The Future Echoes of Disco Elysium

ZA/UM’s detective RPG recalls the ruins of our own contested futures.

by Bart Howe

Martinese is a city in steady decline. A colonial outpost of a coalition of foreign states that take no responsibility for its development, beyond the protection of the bottom line of companies that use the city as a shipping outpost. In the absence of a formal state, policing and managing the city is left to the Dockworker’s labour union, which—while admirably militant—is corrupt and capitalistic. Social problems that are intensified by alienation and poverty, like drug addiction and racism, run rampant. Every surface is covered in bullet holes or shell craters. The right skill point allocation, plus a lucky dice roll, will reveal that at least some of those bullet holes were put there in the process of mass execution.

In the detective RPG Disco Elysium — made by Estonian developers’ ZA/UM — you play Harry DuBois, a past-his-prime cop who has woken up with alcohol induced amnesia and must solve the murder of a mercenary hanging in the courtyard his hotel. 

Throughout the game’s setting, remnants of optimistic visions of the future projected from the past are everywhere. The symbols of a Communist revolution that failed decades ago. Billboards for—and admirers of—once cutting-edge technology, long left abandoned and unfinished. A meta-reference to an ambitious tabletop game that is meant to be played across vast distances (there are no computers in Disco Elysium), dumped unceremoniously in the Doomed Business Precinct. In the past, the future was up for grabs—in the present, everything has already been decided on. The future came and went. 

The remnants of optimistic visions of the future projected from the past are everywhere. 

In his essay What is Hauntology? and his book Ghosts of My Life, writer and academic Mark Fisher took Jaques Derrida’s idea that “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” and fleshed it out to a wider analysis. Capitalist Realist culture, Fisher argued, has reduced the future from the possibility of a project to be constructed to the inevitable continued domination of capital and the flattened culture built in its honour. At the same time, the artifacts of a contested and once widely held and wildly different future lie broken in the cracks of neo-liberal culture. To experience them, to gaze back through lost futures, is to be haunted by a past that was still yet full of possibility.

“Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time”

Examples are all around us. The break in time you feel when you see the iconic Bernie Sanders x Public Enemy poster, even as Joe Biden prepares to take office and a capitalist crisis claims the lives of hundreds of thousands, is hauntology. Finding a bit of tram track in a city that tore them up to sell more cars is hauntology. Moscow’s Fallen Monument Park, where the statues of Soviet figures and accomplishments that were left to languish following the fall of the USSR, is wildly hauntological.

But there is a distinction to make here: hauntology and nostalgia are not the same thing. Nostalgia is an uncritical glorification of the past. Hauntology attempts to see the past as it was in its complexities, while finding and perhaps even reclaiming the future that was being built towards. To say the artifacts of the USSR are hauntological is not to glorify the USSR in its contradictions and ugliness—its gulags and food shortages—but to perceive the Communist society that its people thought they were building.

Nostalgia is an uncritical glorification of the past. Hauntology attempts to see the past as it was in its complexities.

Disco Elysium plays like an existential novel, an effect vividly enhanced by the game’s obsession with the hauntological. Even the title’s reference to disco is a hauntological artifact in and of itself. A cultural revolution of the 1970s whose effects can still be felt today, disco offered a subculture of hedonism and optimism that created a space for both queer people and black people, drawing from a variety of fringe and niche subcultures only barely tolerated by the mainstream, if at all. When the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” was organised by two radio DJs in 1979, tellingly at a baseball game, they were cementing a straight and white reaction against disco that likely killed the genre before its time. To encounter disco’s modern remnants—in club culture, in electronic music, in group dancing—this, too, is hauntology.

David Graeber once remarked that “the anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way.” In Disco Elysium, ZA/UM have made this the role of the game developer. Their innovative skill point system, which primarily affects your character’s inner monologue rather than your physical capabilities, demonstrates that psychology (and therefore our understanding of the world) is socially constructed. The game’s ending, which I won’t spoil, binds together hope and despair.

But it is ultimately in their keen observance and relationship with hauntology that they imbue to the player an awareness that the despair, cultural flattening, and poverty of Martinese was not an inevitability. It was constructed amongst contested futures. 

This is a key insight to keep in our minds as the institutions of capitalism continue to degrade and expand and subject more and more people to lives of exploitation, poverty and brutality. To be haunted is to remember that the future is something we can change. 

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