Post Script

Robert Kurvitz, lead designer

Robert Kurvitz was a novelist and musician before he turned his hand to game design. Here, ZA/UM’s co-founder spills on reckoning with modern history, on the waning corrupting power of the novel, and Disco Elysium’s debt to Dungeons & Dragons.

You’ve explored the world you created for Disco Elysium as both a novelist and a game designer. Which artform suited you best?

I think what you’re limited by in games is that there’s so much to gain from making a hit nowadays, there’s so much territory you can conquer – you can truly set out in your own very small way to alter history a bit. It’s not all divided up between giants yet, which means it’s a tough fight for that territory. A lot of people are there, a lot of people care, there’s not a lot of elbow room and it’s a pretty dirty fight. I think you [put yourself at risk] more than with a novel, which nobody really cares about at all any more! Novels are almost inconsequential – it’s hard to piss anyone off with them, because they spread very slowly from one language to another. You can’t lead the youth astray with a novel nowadays.

Elysium’s setting is a wonderful alt-history exploration of 20th century European politics. Where did the idea come from?

From its earliest inception, when I was 16 or 17, [it] was always going to have a very simple kernel: it’s like Tolkien, but in the modern world, with nation states and so on. A complete hermetic fantasy world, divided from us, with modern states, automobiles and political parties. The age of modernism, the age we live in is incredibly political, and has these signifiers of Left and Right. So [I wanted] to create a convincing modernist setting, and if you want to do that, it’s inescapable that you reckon with those forces. For me, for any of us at ZA/UM, we couldn’t imagine writing it if we didn’t reckon with those ideas. If you take the alignment system from D&D – that sort of expresses a pseudomedieval belief system, a system of characters from fairytales, with a pinch of ’70s psychedelia thrown on top. If you look for an alignment system in a modernist setting, you arrive at that political division.

How did you organise the writing team?

To do a communal writing project of this scale, you need a very strong central vision. I’m absolutely opposed to non-hierarchical ways of doing this kind of thing, because it turns into a hodge-podge that goes in different directions. So that was the order of the day – I personally did a lot of editing. There’s almost nothing in the game that I didn’t edit, Politburo-style! But everyone did get to bring their own interpretation of the setting, of what it is to be a communist, a centrist, a libertarian. The [key unifying element] was that this world is a kind of parody of our world, albeit a very serious and tragic parody. So our approach to ideology is humour. If it’s not funny – funny in an analytical way – then we didn’t want to go that route.

I understand that people take politics incredibly seriously, but I think all of us shared a sense of humour about the ideologies in the game – none of them come out of it unscathed. Everything is criticised, and it’s presented in quite a ludicrous manner. Because at the end of the day, for this cop you play, it’s just feverish, deranged rhetoric that’s flying over his head. It’s not really anything he has any power to do anything about.

“This world is kind of a parody of our world, albeit a very serious and tragic parody”

What were the inspirations for your skill system?

In this kind of detective story, you often have the detective’s voices explaining what they’re thinking. So this kind of commenting voice in the corner is a structural element of how these hard-boiled stories are often written. Since you are the main character, it made sense for the skills to take on this narration role. But to have them squabble amongst themselves was an opportunity that the game medium presented to us. Research-wise, this has come out of 20 years of penand-paper roleplaying.

I think maybe the most important discovery I made about role-playing games, D&D and games in general during the making of Disco Elysium, is that pen-andpaper, and by extension probably CRPGs and even some action games, are second-person narratives. First and third-person narratives work in literature very naturally. In literature if you choose second-person narrative, if you address the reader as “you”, it feels gimmicky and weird. Whereas during a pen-and-paper session, the dungeon master says “you see”, “you feel”, “you’re this, you’re that”. Players [expect] to be addressed by the game, and the skills are our way of doing that.

You have representations of bigotry and hate-speech in the game. Do you have advice for other developers about doing this kind of thing sensitively?

My answer to this is an evasive one, so I apologise in advance. I think to give advice, I would have to add my personal opinions to the artwork we’ve made. We worked incredibly hard to make it self-sufficient [as a representation]. If I were to use my author’s position to add to that or explain, first of all I would take away that balance, and second of all, I don’t want to be like JK Rowling – I don’t want to add politics later to my work. I want the politics, the poetry to already be in there. Our Dumbledore is already out, if you play the game correctly. I shouldn’t have to explain it in interviews.