(play this audio, just to have some music while you read)
November, 2020. There is no singular date, none that I can recall confidently, at least. I’m living with my partner and their parents (graciously, I might add). It is another dim fog of associative memory, shedding off the cocoon of soft comforters, awash in an RGB strip light that frames a series of fake moon moths, old picture frames from college, and other maximalist paraphernalia. It looks like a crammed discotheque in here.
It is another day of quarantine; the future in-laws have been hit with a COVID diagnosis. Another day of paralyzing fear, all having to be tempered down as “just another sick day, right?”, and we all are finding a series of random hobbies/crafts/more Content to consume, all as the country continues to seemingly eat itself as it does every 4 years, Red vs. Blue team fanaticism that will do nothing to solve the actual problem. But don’t worry, the election outcome denial and placid neoliberal assurances of “Return to Normalcy” is only prologue for the eventual psychic bloodbath we will watch on the television, come January 6th and beyond. It is every COVID-centric fatigue story you’ve heard so far.
I try sitting outside on the porch. It’s about 40 something degrees; wind chill is a bit high this time of year, but nothing unpleasant. Perfectly mild winter. The oak leaves sway, and so do I, and for 2 hours, nothing happens. I can’t make anything come out of my fingertips; any arcanic energy I normally have for writing Whatever This Is doesn’t come. And so it goes, this usual, circadian rhythm, of nothing, nothing, nothing. My eyes begin to conjure nothing but static, and I sit, watching the pale, cloudless blue sky, as it feels like everything and nothing converges into a great expression of More Nothing.
This Nothing has prodded its way into my real life; I have yearned for something greater throughout the entirety of my life. I have long held the belief that maybe, just maybe, there is a Greater Purpose with what I’m doing here, that my work will be vainly heralded as something bigger, that Francis Ford Coppola, Kubrick, Hunter Thompson, Lynn Nottage, and other great masters of dramatic flair will shiver in comparison to me, and my Big, Stupid, Thrashing, Masculine Ego-Centric Dick. I want nothing more than to burn out like a goddamned comet, glazed in a shroom ridden, psychedelic trip towards the bottom layers of Hell and all the way back to the top floors of Heaven, only to crash back into a gnarly crater on Earth. Everyone would gather around, point down, and wonder aloud, “Wonder what that poor bastard did. Seems pretty cool, though”, and go about their lives, uttering my name in a hushed, reverential tone.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe my body will become carrion to the crows, to the spores of ravenous fungus that will decompose my body, deposit into the soil, and I, along with the rest of this doomed species, will be Nothing, Ever More. And I get supremely sad again, but tears don’t run out, the river has run dry like the Colorado. I’ve never done shrooms anyway, much as my personality fits it, nor have I ever gone skydiving, skiing, scuba diving, made a film, had sex with more than 2 people, nothing. Carnal desire is a stranger to me and my Judeo-Christian background. Some would call it a boring existence, and I might be inclined to agree with them.
And then, a friend of mine recommends a video game called Disco Elysium, and I realize that I’m not alone in that feeling.
In the Formless Nothing
Disco Elysium is a CRPG (computer role-playing game) that was released on October 15th, 2019 for PC, with a script headed by Estonian writer Robert Kurvitz and developed by ZA/UM Studios. At the time of its initial release, it achieved the highest critical rating for any PC game release on Metacritic, only to be surpassed by its re-release of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, a version that not only added additional content regarding political thought and more side quests, but lended its at least one million word script voice acting for almost the entirety of that script. For perspective, IGN writer and contributor Matt Purslow lauded this game’s wordy achievement as being similar to, or on the scale of essentially writing the equivalent length of the Lord of the Rings trilogy-including The Hobbit…twice.
There’s been fields of ink spilled on this game’s achievements and contributions to the medium of video games as storytelling, and while I will be joining in some of my own praises to sing, there is a particular facet of this game that I think deserves a deeper level of scrutiny and understanding; one that, even years after its release, fills me with a hopeful dread that I can’t shake, despite the seemingly linear nature of time.
I’m talking about the Pale.
Everything and Nothing
Let’s provide some context here: in Disco Elysium, you play as an alcoholic cop waking up from a “new type of hangover” named Harrier Du Bois. At least, that’s the name that you can eventually discover, after a series of skill checks that test your memory, history, sense of place, and other attributes of your self, all being embodied and voiced by the sultry yet chilling tones of Dan Lenvall Brown. And that voice is just…
Dan Lenvall Brown as the Voices in Your Head
Yeah. You get it now, hopefully.
At any rate, you don’t actually see your character or any sort of external action as is typical with games both in the genre of CRPGs and outside of it; the only thing you see is a black screen, with a continue button that then begins with your Ancient Reptilian Brain (yes, that's the real name for it) and your Limbic System chiming in to remind you of your drunken degeneracy, as well as how much nothing currently surrounds you. Right afterwards, you wake up inside of the Whirling-In-Rags, a hotel inside of Martinaise, a decrepit district inside of Revachol, the capital city of Le Caillou, and your character, Harry, has an intense bout of retrograde amnesia; you can’t remember exactly why you’re here, how you got here, and why you’re ass up and face down in your hotel room.
Right out of the gate, the game is practically and literally drowning in an undercurrent of alcohol-fueled negative nihilism; upon getting closer to waking up, your Ancient Reptilian Brain, as if mocking Harry for approaching consciousness, has this to say,
“ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN: Like a fly to the ointment, your conscious sticks to it. The limbed and headed machine of undignified suffering is firing up again. It wants to walk the desert. Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.”
It is not enough for your character’s appendages and internal monologue to merely comment on the fact that you’ve got a one-way trip to “Nothingtown to Fuck All Borough”, no; it revels in this liminal space between unconsciousness and death, and the absence of being. This nothingness is what the game makes you wake up to, and it is what you sometimes have go to bed to. Over, and over again.
Further context and additional plot development: eventually, you make your way around the hotel, and, in traditional CRPG fashion, you can interact with a litany of different objects, places, and, of course, people. Typically though, most players will make their way down to the hotel lobby to check in with Garte, the begrudging front desk worker/cafeteria manager for the Whirling and, after detailing your multiple day stay costs at the Whirling that you have to pay for (with money that you don’t yet have, by the way), Garte directs you to your partner and fellow detective, Kim Kitsuragi. From there, you’re told that you’ve actually been sent on assignment to investigate a hanging body in the back yard of the Whirling, and that it’s likely been there for just over a week in the midst of Harry's (your character) wanton drinking/partying/unwarranted ramblings about putting a gun in his mouth in the cafeteria and planning on “ending it all.” The game unfolds from there to be a winding, existentialist noir crime story set against the backdrop of urban decay, cosmic absurdity, and paranatural elements including, but not limited to, bird cryptids, ghosts haunting failed businesses and a rich man who breaks multiple laws of physics (more to come on that later).
And this “formless nothing” pervades throughout the entirety of the game, though not always in the same intangible form; when you first get out to the back yard of the Whirling and actually do approach the hanging body in the tree, you encounter the abrasive, highly caustic, third-person addressing child Cuno, as well as his probable friend, unlikely girlfriend, Cunoesse. This initial encounter can go multiple ways (you can actually try to punch Cuno in the face. Both failure and success are equally hilarious), though you can utilize your Empathy skill (if you’ve invested enough into it) to get a deeper read on both him and Cunoesse and, shocker, Cuno definitely has problems. His father is a speed addict and unemployed, living with the urban decay all around you in Martinaise, and, per the “Locust City” sidequest you can take on with Cuno, you can see Cuno’s father lying in bed in a drug addled malaise (not entirely dissimilar to Harry). Cuno, the young, brash boy who constantly reiterates, “Cuno doesn’t fucking care,” is being enveloped in this grand nothing: an economic, psychological and spiritual stagnation that’s hard to compare to anything else.
So, back to the Pale; the Pale, as defined by Joyce Messier, a representative of the Tall Pines corporation within the world of the game, is “…the most dominant geological feature of the world…the separative tissue between the isolas. It is the intersiolary mass.” As the conversation you have with her progresses, her assessment of it becomes more grim, tinged with a fear that, again, pervades almost all other understandings of it in the world of Disco Elysium, “Achromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not *like* any other -- or *any* thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness."
The Pale, as understood by a staunch defender of neo-liberal capitalist dogma such as Messier, is the purest form of terror: if there is nothing, how do we go on? After all, the consequences of an economic model that burns all non-renewable resources until the Earth is nothing but a shell of its former self is, in capitalist terms, bad for business. With no actual hospitable environment, how do you tie the isolas together in commerce and trade? In the world of Disco Elysium, this is done with what are called Pale Drivers, those who brave the paranaturally terrifying environs consumed by this “odourless” nothing; in the real world, perhaps this would be done by…highly miffed Amazon delivery drivers? I digress.
There is another understanding of the Pale that lends another layer of dread, one that is less quantifiable in both the game’s understanding of scientific measurement, as well as our own in the real world. It is not just that this phenomenon consumes matter, bringing existence into a black-hole adjacent level of unknowable physics and stipulation; it does something more insidious to the human form.
It is human made atrophy. It is everywhere and nowhere, and it comes from us, yet its evidence is seen everywhere in the world of Disco Elysium; the remnants of the Doomed Commercial Area, a site on the map that you can visit that is filled with so many failed commercial projects, is filled with trapped voices in an intercom, all of them ghosts of former business owners, entrepreneurs, and those filled with foolhardy dreams of trying to succeed in a place like Martinaise.
The Pale doesn’t just draw me in because it’s fascinating aspect of the world within Disco Elysium. It is because right now, as I write this, it is because my world constantly feels as though it is being engulfed in the Pale.
Idyllic Pasts, Dreadful Presents, and Dead Futures
If you happen to look up anything else about this game, another heavily analyzed component is the political quests, factions, and overall ethos within the game itself. Let’s be clear from the outset: this game was created by self-avowed Communists and admirers of Karl Marx.
Game Devs of Disco Elysium Crediting Marx and Engels for Their Political Education
I’m not sharing that video as a means of discrediting the original writers of Disco Elysium, such as Robert Kurvitz or Helen Hindperre. I hope it’s pretty obvious based on the everything about me: I’m very much an average communism enjoyer.
So why am I bringing this up, besides to opine? I say this because that “political education” provided by Marx and Engels is integral to understanding what I mean about the atrophy present in the world of Elysium. Of course, there’s the obvious: the Political Vision Quests, specifically, the one involving the Student Communists. I won’t hyper fixate on this aspect of the game (more so than I have with…well, all of this), other than to make mention of how the game implicitly judges your choices, both from a mechanical “game design” sense, as well as being a judgement from its aforementioned ethos. Also, as a plea to those who don’t think gaming can’t be a serious art medium, play this game, and make your initial encounter with characters Rene Arnoux and Gaston Martin, and listen to what your Rhetoric skill says to you about not choosing the fascist or communist speech options. It is hilarious, horrific, depressing, and inspiring.
No, instead I ask you to just…look at the visual design for this world. It is a design just oozing this stagnancy; roads are left scarred by bombshells, from a war that was lost long ago. Rubble lies in the road, though not because nobody wants it gone, but because the Coalition Government doesn’t do anything to help. Mud forms on seemingly every soiled surface, and children throw stones at hanging corpses that have been there; for a week straight, no less. Wind seems to whistle through every empty husk of a building, and that wind carries for miles.
To me, I see The Pale as not just being confined to where you initially encounter it, nor do I see it as just being limited to an environmental catastrophe, akin to the capitalist fueled mass extinction event we are in right now. It is not just the blown out, sea salt worn speakers, playing the same tinny, despondently hopeful over world theme you hear for Martinaise, nor is it just just the slovenly, dispossesses homeless encampment, pushed out by the police further and further into the invisible oblivion.
It is Everything created for ourselves by the systems we construct, and the Nothing that comes from it. It is a longing for work, even though you work 40 hours a week; it is the feeling of going nowhere, meandering through the cobblestone alleyways of the same place you’ve lived in for far too long, no greater purpose or direction for your life. It is not knowing what day it is, despite having a calendar in your pocket at all times and a window right next to you to see the sky.
Perhaps I can’t stop thinking about Disco Elysium not just because it is a phenomenal video game. I can’t stop thinking about it because it somehow captured this feeling of Everything and Nothing more than most works of art I’ve encountered.
I can't imagine a game more thoroughly aimed at the intersection between you and a former roommate of ours. This game has always reminded me of you because I knew you loved it, but now I'm beginning to recognize that you've been on the same wavelength for a good time now.
Good read!