By Chidi, Elan, Izzy, Maeve, Natalie, and Rita

You wake up, a thundering pain rumbling just behind your eyes, you can’t seem to remember anything, not even your name. You sit up, head ringing and look around at the trashed hotel room that surrounds you. Broken bottles, a smashed window, a neck tie swinging lazily from the ceiling fan as you cringe at the sour smell permitting the air. This is the introduction of the main character for the game Disco Elysium, a video game set in the fictional city of Revachol. It follows the protagonist; a scruffy, disheveled police detective with a memory problem, as he attempts to solve a murder. Based off table-top RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, the plot is advanced through dialogue options and random rolls of the dice with the different colorful characters throughout the city that seek to clue the player into not just who it is that they are playing as, but also the rich social and political history of the world around them. It is with this free roaming type gameplay that an interesting juxtaposition is presented of a more feminine understanding of play involving relationship building and investigation rather than action or violence with the brash, unkempt detective that fits into the male dominated “loser trope” in media. It is with this interesting oxymoron, the exhaustive lore, and breathtakingly beautiful visuals, that allows the player to shape themselves and the things they believe in as they uncover the deep-rooted conspiracies that plague this dystopian world.

From the first scene of Disco Elysium, the playable character (PC) is presented in a very stereotypically masculine way. From repeated displays of substance abuse and aggression to character design and written dialogue, our protagonist falls into many traditional masculine norms that culminate in a ‘Big Lebowski-esque’ portrayal of power, independence, assertiveness, and confidence. Although violence is not directly incorporated into gameplay, the PC’s aggression is portrayed through design elements of the game that the player has little to no control over. For example, immediate references to alcoholism combined with environmental design choices like a trashed hotel room, broken mirror and window, an unkempt character appearance, and even the character’s role as a law enforcer, leaves the player with an impression of an uncontrolled, mysterious, and potentially violent avatar. This aligns with the common character trope ‘The Loser Protagonist,’ described by Tropedia (2014) as a character that, while not unintelligent, “may be considered a loser by the standard of today’s society, or the society the story is set in” and is almost exclusively written for male protagonists. In this case, the PC’s drunken amnesia, scattered appearance, tendency for aggression and resulting questionable reliability as a narrator, include him in the Loser Protagonist trope and integrate traditional masculinity into the basis of his character. This masculinity is contrasted in the player’s experience by nonviolent and feminized game play mechanics.

Despite the presentation of the main characters and much of the dialogue, Disco Elysium presents an interesting an often overlooked femininity: the femininity of mechanics and gameplay. According to Shaw (2014), “…representation does not necessarily equate identification and undermines the emphasis traditionally placed on the importance of identification of the player with a video game character.” Essentially, representation within video games can have much more nuance than other forms of media, and players do not inherently need a visual representative to relate to, the other aspects of a game can have much more impact on a player’s experience. Feminine gameplay goes beyond the hegemonic masculine by emphasizing mystery and knowledge, dialogue and character, chance-based gameplay, and by minimizing the fast-paced and violent aspects of normative gaming. On these points, Disco Elysium is feminine, and is founded on a queering of hegemonic game mechanics. The game is completely self-paced and lets the player have complete control about their movements, who they talk to, and what they interact with. Despite all this choice, the game is also based on chance, which makes it more accessible to people with less free time and more appealing to women, who tend to be less competitive (Hartmann and Klimmt, 2017). The plot centers around the main character solving a murder, which, according to Hartmann and Klimmt (2017), aligns with the preference that the majority of women gamers have for games that revolve around puzzles and knowledge-collecting.

Disco Elysium uses a traditionally masculine aesthetic representation. Its protagonist is male and initially characterized as violently impulsive; many of its prominent characters are also male and serve as representations of violent or authoritarian masculinity. In contrast, its gameplay is “queered” in that its mechanics—namely its story and dialogue based play, and point-and-click style of progression—are divorced from gameplay loops commonly associated with male audiences, which typically reinforce violent play, and glorify the subjugation of adversaries. Instead, Disco Elysium “…engages different grammars of play… not grounded in normative ideologies like competition, exploitation, colonization, speed, violence, rugged individualism, leveling up, and win states (Chang, p.19, 2017).” Through this contradiction, Disco Elysium uses its gameplay, and its engagement with the player, to make an implicit critique of the hegemonic masculinity dominating its narrative and presentation.

Disco Elysium both demonstrates and defies stereotypical gender roles through its character design, gameplay experience and animation style. The game shows the masculine protagonist’s aggressive outbursts and substance abuse as well as how they make sexual advancements towards female characters. However, players engage with a contrasting feminine gameplay experience through aspects like the focus on character interaction and lack of combat scenes. The player is notably unable to change these aspects of the character or the gameplay. This non-hegemonic approach to presenting femininity vs. masculinity contributes to Disco Elysium’s popularity amongst queer players. 

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Works Cited

“Disco Elysium Archetypes Artwork.” <https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6aAL8x>.

Ramos, Jeff. “Disco Elysium beginner’s guide.” <https://www.polygon.com/guides/2019/12/18/21025994/disco-elysium-beginners-skills-builds-thought-cabinet>.

Chang, Edmond Y. “Queergaming.” In Ruberg & Shaw (eds.) Queer Game Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Shaw, Adrienne. “The Internet is Full of Jerks, because the World is Full of Jerks: What Feminist Theory Teaches Us about the Internet.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. 11.3 (2014): 273-7, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2014.926245

Tilo, Hartmann. Christoph, Klimmt. “Gender and Computer Games: Exploring Females’ Dislikes,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.  11.4 (2006): 910–931, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00301.x