Beyond Disco Elysium: Designing race, memory, and meaning decay

31 Jul, 2026

This essay is an edited transcription of a presentation prepared for English 105: Writing in Game Studies, a course I took in the spring semester of 2026 with Mitch Losito at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The conversational language reflects the presentation’s original spoken format.

Disco Elysium is widely credited as a landmark game, not just for its evocative political-theoretical language, but also for its ability to turn that dense language into a playable experience. Many of its critics have also argued for Disco Elysium’s razor-sharp critique of modern capitalism. But in recent years, I’ve also encountered analysis arguing that Disco Elysium fails some of its characters of color despite its obsession with inequality and betrayal. The tension I want to explore before building up my appreciation for Disco Elysium is therefore the conflict between these two bodies of analysis. What if the game were sincere in its desire to dramatize inequality, but also insufficiently self-aware in its representation of systemic racial injustice to really reach the people it most needs to speak to?

The core mechanics of Disco Elysium are grounded in a feeling of paralysis: its lead character is unsure who he is or how to act, and even apparently simple actions can end in humiliating failure. The lead character’s paralysis comes with a sort of collective trauma: the failure of a revolution and the despair that nothing new can now happen. The worldbuilding of Disco Elysium is an exemplar of object-oriented storytelling: environmental details communicate policy, history, and disparity. The crumbling concrete and rust stains that litter the surface of everything seem to say that something bad has happened here, something bad enough that even people now try hard to forget about it.

I’ll pivot now to what critics such as Takeo Rivera have described as Disco Elysium’s racial blind spot. Despite its deep investment in these systems of power and oppression, many reviewers have noted that the game ends up depending on a racial accommodation of the very systems it critiques. In particular, critics such as Takeo Rivera have argued that Kim is treated as a tool and sounding board for the white protagonist to measure his own progress and redeem himself. Taken together with the unconscious but pervasive racism of the world around him, it’s hard to shake the idea that the white protagonist of Disco Elysium is someone who exploits and only needs to find a way to be absolved. And he finds that absolution in Kim Kitsuragi.

There are concrete moments in Disco Elysium that illustrate Kim’s role as a conduit for this self-serving redemption. Kim is able to absorb the catastrophic mess that the self-destructive protagonist inadvertently creates. Kim functions because he is hypercompetent and patient. Kim pawns the valuable spinners from his motor carriage to help pay for the damage Harry caused to his hotel room. Kim is forced to endure the racist lorry driver’s abuse while continuing to help conduct the investigation. Again and again, Disco Elysium relies on the model minority archetype: a patient and super-capable Asian who just needs to do the dirty work in order to help a white protagonist along his redemption arc.

But what if a sequel could not only confront Disco Elysium’s racial blind spot, but at the same time build on the game’s existing strengths? The avenues for doing that seem to lie in repurposing the game’s core mechanics that we’ve just laid out. The Pale is an expanding zone of non-reality associated with decaying information, memory, and history. It functions both as a feature of the game’s world and as a metaphorical counterpart to Harry’s amnesia. On one level, it functions as a metaphor for hyperreality. It is also a material feature of the game’s world through which memory, information, and physical reality begin to break down. Other characters also experience the Pale, sometimes through deliberate travel or prolonged exposure. The Paledriver, in particular, retreats into memories that may not be her own. The Pale therefore offers a model for examining how people seek refuge in the past even when that refuge erodes their relationship to the present. Taking inspiration from these tools and techniques, the three design ideas I’ll lay out below form a blueprint that could enable an excellent sequel to Disco Elysium. Each of these ideas turns one of the blind spots in the original game into a design opportunity. The three ideas are:

1. Reallocate emotional labour
2. Turn decay of meaning into a game mechanic
3. Use the environment to surface stories of deliberately erased people

The first thing a successful sequel would need to do is to redistribute the emotional labour of the original game. In the original game, the companion is too often treated instrumentally: a palette of ideas that the player tries out on a sounding board that doesn’t require the player to examine the real feelings that are causing the player to experiment with words. In a sequel, we might turn the relationship between the player and the companion into an economy of emotional labour. Here, the companion would have goals of his own. He wouldn’t be available for assistance all the time. The player would have to earn the companion’s trust, respect his boundaries, and sometimes proceed without his help. And when the companion said “no” when the player attempted to use him as a sounding board, he wouldn’t just recede into silence. He’d say no and try to push the player to face those feelings that were causing the player to keep on running from things. He wouldn’t be a therapist available on tap, but a human being with a will of his own.

The second thing that the sequel would need to do is to take the decay of meaning and make that a game mechanic. We have already seen this mechanic in action: political speech degrades over time into vague buzzwords and jargon. The hyperreal Pale of forgetting erodes meaning. But in the original game, the player is able to mentally scroll through the palimpsest of meaning and find the true meaning of what is said and do something with it. A sequel could instead make searching through this manic architecture of noise for points of real meaning an explicit challenge. As the amount of buzzwords and jargon increases, the persuasive power of political speech would be correspondingly reduced. Finding what is real would become a challenge. The player would have to dig around in the verbal rubble and piece things together. And the effort required to do this would serve as the constant counterpoint to the laziness and avoidance that are the state of the world in Disco Elysium.

The third thing a sequel would need to do is to expand the already excellent object-oriented storytelling that is central to Disco Elysium into new dimensions. The first step would be to make the player responsible for recovering suppressed histories without making the player their sole owner or interpreter. The player would investigate everything, always trying to learn about the people who had used these objects before. The second step would be to look for stories of deliberately erased people, focusing especially on stories of people who are referenced in the environment, but not represented. A particularly good way to do this would be to look at objects left behind by racialized communities displaced from gentrified neighborhoods. The player could also investigate the faded and ineffective posters of community initiatives and organizations that had already been forced out of existence to better understand what histories would, deliberately, become hidden away.

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