Incline Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - a hardboiled cop show isometric RPG

[Roguey]

First Sawyer, now Kurvitz, this antifascist Marxist gets around.

 

[Hydro]

First Sawyer, now Kurvitz, this antifascist Marxist gets around.

Fuck are you even talking about?

 

[Sratopotator]

That Marijam gal also made a vid with Sawyer.
Probably as meh as this one, though in the Sawyer's video case, the focus is on "woke in video games", or some shit like that.
I'm not even bothering to provide a link, cause this thread already got its share of uninteresting and derivative content (thanks to me, sorry).
Just google it, if you really want to step into that pile of goo.

 

[Maxie]

'uninteresting and derivative content' is a bold though terse summary of the 'game'

 

[Sratopotator]

On the other hand, your response is interesting and original, yeah, thanks.

 

[Yosharian]

Just what I always wanted, to listen to two woke idiots tickle each other's assholes for a few hours

 

[Qarthadqart]

Are we posting interviews? I can contribute to this thread.

Just what I always wanted, to listen to two woke idiots tickle each other's assholes for a few hours

For a change of pace, my article has three of them.

---

Forward-looking return: An interview with Disco Elysium writer Helen Hindpere​

​

Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland​

Platypus Review 173 | February 2025 | Article link

On May 17, 2024, Platypus New Zealand members Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland interviewed Helen Hindpere, lead writer on the video game Disco Elysium (2019). Set in the fantastic realist world of Elysium, the role-playing game includes skill checks and dialogue trees that allow the player to determine their political ideology while exploring the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, an Estonian studio with socialist art collective origins. An edited transcript follows.[1]

Full Article

Michael McClelland: What was your role as a lead writer of Disco Elysium?


Helen Hindpere: I was one of the first writers to be hired, so I was basically there from the beginning. Robert Kurvitz was the lead writer for the majority of the game as it was originally released. Only later on did I become a lead writer, and that was for smaller parts of the game, the “political vision quests,” which were later included via DLC.[2] My role as lead writer involved supervising and editing others’ work and coming up with ideas as to what that political writing should be.


Jamie Adam: Did you all write together?


HH: Yes, we had a writer’s room. Our studio in Estonia was in this run-down building that we were squatting in. It was definitely not fire-safe or safe for business, but that was all we could afford back then. But it was also romantic, as squats often tend to be. We had four or five writers.


MM: What percentage of the writing was yours, roughly?


HH: A lot of writers worked on each others’ parts, so it’s quite difficult to say who wrote what. I mostly worked on the church area, the area with the ravers, the apartment building, the working-class woman’s quest, and everything that happens in the doomed commercial area.


MM: Regarding the political outlook of the game, do you feel comfortable saying that you speak on behalf of the other writers? Do they share your outlook as a Leftist?


HH: I can speak for Kurvitz, the Creative Director of Disco Elysium, and Aleksander Rostov, Art Director, because I’ve been friends with them since I was 15. Robert is more revolutionary than I am, which is amazing and I love that for him. The reason I’ve been able to say that the game has such strong Leftist roots is because of the creative direction that came from him and Rostov.


The other writers would have to speak for themselves as to how they identify politically. We had a politically diverse writing team. Maybe others would say they’re just liberals, but I don’t want to speak for them. All the writers were interested in politics.


JA: How about you? Growing up, were politics much of a conversation at the dinner table?


HH: I remember well the moment I discovered I was Left-wing. I was about 11, and I took a political compass test online. I remember doing it diligently. When I didn’t understand a question, I researched, so it took me at least a day to go through the test. And then, finally, the answer came: “socialist.” I thought, “Oh my god,” because in Estonia the word socialism has awful connotations. I remember going to my dad at the dinner table and saying, “I took this test online that said that I’m a socialist! What’s going on?” My dad is a progressive Right-wing liberal who has a very classical Estonian political view of things, but somehow he has always been open enough to all kinds of politics. He explained to me what the word socialism actually meant. Not just the history of the Soviet Union, but what were considered actual socialist ideals. A big part of why I became so interested in politics later was because my dad was able to be so open and start that sort of discussion with me, even though we would not always agree.


JA: So, in Estonia, the word socialism commonly evokes the Soviet Union?


HH: Yes. If someone calls you a “socialist,” or worse, a “communist,” it’s usually an insult. You don’t go around calling yourself a socialist. Every single Left-wing person in Estonia first has to think it through: “Is that what I am?” And I understand why. The Soviet Union was a tragedy. I have people in my family who were sent to Siberia. I think every single Estonian has.


We tend to ignore what happened in the Soviet Union just because it’s so painful to recall. However, since we in Estonia have since emerged from this historical tragedy, we should talk about it more. It’s a good example of how a movement can be completely derailed by psychopaths. So, it took me years before I started calling myself a socialist, but now I do so in the hopes that it might give new meaning to it. My identification as a socialist has to do with the ideals of socialism.


JA: It sounds like it was important for you to engage in dialogue with those who held contrasting political views. Is that a practice you’ve tried to keep up?


HH: Yes, definitely. It differs depending on the size of the country. In bigger countries like the U.S., it’s easier or even encouraged to maintain a tight-knit group of people that you agree with. In Estonia, however, there’s only a million people. If I were to only choose friends who shared my political views, my friend group would be incredibly small. So, inevitably, you have to talk to people you don’t agree with, and that’s a good thing. Debate is what changes things; it causes you to understand where other people are coming from.


MM: You thanked Marx and Engels onstage at the Game Awards in 2019 for your political education.[3] How did you originally come across Marx and Engels?


HH: That was in my teenage years, just when I was deeply getting into politics. Although Marx and Engels were probably mentioned in history class, it was likely negative, since generally Estonian history classes paint a bad picture of Marx. So, it was more through my own research at that age, during which I started to read political literature, that led me to them directly. I began to realize the enormous impact Marx and Engels have had — both historically and today — with respect to their understanding of capitalism. Their ideas are so widespread that even people who don’t know anything about politics are vaguely familiar with them. And then, years later, I found friends who had similar beliefs, and who recommended literature to each other.


MM: What sort of literature?


HH: I remember reading a lot of Antonio Gramsci. Modern writers too, like Slavoj Žižek, were a huge influence on me. Žižek is interesting in the sense that he’s one of the few Left-wing thinkers whose works get published in Estonia. He’s broken through the ice, which usually doesn’t happen here.


MM: Would you call yourself a Lacanian, like Žižek?


HH: I don’t know. When I was younger, I would ask myself, “am I a Marxist? Am I just a socialist? Am I a Lacanian?” Now I just say that I’m a socialist and a Left-wing thinker. Even though the details have changed and I’ve changed, my Left-wing ideas have stayed the same.


JA: Is it true that you joined a commune when you were about 14?


HH: Yes, I created one with the politically-minded friends I mentioned earlier. Through them, I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were huge.[4] Because it was difficult to break into the institutions of Estonian cultural life, we created a space to share what we had to offer. And that’s where the name ZA/UM came from.[5] It was what we called the blog, our collective, and all our shared ideas. We wrote about politics, but also published short stories, poems, artwork, etc. Even though the collective was Left-leaning ideologically, we didn’t limit it to Left-wing writers. That would have been impossible as there are so few of them in Estonia. To make up for this, we encouraged debate and discussion. We would have a writer representing one side of an issue publish their article, and then another who would argue against it. Sometimes there were 50 comments in a row.


JA: Apparently there’s a punk scene in Estonia. Was there a crossover between these communities? How did they position themselves relative to the country’s Communist history?


HH: I’m really glad you brought this up, because the punk scene in Estonia has its roots in the 80s and 90s, around the time when the Soviet Union fell. There were two types of punks. On the one hand, there were the anarchists, and, on the other, nationalist punks who were for the Estonian national state. Of these two types, the anarchist punks were a huge influence on me and Disco Elysium. One influential Estonian anarchist, punk or post-punk band is Vennaskond, which translates to “Brotherhood.” Their approach early on was interesting because they were creating imagined idealist worlds via their lyrics. They were all about building something, but in this poetic dreamland kind of way; they weren’t just about tearing everything down. They also published books set in fantastical worlds, and this was a huge influence for coming up with the world of Elysium itself.


JA: Speaking of the role imagination plays for the contemporary Left, some observers have read Disco Elysium through the lens of the British postmodern critic Mark Fisher, particularly his notions of “hauntology” and “capitalist realism.”


HH: I’ve read and enjoyed Mark Fisher, but I don’t think there was a conscious influence. That overlap might have come from addressing some of the same topics as Fisher, like the material conditions beneath everyday life and mental health. I’ve been thinking recently about the latter, that it makes a lot of sense that we’re all so mentally ill. In fact, it would be incredibly weird if we weren’t anxious and depressed living in this world. In Estonia, there’s a saying that every family has its own alcoholic. As for me, I’ve started relating to my own mental health issues by accepting them, realizing that yes, okay, the world makes us feel anxious and depressed, but that’s a normal reaction. The question is what to do about it, how to make sure we aren’t completely immobilized from acting to improve the world.


Usually, when I bring up such topics with other Leftists, I begin to sense a shared feeling of defeat. And this comes up in Disco Elysium: that joke about how communism is a failure and is all about failing.[6] This feeling is what we wanted to really touch on: “we had an idea, a dream, and then we failed, and got so utterly defeated. What now?” But no one has an answer. It’s just too sad for anyone to think about.


JA: One of Harry’s key qualities as a character is his alcohol-inflicted amnesia.[7] Do you think the Left is amnesiatic in some way?


HH: With Harry, we just applied a very standard trope in building his character. We didn’t make any conscious connection between it and the Left, but that’s an interesting interpretation.


MM: It seems that by way of Disco Elysium’s various decision trees and skill checks, the player occupies not only the headspace of Harry, but the Left in general. The player’s reckoning with the failure of the Left is embedded into the game via its mechanics.


HH: That’s an interesting interpretation that I’ve never heard before. I absolutely love it! You can really play around with this idea, like when the player makes Harry become Right-wing. It’s like how in some Left-wing circles, after Bernie Sanders’ defeat, some people realized they could not achieve change immediately, becoming disappointed and drifting to the Right.


We wanted players to arrive at political conclusions through playing, not by picking whatever ideology they preferred at the game’s beginning. It isn’t one of those games where you say at the outset, “I’m a socialist,” or, “I’m a centrist.” It’s something you discover through your actions and your dialogue choices. I’ve heard a lot of audience feedback that people are surprised to find themselves leaning in certain political directions via their in-game choices. The same mechanic is also how we engaged players who were not interested in politics. Through playing, they realized that there actually are political choices and opinions woven into our everyday dialogues, and that politics isn’t just something that happens in the media and among politicians, but is what influences our everyday life.


JA: Let’s talk about some aspects of the plot. You said earlier that you wrote the “doomed commercial area” section of the game, which is an abandoned urban zone where the player is tasked with getting to the bottom of its economic “curse.” There, the player encounters a vague sense of a liminally-perceived problem or crisis. What were you exploring?


HH: There’s a character there called Plaisance who has an esoteric bookshop. [8] One thing we were trying to explore with her was how people tend to offer a range of different explanations for a problem that is often obvious, just in order to avoid facing the reality of the latter. The truth of the matter is that under capitalism we don’t have a lot of control over our jobs, our income, or our means of survival. But psychologically, we have to find ways of dealing with such impasses, and a lot of people turn to esoteric explanations. They find imaginary means of explaining their situation, if just to give themselves a sense of control. And I’m not saying this to shame people; it’s a completely normal reaction. So, with Plaisance, we wanted to explore this mystification, this attempt to explain what could be going wrong in her doomed commercial district. That is, if you look at the material conditions of the town, the question is, why should business thrive there? It’s a town that doesn’t have any outsiders going in, people are very poor, and it doesn’t have much purchasing power around it. But the people there try to explain the problem away, falling into superstition.


We also wanted to make sure that there is never just one answer, as is the case in real life. There are always competing, different reasons for what is going on, and for us, as writers, we wanted to come up with as many possible answers as we could. It makes things more realistic.


JA: Plaisance is also interested in economics.


HH: Yes, a lot of modern mystical thinking relates to economics. Manifesting is a good example, in that supposedly if you do certain rituals like thinking only good thoughts about money, the money will come. If you look at successful, rich people, you’ll soon discover that they cling to so many old rituals, whether that of simply repeating the mantra of hard work, or others that make even less sense rationally. But in reality, success is random. You’re either born into a rich family, or you win the lottery, so to speak, and somehow the algorithm notices you and you become successful. So, we use rituals, if just to calm our psyche. Plaisance is trying to do that; she’s trying to figure out what to do to be successful without having the real answer. She’s just doing what keeps her psychology intact and working.


MM: Wilhelm Reich wrote about mysticism in the context of working-class supporters of the Nazis, concluding that “Marxist politics had not included in its practice the character structure of the masses and the social significance of mysticism.”[9]


HH: Yes, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the mystical or esoteric character of extreme Right-wing views. There’s a pipeline.


JA: The Right-wing “vision quest” in the game is particularly interesting in that regard, where the player can engage with the fascistic character Measurehead and the idea of fascist time travel.[10] Do you see the far Right as a desire to turn back the clock?


HH: That’s one way of seeing it. A lot of far-Right thought consists of an idealized slant, a perception that things were better in the past. That’s how many on the Right explain it themselves, but no political side is unified. That’s the difficult thing about writing about politics. There are different fractures that are always changing. Those who want to return to some amazing, imagined past are just one part of the far Right, and there are others who don’t think about it.


JA: I want to ask a broader question about your views on art. In the church section you worked on, a vision of the future is brought about through the medium of a new “anodic” dance music. There are also the mariners who use songs to cross the Pale.[11] Do you share this sense of hopefulness, and how do you see it relating to art?


HH: Art is incredibly helpful in keeping us going, so that the totality of capitalism doesn’t break us down. But I’m pessimistic about art’s ability to transform material conditions or bring about political change. It can perhaps help change people’s views, maybe help them become more curious. I’ve heard from the Disco Elysium audience that there are people who weren’t that political before playing the game, but whom the game prompted to start learning more.


There’s another interesting topic, one I’ve noticed in post-Soviet countries and that I’ve heard is similar in China: authoritarian governments cause young people to lose interest in politics, which implies the dangerous outcome in which one says, “politics is for someone else; I can change so little that I might as well become disinterested.” This came out of the post-Soviet years, and it’s still affecting Estonian youth.


Art can create an interest in politics, but in order to make change we have to rely on other things. Art is only the first step. I’m pessimistic in the sense that we need to start actually organizing in order to make change.


MM: You’re saying that your pessimism lies in the present, and your optimism lies in paths forward?


HH: Yes.


JA: Paralleling your experience with taking the online political compass test when you were 11.


HH: Yes, exactly.


MM: The game tends to use the word “communism” as opposed to softer-sounding terms like “socialism” or “Leftism.” How have players responded in Estonia?


HH: I know that at least some part of our audience, especially from post-Soviet countries, are in denial about my political views. I’ve seen comments that suggest that me shouting out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards was done ironically.


MM: There was, in a since-deleted post on the ZA/UM Instagram, a picture of the developers’ studio with a portrait of Stalin on the wall.[12] Was that ironic or sincere?


HH: Estonia is a post-Soviet country, so there’s simply a lot of old Communist things hanging around everywhere. I’m not pro-Stalin, I can tell you that. I completely condemn Stalin. It’s a tragedy that Stalinism happened. A psychopath entirely took over our ideals of what socialism was meant to be.


Shouting out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards was definitely not ironic. I did it not to spread propaganda, but to inform people about where I come from, how I see the world, so they can see my biases, my ideological leanings. I’m not free of ideology. I just try to be conscious of it.


JA: The game deals with ideology in an interesting way. It’s framed from a default liberal perspective, quite literally in the sense that the camera hovers above the player, its isometric point of view identical with that of the Moralist International[13] gunships in the sky that hover as an invisible threat of violence. Then there’s the character of Kim Kitsuragi, who, with his deadpan pragmatism, acts as your liberal conscience, your moralist Jiminy Cricket.


HH: Yes, the camera perspective is a good thing to point out. Exactly as you said, this all-encompassing liberal media view is the lens through which we see reality in the West. So, it was conscious on our part as developers to make the camera perspective reflect that, offering a commentary on how so much of the media is liberal, but presents itself as neutral. And then once you become aware of different political ideologies, you start to see that there is actually no purely neutral observer point of view. But also we on the development team do happen to like isometric games. We almost always needed to have some in-game reason for every single thing that happened in Disco Elysium, so we just needed to conceptualize and make sense of it: “why are we seeing everything in that perspective?”


JA: The story intermeshes political and personal loss via Harry reliving his traumatic break-up with a character who, broadly speaking, personifies liberalism.[14] Do you regard society as being in a break-up with liberalism?


HH: In the 90s, once the Soviet Union fell, there was this “end of history” moment in the popular imagination for about ten years. But then 9/11 happened, and it was like, “okay, history continues.” As the 21st century has increasingly taken its shape, we’ve begun to realize that liberalism isn’t as neutral as it proclaims itself to be. Many players have given feedback that at first they picked the moralist, centrist, liberal options, only to be surprised at the outcomes of those choices, which are not as simply good, nonpolitical, or neutral as they expect. One thinks, “I’m not taking political sides at all; I’m not into any kinds of extremes,” but this view itself is part of the political discourse. Liberalism, too, is a choice, not just the default setting.


MM: Do you know this Russian joke? “Everything the Party told us about communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true.”


HH: Yes, I know it. Exactly. For my parents’ generation, their school classes were all about what communism is, so they have this different understanding of what true Left-wing politics could achieve in the modern day. To them it all just seems like a thing of the past. But it’s changing in other Western countries where there isn’t that same past.


MM: How do your parents see liberalism?


HH: My parents’ generation sees liberalism as the answer, and for a similar reason a lot of Estonia is trying to be the good boy of the European Union: “we do things correctly here.” As if Estonia is asking, “how European, how liberal can we be?” There are also some more nationalist, far-Right parts of my parents’ generation, and, surprisingly, of my generation too. I was shocked when I realized how the far-Right is growing among young people.


MM: You earlier mentioned the example of disaffection after the failure of Bernie Sanders, who, of course, ran for presidency twice with the Democrats and eventually endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. After that experience, some groups on the Left, especially younger people, are seeing “true” Leftism as a matter of being more radical — less hypocritical — than the liberals. Was there a social democratic moment in Estonia, the equivalent of a Sanders movement, Momentum, SYRIZA, or Podemos?


HH: No. There is a social democrat party that always gets into Parliament, but they’re not even among the top three most popular parties here.[15] Interestingly enough, the party that has occasionally stood up for the working class is a centrist party that never uses the words “Left-wing.”[16] Again, this is because of history. It takes a long time for people to understand that such words can mean something other than state repression and all those horrible things. So I understand where it comes from.


This is maybe where the pessimism about socialism in Disco Elysium comes through. For a Left-wing politician in Estonia, fighting successfully for the rights of working-class people means not mentioning that you’re Left-wing. You have to be clever; you have to hide it in order to get things done.


JA: This reminds me of Evrart Claire, the union boss in the shipping container.[17] How do you regard unions with respect to the Left?


HH: I’m all for unions. Claire was more of a commentary on the fact that there can be people in Left-wing organizations who sometimes have questionable morals, or who do things merely for the sake of doing them. But it was not a commentary on unions per se. I believe in unions, especially in the context of Western societies. Even in Estonia, where people are not known for being social and where the whole working-together-in-groups thing tends not to work out, unions have proven to be surprisingly useful and effective given our history. They have a role.


Unions are important in the video game industry, which is a good example of what capitalism can do in an industry that is so unregulated and so new. We desperately need unions to start regulating it. Even the gaming audience is slowly realizing that they’re not going to get amazing games without the people who make the games having great conditions and a sense of security. I recently read a statistic that said that an average video-game employee spends five years in the industry before burning out and leaving.


JA: Some unions can and have become corrupted, though, and others have become a mere appendage of the state. Do you see any tension within movements with noble aims and yet which require necessary evils?


HH: All movements or organizations can get corrupted in a sense. People have diverging interests. Human beings are so diverse that things can go south in any given cause or organizational context. But, because Leftism has such pronounced ideals, it becomes more noticeable when things go wrong. Take public political discourse where if a Right-wing politician is corrupt or steals something, people say, “at least he was honest about it.” But in Left organizations, a similar issue wouldn’t relate to the cause itself so much as being an organizational problem. So that’s what we tried to explore by making the union boss a polarizing character. It’s not just “union equals good.”


JA: Do you think unions improve capitalism or just ameliorate it?


HH: That’s a difficult question. There are some people who say that, for example, social democrats are extending the lifespan of capitalism because they’re making it a little bit more tolerable, and what we need is actually revolution. We do need a revolution too; I agree with that. At the same time, I think our lives are short and we have to do as much as possible in the present to make things even a bit better for workers.


MM: You mentioned earlier the “ideals” of socialism as opposed to certain grim realities surrounding its past. In the Platypus primary Marxist reading group, we read a text by Leszek Kołakowski, a communist from the former Polish People’s Republic in the Soviet Union, who wrote that “the Left gives forth utopias,” by which he meant not unrealizable utopias in the colloquial sense, but definite visions for transforming the bounds of the possible:


Utopia is the striving for changes which “realistically” cannot be brought about by immediate action, which lie beyond the foreseeable future and defy planning. Still, utopia is a tool of action upon reality and of planning social activity. . . . That is why the Left cannot be defined by saying it will always, in every case, support every demand of the working class, or that it is always on the side of the majority. The Left must define itself on the level of ideas, conceding that in many instances it will find itself in the minority. . . . the Left must be defined in intellectual, and not class, terms.[18]


HH: That’s very interesting. To the first part of the quote, I was like, “Yeah” — the entire utopia thing has been a huge draw for me with respect to Leftism. I’m a person who needs to envision a better world. I’m not able to look at what we have and just say that this is enough. I need to have a sense of vision. But then when you got to the conclusion of the quote, I didn’t agree with it. I very strongly disagree that Leftism is merely an intellectual exercise.


MM: Kołakowski isn’t talking about “the intellectuals” versus “the workers.” Rather, he’s much more broadly addressing the way we think about things: that whether one is a professor or a factory worker, the concept one applies to “the Left” matters. In other words, by conceiving of the Left in intellectual, not strictly practical terms, by holding it as a fixed idea in our heads, we challenge ourselves to regard the Left as a category unto itself, not merely a competing faction with the Right. By upholding this ideal — that of transforming, not preserving the world — the Left cannot accommodate to “practical necessity.” cannot become the Right. Which leads us to a point we’ve been circling around, that of ideas and art. Why do you see video games as an adequate means to express Left ideas?


HH: Ideas, even fantastical ones, are important. Capitalism, on the other hand, causes people to stop being able to envision alternatives. Fiction functions to keep other worlds alive. Ursula le Guin, for instance, did it brilliantly in her writing. You can’t just take one part of Leftism and say, “let’s only focus on that.” Rather, they work in this beautiful symbiosis where you have ideals on the one hand and the immediate actions we can take on the other. The ideas are the star you follow, the marker you set up for where to go. I hope that creativity can help us expand what is possible.


MM: Disco Elysium is all about the failure of Communism and the Left generally. What do you make of the game’s success? On the one hand, it’s great for you personally that the game has sold well and earned awards, but on the other, it indicates that audiences can sense that there is a sustained crisis beneath the Left. To put it another way, if the Left was doing wonderfully, perhaps your game wouldn’t be so successful.


HH: The success of the game is interesting in itself because it leads us to examine the material conditions of success, the question of who earns money from the game. The entire video-game industry, and creative industries generally, have this problem where often the intellectual property rights are owned by capitalist entities who want to control everything that happens. A lot of people have pointed out that what happened to our studio after the game’s popularity was almost ironic.[19] Where did the money go? Who profited from the success of this Leftist game? Well, spoiler alert, not Leftists.


It’s a textbook example of how you can have all these Leftist ideas, but then you also have the material conditions around them. Is it possible to make art in capitalism without making money for capitalists? Probably not. Maybe crowdfunding is the answer, but it’s difficult.


The success of the game is a very complicated topic for me. It’s good because of the audience and what it meant for people. But it did not turn out the way I thought it would turn out. I was a little naïve.


JA: You talked earlier about the Estonian Left having difficulty reconciling itself with its past. The Mazovian reading group in the communist vision quest make a tower made out of matchboxes, which looks like a famous 1919 design for a Soviet building that was to represent the dialectical spiral of history.[20] Do you think history “spirals”?


MM: Or is it an eternal recurrence?


HH: I would say it’s a spiral, not a circle. We are returning to the same themes but always with a new twist.


MM: Spiraling upwards?


HH: Exactly. I’ve realized during this interview that I’m actually an optimistic person. I always used to think that I was pessimistic.


JA: How does this relate to your writing?


HH: All of my writing is inspired by history. I sometimes say that I don’t make things up, I just take them from history and then put them in another context so people pay them more attention. That’s how the entire world of Elysium was created. We just took things out of their contexts, freeing them of the conscious notions and subconscious associations attached to them by applying different names and aesthetics. The hope was that people could see them in a new light, and that is what I usually say I do. But I’m not just writing for myself; I’m writing to communicate ideas. These come from history, about which Kurvitz and I read a lot.


JA: Communicating with history, putting the past and present in communication with one another?


HH: Yes. Every decision about which way to go forward as a society is so heavily influenced by how we see and interpret the past. When conflicts break out between states, for instance, a question people ask is, “what is the history behind these events?” How do we understand and reconceptualize them?


JA: In the game there’s the motif of the Return (Le Retour), which seems to evoke the beautiful potential of a vague and unspecified event lying in an emancipatory future.[21] It seems to be both something new and also, as the name suggests, a return to something old.


HH: It’s interesting that you picked that. I think the Return is one of the most important concepts in the game, even though we don’t explore it much other than via snippets here and there. We could get psychological or Lacanian here, like the idea of returning to your mother’s womb.


MM: Or Freudian: the return of the repressed?


HH: Yes. It’s what signifies revolution in the world of Elysium. It’s the same idea I talked about earlier. Revolution is usually imagined in the future, but here, it’s as if it’s something you have already felt. It suggests why we’re so drawn to notions of revolution. Everyone has felt it in their life at some point, so it’s a return to that feeling you already know. It’s a bit of a poetic, mystical explanation, but the Return signifies revolution and the aspiration that one day it will happen after all.


MM: It’s like art. In the realm of aesthetic feeling, we appreciate that which we already sense but cannot yet find words for. And yet Adorno talks about the artistic act as the creation of that which we do not yet know.


HH: Definitely. Art can surprise you, like when you later look at an artwork you yourself created and say, “so that’s what that is.” It’s like discovering a part of yourself. In the context of society, I agree that it’s like showing something that might still be unknown to the collective consciousness. That’s what you’re striving to do.


JA: And yet it contains some of what we were addressing previously regarding Measurehead’s fascistic time travel, how it’s a forward-looking return.


HH: Yes, I noticed that connection as well when I was talking, but I had never put that together. On the one hand there’s Measurehead’s return to better times, and on the other there’s the “return” forward into a utopian world that we have never known and has never existed, but feels like home. The former is merely an imagined past that we see signs of and yet have never experienced. To go there would be to go backwards. |P

---

[1] This interview assumes readers have not played Disco Elysium. For more about the game and its elements, see <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Disco_Elysium_Wiki>.


[2] Downloadable content.


[3] The Game Awards were held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on December 12, 2019. See “Disco Elysium Wins the Fresh Indie Game Award Presented by Reggie Fils-Aimé,” <https://youtu.be/DOz4QcRZu_g>.


[4] Nihilist.ee (later nihilist.fm) was an Estonian social criticism and literature portal created by several people who later worked on Disco Elysium. For an archived version of the blog, see <https://web.archive.org/web/20190622030555/http://www.zaum.ee/2009/> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20160202141427/http://nihilist.fm/>. For a brief history, see Stefan Peetri, “Arvustus. ‘FINAL CUT’ kui post-eestlaslik arhiiv,” kultuur (February 11, 2017), <https://kultuur.err.ee/640249/arvustus-final-cut-kui-post-eestlaslik-arhiiv>, which is a book review of Nihilist.fm: Final Cut, ed. Siim Sinamäe (ZA/UM, 2017).


[5] In an interview, Robert Kurvitz explains that there is a Russian meaning: from or for the mind. See Alex Wiltshire, “ZA/UM created one of the most original RPGs of the decade,” Games Radar (January 9, 2020), <https://www.gamesradar.com/the-maki...-one-of-the-most-original-rpgs-of-the-decade/>. The name of the studio may also allude to за́умь (Zaum) ([Russian] transrational, abstruse; it is made up of the prefix за (beyond) and the noun умъ (mind)), which was a series of linguistic experiences done by Russian avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, et. al., in the early 20th century.


[6] “Yes! Abject failure. Total, irreversible defeat on all fronts! Absolutely vanquished, beaten, curb-stomped and pissed on — until *you* came along! *You* will reverse the fortune of the workers of the world.” For the full quote, see <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/DiscoElysium>.


[7] Harry Du Bois is the player-controlled protagonist of Disco Elysium, an officer of the Revachol Citizens Militia with a troubled past.


[8] Plaisance is the owner of an unsuccessful bookshop who believes in a “curse” that prevents businesses from succeeding in the doomed commercial area, and that by praying for protection of her “honest business venture,” she can alleviate it. She fetishizes financial success not only figuratively but also literally, in that she fills her shop with fetishes designed to ensure financial prosperity through magic. See <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Plaisance>.


[9] Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as Material Power” (1933/45), in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), 3, italicized in the text.


[10] See <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Turn_back_the_wheels_of_time>.


[11] In the world of Disco Elysium, the Pale is the quasi-metaphysical separative tissue between landmasses and reality itself, described as “achromatic, odorless, featureless . . . the enemy of matter and life . . . the transition state of being into nothingness.” Traveling through the Pale is difficult and risky psychologically, but it can be done using certain technologies, including song.


[12] See <https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAc...co_elysium_developers_have_a_stalin_portrait/>.


[13] In Disco Elysium, the Moralist International (Moralintern) is an international organization dedicated to the preservation of order and democratic values and promoting progress through incremental change. It can be regarded as roughly analogous to the United Nations or European Union.


[14] As Harry works through his troubled psyche, he confuses his real former fiancée, Dora, with the Disco Elysium universe’s personification of liberalism, Dolores Dei, remembering them as the same person.


[15] Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond (Social Democratic Party), founded in 1990.


[16] Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party), founded in 1991 as a successor of the Eestimaa Rhavarinne (Popular Front of Estonia).


[17] Evrart Claire is a character in Disco Elysium who appears, at first, to be a superficially corrupt union official. However, if the player investigates Evrart, it becomes unclear whether his advocacy for the working class is a shield for his corruption, or his corruption a contrivance to remain effective in capitalism while sincerely advocating for the working class.


[18] Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left” (1958), in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969), 147, 151.


[19] In 2022, several founding ZA/UM members (including Hindpere, Rostov, and Kurvitz) were fired by new management who were allegedly brought in without their knowledge. The studio retained the Disco Elysium intellectual property. There were allegations of exploitative work environments, fraud, and misallocated profits, but exact circumstances are disputed. See Klein Felt, “Disco Elysium & ZA/UM Controversy Explained,” The Direct (July 4, 2024), <https://thedirect.com/article/disco-elysium-zaum-controversy-explained>.


[20] The design is Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International,” also known as “Tatlin’s Tower” (1919–20); the proposed building was not built. See Kye, “Generating plasm and stacking matchboxes: how to build a better future through collective consciousness,” Estherax (April 27, 2023), <https://estherax.tumblr.com/post/715696406050029569/generating-plasm-and-stacking-matchboxes-how-to>, and Chris Cutrone’s chart diagram of the spiral of history, <https://chriscutrone.platypus1917.o.../2011/12/leninmarxismspiral053111sequence.pdf>.


[21] “The Return” is a vaguely-described world-changing event alluded to by several characters in Disco Elysium and which is to occur at an indeterminate point in the future. It is usually alluded to cryptically.

 

[Maxie]

Are we posting interviews? I can contribute to this thread.

Just what I always wanted, to listen to two woke idiots tickle each other's assholes for a few hours

For a change of pace, my article has three of them.

---

Forward-looking return: An interview with Disco Elysium writer Helen Hindpere​

​

Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland​

Platypus Review 173 | February 2025 | Article link

On May 17, 2024, Platypus New Zealand members Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland interviewed Helen Hindpere, lead writer on the video game Disco Elysium (2019). Set in the fantastic realist world of Elysium, the role-playing game includes skill checks and dialogue trees that allow the player to determine their political ideology while exploring the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, an Estonian studio with socialist art collective origins. An edited transcript follows.[1]

Full Article

Michael McClelland: What was your role as a lead writer of Disco Elysium?


Helen Hindpere: I was one of the first writers to be hired, so I was basically there from the beginning. Robert Kurvitz was the lead writer for the majority of the game as it was originally released. Only later on did I become a lead writer, and that was for smaller parts of the game, the “political vision quests,” which were later included via DLC.[2] My role as lead writer involved supervising and editing others’ work and coming up with ideas as to what that political writing should be.


Jamie Adam: Did you all write together?


HH: Yes, we had a writer’s room. Our studio in Estonia was in this run-down building that we were squatting in. It was definitely not fire-safe or safe for business, but that was all we could afford back then. But it was also romantic, as squats often tend to be. We had four or five writers.


MM: What percentage of the writing was yours, roughly?


HH: A lot of writers worked on each others’ parts, so it’s quite difficult to say who wrote what. I mostly worked on the church area, the area with the ravers, the apartment building, the working-class woman’s quest, and everything that happens in the doomed commercial area.


MM: Regarding the political outlook of the game, do you feel comfortable saying that you speak on behalf of the other writers? Do they share your outlook as a Leftist?


HH: I can speak for Kurvitz, the Creative Director of Disco Elysium, and Aleksander Rostov, Art Director, because I’ve been friends with them since I was 15. Robert is more revolutionary than I am, which is amazing and I love that for him. The reason I’ve been able to say that the game has such strong Leftist roots is because of the creative direction that came from him and Rostov.


The other writers would have to speak for themselves as to how they identify politically. We had a politically diverse writing team. Maybe others would say they’re just liberals, but I don’t want to speak for them. All the writers were interested in politics.


JA: How about you? Growing up, were politics much of a conversation at the dinner table?


HH: I remember well the moment I discovered I was Left-wing. I was about 11, and I took a political compass test online. I remember doing it diligently. When I didn’t understand a question, I researched, so it took me at least a day to go through the test. And then, finally, the answer came: “socialist.” I thought, “Oh my god,” because in Estonia the word socialism has awful connotations. I remember going to my dad at the dinner table and saying, “I took this test online that said that I’m a socialist! What’s going on?” My dad is a progressive Right-wing liberal who has a very classical Estonian political view of things, but somehow he has always been open enough to all kinds of politics. He explained to me what the word socialism actually meant. Not just the history of the Soviet Union, but what were considered actual socialist ideals. A big part of why I became so interested in politics later was because my dad was able to be so open and start that sort of discussion with me, even though we would not always agree.


JA: So, in Estonia, the word socialism commonly evokes the Soviet Union?


HH: Yes. If someone calls you a “socialist,” or worse, a “communist,” it’s usually an insult. You don’t go around calling yourself a socialist. Every single Left-wing person in Estonia first has to think it through: “Is that what I am?” And I understand why. The Soviet Union was a tragedy. I have people in my family who were sent to Siberia. I think every single Estonian has.


We tend to ignore what happened in the Soviet Union just because it’s so painful to recall. However, since we in Estonia have since emerged from this historical tragedy, we should talk about it more. It’s a good example of how a movement can be completely derailed by psychopaths. So, it took me years before I started calling myself a socialist, but now I do so in the hopes that it might give new meaning to it. My identification as a socialist has to do with the ideals of socialism.


JA: It sounds like it was important for you to engage in dialogue with those who held contrasting political views. Is that a practice you’ve tried to keep up?


HH: Yes, definitely. It differs depending on the size of the country. In bigger countries like the U.S., it’s easier or even encouraged to maintain a tight-knit group of people that you agree with. In Estonia, however, there’s only a million people. If I were to only choose friends who shared my political views, my friend group would be incredibly small. So, inevitably, you have to talk to people you don’t agree with, and that’s a good thing. Debate is what changes things; it causes you to understand where other people are coming from.


MM: You thanked Marx and Engels onstage at the Game Awards in 2019 for your political education.[3] How did you originally come across Marx and Engels?


HH: That was in my teenage years, just when I was deeply getting into politics. Although Marx and Engels were probably mentioned in history class, it was likely negative, since generally Estonian history classes paint a bad picture of Marx. So, it was more through my own research at that age, during which I started to read political literature, that led me to them directly. I began to realize the enormous impact Marx and Engels have had — both historically and today — with respect to their understanding of capitalism. Their ideas are so widespread that even people who don’t know anything about politics are vaguely familiar with them. And then, years later, I found friends who had similar beliefs, and who recommended literature to each other.


MM: What sort of literature?


HH: I remember reading a lot of Antonio Gramsci. Modern writers too, like Slavoj Žižek, were a huge influence on me. Žižek is interesting in the sense that he’s one of the few Left-wing thinkers whose works get published in Estonia. He’s broken through the ice, which usually doesn’t happen here.


MM: Would you call yourself a Lacanian, like Žižek?


HH: I don’t know. When I was younger, I would ask myself, “am I a Marxist? Am I just a socialist? Am I a Lacanian?” Now I just say that I’m a socialist and a Left-wing thinker. Even though the details have changed and I’ve changed, my Left-wing ideas have stayed the same.


JA: Is it true that you joined a commune when you were about 14?


HH: Yes, I created one with the politically-minded friends I mentioned earlier. Through them, I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were huge.[4] Because it was difficult to break into the institutions of Estonian cultural life, we created a space to share what we had to offer. And that’s where the name ZA/UM came from.[5] It was what we called the blog, our collective, and all our shared ideas. We wrote about politics, but also published short stories, poems, artwork, etc. Even though the collective was Left-leaning ideologically, we didn’t limit it to Left-wing writers. That would have been impossible as there are so few of them in Estonia. To make up for this, we encouraged debate and discussion. We would have a writer representing one side of an issue publish their article, and then another who would argue against it. Sometimes there were 50 comments in a row.


JA: Apparently there’s a punk scene in Estonia. Was there a crossover between these communities? How did they position themselves relative to the country’s Communist history?


HH: I’m really glad you brought this up, because the punk scene in Estonia has its roots in the 80s and 90s, around the time when the Soviet Union fell. There were two types of punks. On the one hand, there were the anarchists, and, on the other, nationalist punks who were for the Estonian national state. Of these two types, the anarchist punks were a huge influence on me and Disco Elysium. One influential Estonian anarchist, punk or post-punk band is Vennaskond, which translates to “Brotherhood.” Their approach early on was interesting because they were creating imagined idealist worlds via their lyrics. They were all about building something, but in this poetic dreamland kind of way; they weren’t just about tearing everything down. They also published books set in fantastical worlds, and this was a huge influence for coming up with the world of Elysium itself.


JA: Speaking of the role imagination plays for the contemporary Left, some observers have read Disco Elysium through the lens of the British postmodern critic Mark Fisher, particularly his notions of “hauntology” and “capitalist realism.”


HH: I’ve read and enjoyed Mark Fisher, but I don’t think there was a conscious influence. That overlap might have come from addressing some of the same topics as Fisher, like the material conditions beneath everyday life and mental health. I’ve been thinking recently about the latter, that it makes a lot of sense that we’re all so mentally ill. In fact, it would be incredibly weird if we weren’t anxious and depressed living in this world. In Estonia, there’s a saying that every family has its own alcoholic. As for me, I’ve started relating to my own mental health issues by accepting them, realizing that yes, okay, the world makes us feel anxious and depressed, but that’s a normal reaction. The question is what to do about it, how to make sure we aren’t completely immobilized from acting to improve the world.


Usually, when I bring up such topics with other Leftists, I begin to sense a shared feeling of defeat. And this comes up in Disco Elysium: that joke about how communism is a failure and is all about failing.[6] This feeling is what we wanted to really touch on: “we had an idea, a dream, and then we failed, and got so utterly defeated. What now?” But no one has an answer. It’s just too sad for anyone to think about.


JA: One of Harry’s key qualities as a character is his alcohol-inflicted amnesia.[7] Do you think the Left is amnesiatic in some way?


HH: With Harry, we just applied a very standard trope in building his character. We didn’t make any conscious connection between it and the Left, but that’s an interesting interpretation.


MM: It seems that by way of Disco Elysium’s various decision trees and skill checks, the player occupies not only the headspace of Harry, but the Left in general. The player’s reckoning with the failure of the Left is embedded into the game via its mechanics.


HH: That’s an interesting interpretation that I’ve never heard before. I absolutely love it! You can really play around with this idea, like when the player makes Harry become Right-wing. It’s like how in some Left-wing circles, after Bernie Sanders’ defeat, some people realized they could not achieve change immediately, becoming disappointed and drifting to the Right.


We wanted players to arrive at political conclusions through playing, not by picking whatever ideology they preferred at the game’s beginning. It isn’t one of those games where you say at the outset, “I’m a socialist,” or, “I’m a centrist.” It’s something you discover through your actions and your dialogue choices. I’ve heard a lot of audience feedback that people are surprised to find themselves leaning in certain political directions via their in-game choices. The same mechanic is also how we engaged players who were not interested in politics. Through playing, they realized that there actually are political choices and opinions woven into our everyday dialogues, and that politics isn’t just something that happens in the media and among politicians, but is what influences our everyday life.


JA: Let’s talk about some aspects of the plot. You said earlier that you wrote the “doomed commercial area” section of the game, which is an abandoned urban zone where the player is tasked with getting to the bottom of its economic “curse.” There, the player encounters a vague sense of a liminally-perceived problem or crisis. What were you exploring?


HH: There’s a character there called Plaisance who has an esoteric bookshop. [8] One thing we were trying to explore with her was how people tend to offer a range of different explanations for a problem that is often obvious, just in order to avoid facing the reality of the latter. The truth of the matter is that under capitalism we don’t have a lot of control over our jobs, our income, or our means of survival. But psychologically, we have to find ways of dealing with such impasses, and a lot of people turn to esoteric explanations. They find imaginary means of explaining their situation, if just to give themselves a sense of control. And I’m not saying this to shame people; it’s a completely normal reaction. So, with Plaisance, we wanted to explore this mystification, this attempt to explain what could be going wrong in her doomed commercial district. That is, if you look at the material conditions of the town, the question is, why should business thrive there? It’s a town that doesn’t have any outsiders going in, people are very poor, and it doesn’t have much purchasing power around it. But the people there try to explain the problem away, falling into superstition.


We also wanted to make sure that there is never just one answer, as is the case in real life. There are always competing, different reasons for what is going on, and for us, as writers, we wanted to come up with as many possible answers as we could. It makes things more realistic.


JA: Plaisance is also interested in economics.


HH: Yes, a lot of modern mystical thinking relates to economics. Manifesting is a good example, in that supposedly if you do certain rituals like thinking only good thoughts about money, the money will come. If you look at successful, rich people, you’ll soon discover that they cling to so many old rituals, whether that of simply repeating the mantra of hard work, or others that make even less sense rationally. But in reality, success is random. You’re either born into a rich family, or you win the lottery, so to speak, and somehow the algorithm notices you and you become successful. So, we use rituals, if just to calm our psyche. Plaisance is trying to do that; she’s trying to figure out what to do to be successful without having the real answer. She’s just doing what keeps her psychology intact and working.


MM: Wilhelm Reich wrote about mysticism in the context of working-class supporters of the Nazis, concluding that “Marxist politics had not included in its practice the character structure of the masses and the social significance of mysticism.”[9]


HH: Yes, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the mystical or esoteric character of extreme Right-wing views. There’s a pipeline.


JA: The Right-wing “vision quest” in the game is particularly interesting in that regard, where the player can engage with the fascistic character Measurehead and the idea of fascist time travel.[10] Do you see the far Right as a desire to turn back the clock?


HH: That’s one way of seeing it. A lot of far-Right thought consists of an idealized slant, a perception that things were better in the past. That’s how many on the Right explain it themselves, but no political side is unified. That’s the difficult thing about writing about politics. There are different fractures that are always changing. Those who want to return to some amazing, imagined past are just one part of the far Right, and there are others who don’t think about it.


JA: I want to ask a broader question about your views on art. In the church section you worked on, a vision of the future is brought about through the medium of a new “anodic” dance music. There are also the mariners who use songs to cross the Pale.[11] Do you share this sense of hopefulness, and how do you see it relating to art?


HH: Art is incredibly helpful in keeping us going, so that the totality of capitalism doesn’t break us down. But I’m pessimistic about art’s ability to transform material conditions or bring about political change. It can perhaps help change people’s views, maybe help them become more curious. I’ve heard from the Disco Elysium audience that there are people who weren’t that political before playing the game, but whom the game prompted to start learning more.


There’s another interesting topic, one I’ve noticed in post-Soviet countries and that I’ve heard is similar in China: authoritarian governments cause young people to lose interest in politics, which implies the dangerous outcome in which one says, “politics is for someone else; I can change so little that I might as well become disinterested.” This came out of the post-Soviet years, and it’s still affecting Estonian youth.


Art can create an interest in politics, but in order to make change we have to rely on other things. Art is only the first step. I’m pessimistic in the sense that we need to start actually organizing in order to make change.


MM: You’re saying that your pessimism lies in the present, and your optimism lies in paths forward?


HH: Yes.


JA: Paralleling your experience with taking the online political compass test when you were 11.


HH: Yes, exactly.


MM: The game tends to use the word “communism” as opposed to softer-sounding terms like “socialism” or “Leftism.” How have players responded in Estonia?


HH: I know that at least some part of our audience, especially from post-Soviet countries, are in denial about my political views. I’ve seen comments that suggest that me shouting out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards was done ironically.


MM: There was, in a since-deleted post on the ZA/UM Instagram, a picture of the developers’ studio with a portrait of Stalin on the wall.[12] Was that ironic or sincere?


HH: Estonia is a post-Soviet country, so there’s simply a lot of old Communist things hanging around everywhere. I’m not pro-Stalin, I can tell you that. I completely condemn Stalin. It’s a tragedy that Stalinism happened. A psychopath entirely took over our ideals of what socialism was meant to be.


Shouting out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards was definitely not ironic. I did it not to spread propaganda, but to inform people about where I come from, how I see the world, so they can see my biases, my ideological leanings. I’m not free of ideology. I just try to be conscious of it.


JA: The game deals with ideology in an interesting way. It’s framed from a default liberal perspective, quite literally in the sense that the camera hovers above the player, its isometric point of view identical with that of the Moralist International[13] gunships in the sky that hover as an invisible threat of violence. Then there’s the character of Kim Kitsuragi, who, with his deadpan pragmatism, acts as your liberal conscience, your moralist Jiminy Cricket.


HH: Yes, the camera perspective is a good thing to point out. Exactly as you said, this all-encompassing liberal media view is the lens through which we see reality in the West. So, it was conscious on our part as developers to make the camera perspective reflect that, offering a commentary on how so much of the media is liberal, but presents itself as neutral. And then once you become aware of different political ideologies, you start to see that there is actually no purely neutral observer point of view. But also we on the development team do happen to like isometric games. We almost always needed to have some in-game reason for every single thing that happened in Disco Elysium, so we just needed to conceptualize and make sense of it: “why are we seeing everything in that perspective?”


JA: The story intermeshes political and personal loss via Harry reliving his traumatic break-up with a character who, broadly speaking, personifies liberalism.[14] Do you regard society as being in a break-up with liberalism?


HH: In the 90s, once the Soviet Union fell, there was this “end of history” moment in the popular imagination for about ten years. But then 9/11 happened, and it was like, “okay, history continues.” As the 21st century has increasingly taken its shape, we’ve begun to realize that liberalism isn’t as neutral as it proclaims itself to be. Many players have given feedback that at first they picked the moralist, centrist, liberal options, only to be surprised at the outcomes of those choices, which are not as simply good, nonpolitical, or neutral as they expect. One thinks, “I’m not taking political sides at all; I’m not into any kinds of extremes,” but this view itself is part of the political discourse. Liberalism, too, is a choice, not just the default setting.


MM: Do you know this Russian joke? “Everything the Party told us about communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true.”


HH: Yes, I know it. Exactly. For my parents’ generation, their school classes were all about what communism is, so they have this different understanding of what true Left-wing politics could achieve in the modern day. To them it all just seems like a thing of the past. But it’s changing in other Western countries where there isn’t that same past.


MM: How do your parents see liberalism?


HH: My parents’ generation sees liberalism as the answer, and for a similar reason a lot of Estonia is trying to be the good boy of the European Union: “we do things correctly here.” As if Estonia is asking, “how European, how liberal can we be?” There are also some more nationalist, far-Right parts of my parents’ generation, and, surprisingly, of my generation too. I was shocked when I realized how the far-Right is growing among young people.


MM: You earlier mentioned the example of disaffection after the failure of Bernie Sanders, who, of course, ran for presidency twice with the Democrats and eventually endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. After that experience, some groups on the Left, especially younger people, are seeing “true” Leftism as a matter of being more radical — less hypocritical — than the liberals. Was there a social democratic moment in Estonia, the equivalent of a Sanders movement, Momentum, SYRIZA, or Podemos?


HH: No. There is a social democrat party that always gets into Parliament, but they’re not even among the top three most popular parties here.[15] Interestingly enough, the party that has occasionally stood up for the working class is a centrist party that never uses the words “Left-wing.”[16] Again, this is because of history. It takes a long time for people to understand that such words can mean something other than state repression and all those horrible things. So I understand where it comes from.


This is maybe where the pessimism about socialism in Disco Elysium comes through. For a Left-wing politician in Estonia, fighting successfully for the rights of working-class people means not mentioning that you’re Left-wing. You have to be clever; you have to hide it in order to get things done.


JA: This reminds me of Evrart Claire, the union boss in the shipping container.[17] How do you regard unions with respect to the Left?


HH: I’m all for unions. Claire was more of a commentary on the fact that there can be people in Left-wing organizations who sometimes have questionable morals, or who do things merely for the sake of doing them. But it was not a commentary on unions per se. I believe in unions, especially in the context of Western societies. Even in Estonia, where people are not known for being social and where the whole working-together-in-groups thing tends not to work out, unions have proven to be surprisingly useful and effective given our history. They have a role.


Unions are important in the video game industry, which is a good example of what capitalism can do in an industry that is so unregulated and so new. We desperately need unions to start regulating it. Even the gaming audience is slowly realizing that they’re not going to get amazing games without the people who make the games having great conditions and a sense of security. I recently read a statistic that said that an average video-game employee spends five years in the industry before burning out and leaving.


JA: Some unions can and have become corrupted, though, and others have become a mere appendage of the state. Do you see any tension within movements with noble aims and yet which require necessary evils?


HH: All movements or organizations can get corrupted in a sense. People have diverging interests. Human beings are so diverse that things can go south in any given cause or organizational context. But, because Leftism has such pronounced ideals, it becomes more noticeable when things go wrong. Take public political discourse where if a Right-wing politician is corrupt or steals something, people say, “at least he was honest about it.” But in Left organizations, a similar issue wouldn’t relate to the cause itself so much as being an organizational problem. So that’s what we tried to explore by making the union boss a polarizing character. It’s not just “union equals good.”


JA: Do you think unions improve capitalism or just ameliorate it?


HH: That’s a difficult question. There are some people who say that, for example, social democrats are extending the lifespan of capitalism because they’re making it a little bit more tolerable, and what we need is actually revolution. We do need a revolution too; I agree with that. At the same time, I think our lives are short and we have to do as much as possible in the present to make things even a bit better for workers.


MM: You mentioned earlier the “ideals” of socialism as opposed to certain grim realities surrounding its past. In the Platypus primary Marxist reading group, we read a text by Leszek Kołakowski, a communist from the former Polish People’s Republic in the Soviet Union, who wrote that “the Left gives forth utopias,” by which he meant not unrealizable utopias in the colloquial sense, but definite visions for transforming the bounds of the possible:


Utopia is the striving for changes which “realistically” cannot be brought about by immediate action, which lie beyond the foreseeable future and defy planning. Still, utopia is a tool of action upon reality and of planning social activity. . . . That is why the Left cannot be defined by saying it will always, in every case, support every demand of the working class, or that it is always on the side of the majority. The Left must define itself on the level of ideas, conceding that in many instances it will find itself in the minority. . . . the Left must be defined in intellectual, and not class, terms.[18]


HH: That’s very interesting. To the first part of the quote, I was like, “Yeah” — the entire utopia thing has been a huge draw for me with respect to Leftism. I’m a person who needs to envision a better world. I’m not able to look at what we have and just say that this is enough. I need to have a sense of vision. But then when you got to the conclusion of the quote, I didn’t agree with it. I very strongly disagree that Leftism is merely an intellectual exercise.


MM: Kołakowski isn’t talking about “the intellectuals” versus “the workers.” Rather, he’s much more broadly addressing the way we think about things: that whether one is a professor or a factory worker, the concept one applies to “the Left” matters. In other words, by conceiving of the Left in intellectual, not strictly practical terms, by holding it as a fixed idea in our heads, we challenge ourselves to regard the Left as a category unto itself, not merely a competing faction with the Right. By upholding this ideal — that of transforming, not preserving the world — the Left cannot accommodate to “practical necessity.” cannot become the Right. Which leads us to a point we’ve been circling around, that of ideas and art. Why do you see video games as an adequate means to express Left ideas?


HH: Ideas, even fantastical ones, are important. Capitalism, on the other hand, causes people to stop being able to envision alternatives. Fiction functions to keep other worlds alive. Ursula le Guin, for instance, did it brilliantly in her writing. You can’t just take one part of Leftism and say, “let’s only focus on that.” Rather, they work in this beautiful symbiosis where you have ideals on the one hand and the immediate actions we can take on the other. The ideas are the star you follow, the marker you set up for where to go. I hope that creativity can help us expand what is possible.


MM: Disco Elysium is all about the failure of Communism and the Left generally. What do you make of the game’s success? On the one hand, it’s great for you personally that the game has sold well and earned awards, but on the other, it indicates that audiences can sense that there is a sustained crisis beneath the Left. To put it another way, if the Left was doing wonderfully, perhaps your game wouldn’t be so successful.


HH: The success of the game is interesting in itself because it leads us to examine the material conditions of success, the question of who earns money from the game. The entire video-game industry, and creative industries generally, have this problem where often the intellectual property rights are owned by capitalist entities who want to control everything that happens. A lot of people have pointed out that what happened to our studio after the game’s popularity was almost ironic.[19] Where did the money go? Who profited from the success of this Leftist game? Well, spoiler alert, not Leftists.


It’s a textbook example of how you can have all these Leftist ideas, but then you also have the material conditions around them. Is it possible to make art in capitalism without making money for capitalists? Probably not. Maybe crowdfunding is the answer, but it’s difficult.


The success of the game is a very complicated topic for me. It’s good because of the audience and what it meant for people. But it did not turn out the way I thought it would turn out. I was a little naïve.


JA: You talked earlier about the Estonian Left having difficulty reconciling itself with its past. The Mazovian reading group in the communist vision quest make a tower made out of matchboxes, which looks like a famous 1919 design for a Soviet building that was to represent the dialectical spiral of history.[20] Do you think history “spirals”?


MM: Or is it an eternal recurrence?


HH: I would say it’s a spiral, not a circle. We are returning to the same themes but always with a new twist.


MM: Spiraling upwards?


HH: Exactly. I’ve realized during this interview that I’m actually an optimistic person. I always used to think that I was pessimistic.


JA: How does this relate to your writing?


HH: All of my writing is inspired by history. I sometimes say that I don’t make things up, I just take them from history and then put them in another context so people pay them more attention. That’s how the entire world of Elysium was created. We just took things out of their contexts, freeing them of the conscious notions and subconscious associations attached to them by applying different names and aesthetics. The hope was that people could see them in a new light, and that is what I usually say I do. But I’m not just writing for myself; I’m writing to communicate ideas. These come from history, about which Kurvitz and I read a lot.


JA: Communicating with history, putting the past and present in communication with one another?


HH: Yes. Every decision about which way to go forward as a society is so heavily influenced by how we see and interpret the past. When conflicts break out between states, for instance, a question people ask is, “what is the history behind these events?” How do we understand and reconceptualize them?


JA: In the game there’s the motif of the Return (Le Retour), which seems to evoke the beautiful potential of a vague and unspecified event lying in an emancipatory future.[21] It seems to be both something new and also, as the name suggests, a return to something old.


HH: It’s interesting that you picked that. I think the Return is one of the most important concepts in the game, even though we don’t explore it much other than via snippets here and there. We could get psychological or Lacanian here, like the idea of returning to your mother’s womb.


MM: Or Freudian: the return of the repressed?


HH: Yes. It’s what signifies revolution in the world of Elysium. It’s the same idea I talked about earlier. Revolution is usually imagined in the future, but here, it’s as if it’s something you have already felt. It suggests why we’re so drawn to notions of revolution. Everyone has felt it in their life at some point, so it’s a return to that feeling you already know. It’s a bit of a poetic, mystical explanation, but the Return signifies revolution and the aspiration that one day it will happen after all.


MM: It’s like art. In the realm of aesthetic feeling, we appreciate that which we already sense but cannot yet find words for. And yet Adorno talks about the artistic act as the creation of that which we do not yet know.


HH: Definitely. Art can surprise you, like when you later look at an artwork you yourself created and say, “so that’s what that is.” It’s like discovering a part of yourself. In the context of society, I agree that it’s like showing something that might still be unknown to the collective consciousness. That’s what you’re striving to do.


JA: And yet it contains some of what we were addressing previously regarding Measurehead’s fascistic time travel, how it’s a forward-looking return.


HH: Yes, I noticed that connection as well when I was talking, but I had never put that together. On the one hand there’s Measurehead’s return to better times, and on the other there’s the “return” forward into a utopian world that we have never known and has never existed, but feels like home. The former is merely an imagined past that we see signs of and yet have never experienced. To go there would be to go backwards. |P

---

[1] This interview assumes readers have not played Disco Elysium. For more about the game and its elements, see <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Disco_Elysium_Wiki>.


[2] Downloadable content.


[3] The Game Awards were held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on December 12, 2019. See “Disco Elysium Wins the Fresh Indie Game Award Presented by Reggie Fils-Aimé,” <https://youtu.be/DOz4QcRZu_g>.


[4] Nihilist.ee (later nihilist.fm) was an Estonian social criticism and literature portal created by several people who later worked on Disco Elysium. For an archived version of the blog, see <https://web.archive.org/web/20190622030555/http://www.zaum.ee/2009/> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20160202141427/http://nihilist.fm/>. For a brief history, see Stefan Peetri, “Arvustus. ‘FINAL CUT’ kui post-eestlaslik arhiiv,” kultuur (February 11, 2017), <https://kultuur.err.ee/640249/arvustus-final-cut-kui-post-eestlaslik-arhiiv>, which is a book review of Nihilist.fm: Final Cut, ed. Siim Sinamäe (ZA/UM, 2017).


[5] In an interview, Robert Kurvitz explains that there is a Russian meaning: from or for the mind. See Alex Wiltshire, “ZA/UM created one of the most original RPGs of the decade,” Games Radar (January 9, 2020), <https://www.gamesradar.com/the-maki...-one-of-the-most-original-rpgs-of-the-decade/>. The name of the studio may also allude to за́умь (Zaum) ([Russian] transrational, abstruse; it is made up of the prefix за (beyond) and the noun умъ (mind)), which was a series of linguistic experiences done by Russian avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, et. al., in the early 20th century.


[6] “Yes! Abject failure. Total, irreversible defeat on all fronts! Absolutely vanquished, beaten, curb-stomped and pissed on — until *you* came along! *You* will reverse the fortune of the workers of the world.” For the full quote, see <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/DiscoElysium>.


[7] Harry Du Bois is the player-controlled protagonist of Disco Elysium, an officer of the Revachol Citizens Militia with a troubled past.


[8] Plaisance is the owner of an unsuccessful bookshop who believes in a “curse” that prevents businesses from succeeding in the doomed commercial area, and that by praying for protection of her “honest business venture,” she can alleviate it. She fetishizes financial success not only figuratively but also literally, in that she fills her shop with fetishes designed to ensure financial prosperity through magic. See <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Plaisance>.


[9] Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as Material Power” (1933/45), in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), 3, italicized in the text.


[10] See <https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Turn_back_the_wheels_of_time>.


[11] In the world of Disco Elysium, the Pale is the quasi-metaphysical separative tissue between landmasses and reality itself, described as “achromatic, odorless, featureless . . . the enemy of matter and life . . . the transition state of being into nothingness.” Traveling through the Pale is difficult and risky psychologically, but it can be done using certain technologies, including song.


[12] See <https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAc...co_elysium_developers_have_a_stalin_portrait/>.


[13] In Disco Elysium, the Moralist International (Moralintern) is an international organization dedicated to the preservation of order and democratic values and promoting progress through incremental change. It can be regarded as roughly analogous to the United Nations or European Union.


[14] As Harry works through his troubled psyche, he confuses his real former fiancée, Dora, with the Disco Elysium universe’s personification of liberalism, Dolores Dei, remembering them as the same person.


[15] Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond (Social Democratic Party), founded in 1990.


[16] Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party), founded in 1991 as a successor of the Eestimaa Rhavarinne (Popular Front of Estonia).


[17] Evrart Claire is a character in Disco Elysium who appears, at first, to be a superficially corrupt union official. However, if the player investigates Evrart, it becomes unclear whether his advocacy for the working class is a shield for his corruption, or his corruption a contrivance to remain effective in capitalism while sincerely advocating for the working class.


[18] Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left” (1958), in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969), 147, 151.


[19] In 2022, several founding ZA/UM members (including Hindpere, Rostov, and Kurvitz) were fired by new management who were allegedly brought in without their knowledge. The studio retained the Disco Elysium intellectual property. There were allegations of exploitative work environments, fraud, and misallocated profits, but exact circumstances are disputed. See Klein Felt, “Disco Elysium & ZA/UM Controversy Explained,” The Direct (July 4, 2024), <https://thedirect.com/article/disco-elysium-zaum-controversy-explained>.


[20] The design is Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International,” also known as “Tatlin’s Tower” (1919–20); the proposed building was not built. See Kye, “Generating plasm and stacking matchboxes: how to build a better future through collective consciousness,” Estherax (April 27, 2023), <https://estherax.tumblr.com/post/715696406050029569/generating-plasm-and-stacking-matchboxes-how-to>, and Chris Cutrone’s chart diagram of the spiral of history, <https://chriscutrone.platypus1917.o.../2011/12/leninmarxismspiral053111sequence.pdf>.


[21] “The Return” is a vaguely-described world-changing event alluded to by several characters in Disco Elysium and which is to occur at an indeterminate point in the future. It is usually alluded to cryptically.

Out of all deviants and hacks in charge of no truce with the furries development, they've chosed to interview kurvits's child bride?

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Nice, thanks for the video.


To counter, here is a totally shitty video of his. Nobody should watch it.

He is supposed to discuss Fallout 1 here, a kind of video love letter to the game, but instead he is:
- wearing cat ear headphones
- listening in silence with his eyes on the floor, while the gal is making promotional shoutouts (a few times) and speaking with a "producing team" on her earbuds
- explaining how to click on things and end combat (repeatedly) to w gal who only ever plays shooter games (SHE is playing the game, not him)

I really like the guy, and his LSD/alcoholism induced expression, but to add insult to injury here, piece of shit motherfucking Kurwitz basically starts off, drum roll, by saying how he "loves pip-boy" on all of those ingame artworks.

(the video is not even funny-bad, just bad, please don't watch it)

He has the so-called meth teeth. I'm afraid this explains everything, from the ZA/UM breakup to this strange interview.

 

[Hydro]

Nice, thanks for the video.


To counter, here is a totally shitty video of his. Nobody should watch it.

He is supposed to discuss Fallout 1 here, a kind of video love letter to the game, but instead he is:
- wearing cat ear headphones
- listening in silence with his eyes on the floor, while the gal is making promotional shoutouts (a few times) and speaking with a "producing team" on her earbuds
- explaining how to click on things and end combat (repeatedly) to w gal who only ever plays shooter games (SHE is playing the game, not him)

I really like the guy, and his LSD/alcoholism induced expression, but to add insult to injury here, piece of shit motherfucking Kurwitz basically starts off, drum roll, by saying how he "loves pip-boy" on all of those ingame artworks.

(the video is not even funny-bad, just bad, please don't watch it)

He has the so-called meth teeth. I'm afraid this explains everything, from the ZA/UM breakup to this strange interview.

That doesn’t explain why you are such a dumb faggot though.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Nice, thanks for the video.


To counter, here is a totally shitty video of his. Nobody should watch it.

He is supposed to discuss Fallout 1 here, a kind of video love letter to the game, but instead he is:
- wearing cat ear headphones
- listening in silence with his eyes on the floor, while the gal is making promotional shoutouts (a few times) and speaking with a "producing team" on her earbuds
- explaining how to click on things and end combat (repeatedly) to w gal who only ever plays shooter games (SHE is playing the game, not him)

I really like the guy, and his LSD/alcoholism induced expression, but to add insult to injury here, piece of shit motherfucking Kurwitz basically starts off, drum roll, by saying how he "loves pip-boy" on all of those ingame artworks.

(the video is not even funny-bad, just bad, please don't watch it)

He has the so-called meth teeth. I'm afraid this explains everything, from the ZA/UM breakup to this strange interview.

That doesn’t explain why you are such a dumb faggot though.

I like snark and banter, but with people who have thicker skin than yours. It would be a sin to tease you.