Disco Elysium as High Art - by Shay Inkpen

The difference between high and low art has traditionally centered around the idea that while low art is made for another purpose, high art is purely created for its aesthetic value - “art pour l’art”, as the old saying goes. Cinema has often fallen into both categories, due to the broad nature of the medium. Recently, video games have raised their production value and quality of writing to be considered alongside cinema as an art form, but a select few offer a divergent look at the medium that can be considered a work of true “high art”. One such video game, Disco Elysium (2019), serves as the perfect example of a piece of media which, by its merits, has broken free from the traditional placement of the media of video games and, through a critical divergence from the known cinematic formula, earned its place as a piece of high art, perhaps the first of its kind that could be universally recognized as such.

        The recent advancements in technology have allowed a select few narrative video games to be considered in the same echelon as movies and television. Popularly thought of as an extension of analog gaming, the public's eyes are just beginning to open to video games' ability to guide the user through an experience which has strong parallels to well-renowned classical cinema. Games such as The Last of Us, Part 1 & 2 (2013 & 2020), L.A. Noire (2011), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) have all earned high praise from those outside the industry for their ability to create an interactive story with depth and aesthetic beauty which rivals and even surpasses the average blockbuster. Those games share a common trait: the use of trained actors and motion-capture technology to create extremely life-like characters which the audience can easily connect with. Disco Elysium, in contrast, is more akin in visual style to games like Kentucky Route Zero (2013), Inside (2016) and The Darkest Dungeon (2016), all of which employ simplistic depictions of the world and characters, and allowing the player to attribute their own meanings and relationships to the things they experience in the game. Disco doesn’t rely on the template of traditional visual media like television and movies to create an emotional connection with the characters and investment in the story. In other words, it gives abstract, surreal representations of its characters and setting, and gives them space to breathe - allowing the user’s imagination to fill in the gaps.

        Boiling down an art form to its bare bones is a common strategy to attempt to reveal something greater within. The minimalist art movement of the 1950s was inspired by the idea that art need not be representative of a recognizable aspect of reality, it can stand on its own as a combination of the medium and the form (Tate). In a similar way, Disco follows the methodology of “less is more”, choosing to build a world which is not representational of visually accurate realism, but one that follows the constructed aesthetic of the game as a whole. The focus on a unified intention through the design of the game, reflected in both the visual and auditory style choices, further distinguishes it from its peers.

Despite the lack of focus on representational purity, however, Disco’s style is far from crude. Within the bold and beautiful artistic translations of the game world and characters, it relies heavily on suspension of disbelief - when a character talks, their voice lines are read by voice actors, along with the text and an oil painting to represent them. These characters are visually inanimate, yet they are as developed and complex as those in many feature-length films, and the connections the player forms with them are equally profound and meaningful. Disco presents a bold challenge to the assumption that realism is the logical endpoint for the medium of video games, by presenting a compelling narrative presented in a way that doesn’t attempt to mimic reality, but instead, does what reality is incapable of achieving.

Players making their first foray into the game are greeted by a personification of the unconscious, referred to as “lizard-brain” and a personification of the physical senses, or “limbic system”. It establishes the key artistic and functional perspective of the game, where following an episode leading to traumatic total amnesia, the player inhabits the mind of the player character. It is an unfamiliar take on the core basis of gaming, that the player character is in some way being inhabited by the player. These internal conversations continue as the game progresses, with various aspects of the player character's personality voicing their opinions and thoughts on the happenings of the world, and the player responding in kind. For example:

“Inland Empire: ‘What if *you* only appear as a large singular body, but are actually a congregation of tiny organisms working in unison?’

Physical Instrument: ‘Get out of here, dreamer! Don't you think we'd know about it?’

Volition: ‘If it were true those organisms would *not* be working *in unison*.’

Endurance: ‘That's because some of them just don't have the best interests of the colony in mind.’

Electrochemistry: ‘Hey, maybe if the rest of you took a chill-pill every now and then, they'd be more motivated?’

Perception: ‘Shut up, we can't hear what he's saying!’” (Disco Elysium).

The conversations are not limited internally, however: objects and aspects of the world regularly give voice to their personal experiences and deeper representational value, “present(ing) the situation of meeting and conversing with objects, in which the different cognitive abilities of Disco Elysium’s protagonist are set in motion...acts turn into a soliloquy” (Kłosiński). The process of turning the otherwise ordinary into an exploration of its idiosyncratic qualities is perhaps one of the foundations of  modern art, and the largely unrestricted narrative of the game allows the player to interact, or not interact, with any detail within the sprawling map. In this way, playing the game is similar to walking through an art gallery - the player is gently guided through the experience, while having the freedom to stop and linger at any point, free to spend as much or as little time as they want attempting to discern greater significance from the experience. At the same time, investigating and learning with the great depth required to fully experience it would only be possible in the format of home video gaming. This begs the question: why are games relegated to the world of “low art” by default, when they are able to achieve so much more than comic strips, television and B-movies? The most likely reason these highly active experiences are lumped in with markedly static ones is a lack of understanding. Video games are a relatively new art form, and the vast majority of the historical content has been modeled around a strict formula which is centered around reaction time and a steepening learning curve. Disco rejects such a formula, by removing the reaction-time centered gameplay and making the learning curve purely centered around features around the interwoven narratives. Rather than learning how to fight, as so many games are focused on, Disco teaches the player how to think, allowing the player to immerse themselves in the narrative as an active participant, and then draw their own conclusions.

The way that Disco approaches the subject of mental health may not always be remarkably accurate, but at the same time, this approach is a method in which the game can explore other challenging topics. The player moves through the game with their mind shattered, scattered and separate after a traumatic event, with each aspect of the character's personality engaging the “core personality”- the player. These conversations reveal things about the world, the main character’s amnesia-obscured past, as well as deeper matters, philosophical perspectives on the nature of life and the universe. Through the game, the trauma of the main character and others is represented “as an existential wound with both a psychological and social dimension, affect(ing) not only the individual, but also the community as a whole”, and while this is a central theme, it is merely one of the many sociological, political, and philosophical issues the game interrogates (Spies).  The use of philosophy and complex thought is not new to the medium of video games, however it is usually a single question which the game seeks to ask or answer over the course of the entire game. Very few games present philosophy as broadly and deeply as Disco, and virtually none give you the choice whether or not to engage or reject specific philosophical questions. The player is given the agency of what to pursue and what to ignore, reflecting reality with the assertion that not all thoughts have equal value. When the choice to pursue a specific thought is made, the details are given in thoughtful prose, using poetic expression to convey the application of this thought to the world of the game. These readings are accompanied by musical compositions which attempt to articulate the feeling of various locations in the game, from the lilting melodies of the small hotel to the droning dirges of the union shipyard. The music is far more than just a tone-setting device, it is an auditory reflection of the setting  -  as more of the landscape is revealed, along with the many facets of the world, the soundtrack shifts to reflect those changes. The landscape, along with its many key objects and people, is the final piece which brings to life this immersive artistic experience. Displayed in oil-painting aesthetic which artist Kaspar Tamsalu describes as inspired by the works of “Jenny Saville, Alex Kanevsky, Sangram Majumdar, Iliya Repin, or Mikhail Vrubel”, the world is brought to live in trademark broad brushstrokes, which simultaneously subverts the traditional expectation graphical superiority while helping to maintain the unique aesthetic tone that Disco works so hard to create - that what the player experiences is not, perhaps, reality, but a representationalist perspective of reality, seen through the eyes of an amnesiac cop (Staff).

        Disco Elysium methodically constructs a world with four meticulously designed and deliberate walls: the spoken prose, the visual art, the musical soundscape - and the fourth wall, where the game speaks directly to the player, allowing them to have influence virtually every moment in the game. However, simply because “a video games contain artistic elements such as graphics or music, these qualities alone do not necessarily imply that they are art in themselves...(but) game technologies could be considered an extension of traditional art, enabling a two-way dialogue between the author and a viewer... allow(ing) both to explore new artistic possibilities”(Bourgonjon et al). By the finale of the game, the player exists in a world which they have not only experienced, but changed - their virtual fingerprints are left across the world, on the people and objects which they have chosen to interact with.

This is perhaps the difficulty that video games face when being considered among works of art, that they act in such unique and esoteric ways, far removed in their mechanics and features from the mediums of traditional high art. In order to truly appreciate art, however, we cannot allow difference to be the justifying barrier for entry. All art was new and unprecedented at one point, and including new styles among “high art” has nearly always been considered a transgression. Until society attempts to engage with this medium on an artistic level, however, these transgressions are the only thing that keep the world of art from becoming a platitudinous collection of arbitrary rules and elitist repetition. The art world must remember to look for art in any medium, in every medium, lest it become confined by its own definitions. When that is done, Disco Elysium will be rightly considered among the most profound contemporary high art.

Works Cited

Bourgonjon, Jeroen; Vandermeersche, Geert; Rutten, Kris; and Quinten, Niels. "Perspectives on Video Games as Art." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 19.4 (2017): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3024>

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, PS4 version, ZAUM, 2019.

Kłosiński, Michał. "The Object Gives Rise to Thought: Hermeneutics of Objects in Disco Elysium" Baltic Screen Media Review, vol.9, no.1, 2021, pp.56-66. <https://doi.org/10.2478/bsmr-2021-0006>

Spies, Thomas. "“Making Sense in a Senseless World”: Disco Elysium’s Absurd Hero" Baltic Screen Media Review, vol.9, no.1, 2021, pp.80-89. https://doi.org/10.2478/bsmr-2021-0008

Staff, MCV. “‘We Knew Immediately That We Needed to Make a Game with a Striking and Unique Look to Accompany the Writing’ – the Art of Disco Elysium - Business News.” MCV/DEVELOP, MCV/DEVELOP, 8 Apr. 2021, https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/we-knew-immediately-that-we-needed-to-make-a-game-with-a-striking-and-unique-look-to-accompany-the-writing-a-look-that-would-balance-the-mundane-with-the-unfamiliar-and-strange-the-art/.

Tate. “Minimalism.” Tate, Tate.org.uk, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/minimalism#:~:text=Minimalism%20emerged%20in%20the%20late,art%20of%20the%20previous%20generation.