From colonialist boardgames to radiocomputer wizardry: Investigating Disco Elysium’s intermedial world via media archaeology

Abstract

Disco Elysium (ZA/UM 2019) is a computer role-playing game set in a fully realised fantasy world, Elysium, in the city of Revachol, at a historical time that offers caustic echoes of our world’s 1970s. Lauded for its complex detective narrative and memorable protagonist, Harry du Bois, the game is also notable for its detailed world-building, including a history of failed technology that mirrors the failed city-state of Revachol (“the disgraced former capital of the world”) is in at the time of the investigation. This paper argues that both creating and exploring Disco Elysium interrogates playful media as sediments of culture and world-play as a tool for critical engagement with media history.

Following Jussi Parikka’s theoretical legacy, I analyse the intermedial world-building of Elysium through the lens of (fictional) media archaeology, noting how the presence of printed documents, stained glass windows, radios, pinball machines, computers, and board games contribute to a sense of worldness and dormant commercial media culture within the Elysium setting. Memorable for its alternative course of technological development, Elysium is an ideal example of a game that issues a non-deterministic, historical materialist inquiry into technology’s power to shape social conditions in a fictional setting.

I examine the way ZA/UM uses the modalities of media production to convey history, ranging from its spatiotemporal compression to the semiotic enconding of technology, as well as their impact on ludic and political agency within Elysium. Special attention is paid to how exposition of the fictional world is embedded and mapped onto different media types to disclose different aspects of world-building, including economic, political, and media history. Theoretically, the paper understands the media products under scrutiny as “dead media” to varying degrees, reflecting upon the anomie and lawlessness of Revachol itself.