Flipping Through the Dictionary: An Eccentric Approach to ‘Disco Elysium’

I have been writing critically about video games since the end of 2017, amassing hundreds of articles, but I have never been intimidated to write about a game until Disco Elysium. This intimidation arises in response to the wealth of high-quality prose permeating every ounce of dialogue and narration throughout Disco Elysium’s endlessly polished script. I often describe Disco Elysium as the single most articulate video game I have ever played, which is admittedly not the most useful of intellectual demarcations; rather, I emphasize the writing quality in Disco Elysium because it provided poignant pause at precise and welcome intervals, something that too many games fail to accomplish as effectively.

I am rarely impressed by the actual diction and syntax of video game writing, but Disco Elysium had me frequently swapping my controller for a dictionary to figure out what was being said. It was a kind of cerebral challenge that I haven’t felt since I was working on my Master’s degree at university, the compulsion to stop at every conceivable interval to double-check my understanding and ensure I didn’t move a millimeter forward through the story without having a definitive grasp on the explicit and implicit narrative and characterological development.

As Disco Elysium has been swirling around in my consciousness like one of the many personalities of Harry Du Bois (H.B.D.), the protagonist, I keep feeling a compulsion to write about it. For, if a game strikes me as well-written, then there must be something to say about it, right? And that’s where the intimidation arises each time I get started. I never feel like I have the right words or the right ideas to encapsulate and adumbrate what makes Disco Elysium so profound and special. Any attempt I make is fundamentally inferior to the actual experience. Again, a game has never made me feel this way before.  

Thus, I found myself haphazardly flipping through my Disco Elysium screenshots on Steam, a routine that sometimes gives me inspiration for where to start an article. I realized while I was skimming that many of my screenshots were simply archives of my ignorance, snapshots of the words I either didn’t already know or was impressed to find appear in a video game. And then the idea emerged in my head: the notion that I could use these vocabulary-based screenshots as a sort of absurdist vector with which to commentate on my experience with Disco Elysium. I wanted to write a Dada-esque smattering of what personally stood out to me rather than a sincere attempt at comprehensive criticism. Resultantly, this article is purely a literary experiment.  

Here are the words I paused to screenshot throughout my playthrough of Disco Elysium: 

“Moralintern”

This, like many of the screenshots I took within Disco Elysium, is not actually a word with real world application outside of Revachol. Moralintern is simply a portmanteau of the words “moralist” and “international,” an organization in Disco Elysium that was founded by the woman you see in the screenshot above, Dolores Dei. A moralintern is someone who dedicates themselves to principles of humanism and moralism, but Disco Elysium takes a cynical view of this political alignment, especially as the Moralinterns have amassed millions of followers, becoming one of the most influential parties in Elysium. When I inevitably replay Disco Elysium, I think my next playthrough will be in pursuit of moralism.  

“Epithelium” 

Using my context clues, H.B.D.’s Perception personality is observing the harsh, industrial smell surrounding the characters. The words “olfactory” and “cilia” are nothing new to me, but I had never heard of the anatomical term present here, “epithelium,” which, even after digging around in the medical literature, I only vaguely understand as the tissue lining human organs. What this extract serves to illustrate, however, is the mouth-watering prose of even the most mundane observations made by the protagonist’s inner voices. The beauty of the writing is perfectly balanced between the two-word, simple sentence prior, followed by the eloquent, winding description that evokes incredible perceptive depth. 

“Entroponetics” 

Another Disco Elysium term that you will never find elsewhere, having to do with The Pale, which is an abstract geological feature of Elysium. My understanding of The Pale in Disco Elysium is quasi-religious in nature, almost something like a foggy Aurora Borealis rather than something solid and finite, a phenomenon rather than an understood scientific occurrence. The word itself, “entroponetics,” evokes the scientific principle of entropy, or chaos. I’ll lean on the Disco Elysium wiki to give you a sense of how the community surrounding the game understands The Pale: “it’s something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical — numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier since the discovery of the pale and it may be impossible.” It’s as if The Pale is part black hole, part philosophical conundrum, part paradox. The lore surrounding this concept is incredibly compelling to me, even as I fail, like the characters, to completely understand it.  

“Paraboloid” 

Luckily, I didn’t have to consult online resources to determine the meaning of “paraboloid.” As the word suggests, a paraboloid is a geometric shape which is characterized by having a cross-section that’s parabolic in nature. My academic avoidance of all things mathematics left me briefly scratching my head, wondering if I was imagining the correct image. But Ruby, the instigator, makes it clear that the paraboloid in question here is part of a dimensional signal used to tease out supernatural elements of Elysium’s world. The word also reminds me of the time I encountered a poorly translated sign on the side of a mountain leading up to the Great Buddha of Leshan, which read, “Not to parabola.” Knowing just enough maths to be dangerous, I was able to extrapolate that this sign meant to say something to the effect of, “Don’t throw things off the side of this path, please!” This moment in Disco Elysium is the opposite of poor translation, and we can see Kim Kitsuragi and H.D.B. cowering and cringing in psychic pain under the weight of this invisible paraboloid.  

“Sartorial” 

The word “maverick” has been forever tainted by a YouTuber who I will not dignify by naming here, and I cannot help but peel that associative slime off my connotations with the phrase even as it appears in a respectable title like Disco Elysium. Combined with the far less familiar “sartorial,” I realized that H.D.B.’s perception is describing a sort of idiosyncratic fashion (“sartorial maverick”), as exhibited by the observational focus on eclectic and indigenous aesthetics. At the location of this homeless camp inhabited by drunks, H.D.B. becomes intensely aware of how his style of dress brings inevitable cultural associations with it. As you can see by the six dialog options, Disco Elysium gives the player enough leash to run but not always enough to hang themselves.  

“Encephalopathy” 

Returning us to The Pale, Joyce Messier pinches her elitist nose to explain some of the stranger elements of Elysium’s weird world to our protagonists. For all the confidence of science, she admits, The Pale presents the world with a number of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. H.D.B.’s supernatural amnesia, for example, might be a consequence of The Pale. Perhaps H.D.B. has permanent brain damage from his night of drugs and binge drinking, but perhaps there is also something happening at a higher level of metaphysical understanding, something that even scientific positivism – deriving itself from logical positivism – cannot account for.  

“Antecentennial” 

Like so many words that seemingly only exist through the Disco Elysium universe, “antecentennial” is a word that I can piece together without looking up. But, at this point in my playthrough, I was completely bought into the idea that this game was like flipping through the thesaurus, so I looked it up all the same. “Ante,” meaning before, and “centennial,” meaning one-hundred years’ anniversary, is thus almost self-explanatory. Like so many things plaguing the citizens of Revachol, the past haunts the present as actively as these people do. Disco Elysium cannot escape its past any more than we can.  

“Franconigerian” 

Isn’t it telling that so many of these instances of nomenclature derive themselves from fabricated histories oozing with contextual depth? Franconegro, also known as Innocence Franconegro, is directly connected to Elysium’s lineage of organized philosophical militarism. Tied to Franconegro is the notion of hereditary rule simultaneous with contradictory efforts to palliate perceived conflict between self-assured aristocratic blowhards and squalid, sidelined bourgeoisie. Via that implied unity amongst class differences, Garte’s observation about the massive hole in the fence reveals how such a Franconigerian force would be excessively populous – easily enough to bulldoze their way through a fence with cavalry, Franconegro’s preferred tactical formation. At the least, it reminds us almost etymologically of France and Nigeria — however direct that allusion may be.

“Vespertine” 

I should have known this one. My studies of Virginia Woolf’s night outings and Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur wanderings should have taught me this term. And yet I found myself briefly perplexed at the term’s usage, specifically its nature as a proper noun, which led me again to the lengthy Disco Elysium wiki. The term, “Vespertine,” here doesn’t mean nightlife, as it usually would, but instead refers to Vesper, a republic similar to our real-world understanding of the term “occident.” As Annette uses the phrase outside Revachol’s quaint bookshop, Vespertine indicates a series of crime novels, a fitting meta-text for Disco Elysium’s premise.  

“Phlegmatic” 

Calm, cool, and collected. As Kim and H.D.B. meet the Deserter, he reveals that he heard their maritime approach from the radio, Sad FM, echoing across the water from afar. The Deserter, who represents the misanthropic woes of an exhausted revolutionary, describes this choice of music as one caught up in the regrets of the past. The additional suggestion that sadness is a mental illness, “a weapon of the bourgeoisie,” is a vertical slice of this Deserter’s ideology, rusting away, isolated on this lonesome island.  

“Stridulations” 

I remember asking my grandmother for her earplugs one night when we vacationed in the Georgian mountains, for the evening crickets were louder than most thunderstorms and kept me awake. Her response was never, “it’s just the stridulations, little one,” but it might as well have been – because whatever she said was not hypnagogically comforting. Given how Elysium presents a world steeped in political turmoil and philosophical probing, I found it intensely strange to arrive at a cryptozoological impasse within the game’s final act. Disco Elysium feels mortally committed to realism for much of its worldbuilding and writing, but it doesn’t shy away from the fringes of folklore when it wants to make an intentionally mystifying point to its player. 

As you can plainly see, Disco Elysium is riddled with tedious terminology that — as someone who formerly mistook education for intelligence, verbosity for veracity, eloquence and elegance for soundness and validity — is nevertheless humbling. Disco Elysium is a literary person’s wet dream, crudely speaking, for it provides the same comfits of academic jargon-laden discourse fused with the inescapably compelling everyday chatter of weary people. It’s more an examination than exculpation of the failed cultural projects of humanity, of the multiplicitous facets of unutterably private human thoughts.

It’s often bandied about that fiction is a mirror of reality, but I’ve never felt the truth of this until my time playing Disco Elysium. I cannot overstate the unflinching insight and ingenious nature of the writing throughout the entire game. This will almost certainly be the most pretentious qualification I ever make for my readers at Epilogue, but if you consider yourself an intellectual, you owe it to yourself to play Disco Elysium at least once. If nothing else, it might teach you a few new words.  

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