride across a river.
I also liked that it doesn’t say that all followers of an ideology are good or bad people. A lot of media that tries to tackle ideologies just make everyone in the general direction of an opposing ideology horrible people. In Disco Elysium is not as black and white. There are good and bad people in every broad ideology. Are you a bad person, just because you believe in capitalism? No. Are you a good person, just because you believe in communism? Also no. Disco Elysium is very nuanced while making it’s cases.
Also, on a meta level, the creators got screwed over by capitalists because that’s just what a scorpion will do if you give it a ride across a river.
Or maybe they were really good at coming up with stuff, but really bad at managing projects. And when the organization grew to more than a few people they couldn’t handle it anymore and couldn’t deliver on what they had committed to.
Everyone has a story in this particular screw up, and while I really would like the moral to be “capitalism bad/creatives good”, it sounds like your average SME implosion.
“Hey, all the creators keep saying this went down, but I do love the taste of corpro cock, so I’m just going to make up my own version.”
It’s been pretty widely documented from all sides. You might want to widen your reading habits if you think it’s cut and dried.
It’s very much not.
Also “taste corpro cock”? Are you twelve? Isn’t it past your bed time?
Widely documented that all the creatives blame a corporate takeover, yeah, bootlicker.
Not all. Just three. Actually, two. And one of them has mellowed quite a lot in the last year or so. So just one.
Out of the tens of people that were involved with that game.
You are coming at this from a place of prejudice. Just listen.
I did listen, and said “Hey, this useful idiot is lying!”
Btw:
https://videogames.si.com/news/disco-elysium-dev-zaum-layoffs-last-writer-speaks-out
If you are planning on getting into this game, just don’t pay for it. I’m not saying don’t play it, just don’t pay for it. The original devs were all stolen from and pushed out of their organization (ZA/UM).
Got a link for the story? Sounds like something I want to read in depth. I have bought DE on my GOG account but have yet to play it
Gross ass reddit link, but seems to explain it well enough:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/xujjrd/whats_going_on_with_disco_elysium/
Tl;DR: Group of friends made a RPG setting & book, and then decided they wanted to turn it into a game. All with heavy anti-capitalist, leftist themes. But they needed money to make game, so they brought in some investors who later fucked them over and forced the original creators out so they could make even more money.
That game is a work of art, everyone should play it at least once.
I don’t know why, but I really didn’t enjoy it. I like pretty much every single critically acclaimed game there is, but Disco Elysium bored the hell out of me. It was basically a visual novel with this clunky split personality disorder thing going on. The humour was pretty “so THAT just happened” which explains why it got so popular with Redditors.
Idk, I played it until I got to some group of union workers arguing on some big wall before I just couldn’t stomach any more.
🤷
