I mean, it’s a cool sentiment. But the horrible thing is the bourgeoisie are human. That’s what makes their greed and desire to inflict suffering more grotesque.
Yes, they may be human, but the class logic they follow isn’t. The cold calculus of profit subverts all their human emotions and empathy, allowing themselves to justify the most horrible crimes they are “forced” to commit. Even if one human refuses, the system ensures there’s countless more behind them to serve as their replacement, ready to sink to new lows of depravity for material gain. In my opinion, the efficiency with which capitalism can strip a human of the best parts of humanity and encourage the worst is one of its most terrifying aspects:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Ok I gotta play this game, it’s been sitting in my library for over a year now
It’s so good. Day 1 and 2 can be confusing and it can feel like you keep failing checks, but stick with it
Perfectly executed character, the ultimate personification of one of the game’s central themes: “correctness”
He pretty much spits facts when you ask about his motivations, he correctly identifies the true drivers of the problems you navigate through the game, his actions were, broadly, “correct.” But in a vacuum, what is his correctness worth? DE as a whole is pretty stiffly critical towards the need to be Right, especially if it comes at the expense of friendships and human relationships. After all, internalizing communism in the game makes you into a “very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth” who is still miserable.
I could go for ten more paragraphs about this, like the irony of his title of “deserter” despite him being one of the only people left who still holds on to the cause of Scientific Communism (he has deserted society instead), or how he’s part of the game’s indictment of the romantic idea of the “eternal vigil.” But I’ll restrain myself so that Kim won’t have to clear his throat at me.
I’d rather be miserable than clueless and miserable
I don’t mean it like “don’t be informed,” just that being correct is not inherently productive, like the game is telling you to at least try and take part in the society that you know to be tragically out of balance. (The game wants you to take Matt Christman’s grill pill)
Was he a deserter or was he deserted 💅
He called my sad song about a little church REACTIONARY okay? Not cool
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital (1879)
Marxism-Lovecraftism
The actual manmade horror beyond our comprehension was just capitalism
I’m reading tomes of eldritch lore to comprehend those horrors.
Marx was an eldrichist, he wrote 3 books about them
Read a book a while back called Monsters of The Market that was pretty cool. Delved into all the monster language from Marx
me_irl rn
God, I felt so much empathy for that man.
The most human character in one of the most human games ever made.
What gave me chills was that the line before this. “I have seen it”, because if you pass a passive empathy check I think, your own brain will chime in to warn you “Something terrible. Worse than what you have seen.” right before this. And considering how well we know Harry by this point in the game, if his brain is warning him that something is worse than anything that he has experienced, that is bad. Harry has experienced some pretty terrible stuff and his brain is predisposed to focus on that and make an even bigger deal out of his personal problems. So the little warning that “Whatever this man has seen is worse than anything that has ever happened to you” from your own brain sets me up for some cosmic horror level shit that this line then beautifully delivers on.
I dont think the deranged voyuer living off of garbage and bug cum is a good role model
Hexbears when somebody tells them to log off:
“No superiors can relieve me of my duty, you bulldozed them all to a mass grave for trying to free humanity.”I need to play this game.
yea do not pay that grabby ass company for the stolen goods they’re hawking, pirate it for sure
Damn, we’re seriously never getting another game?
The finance bros own the IP through their shady dealings and the core writers left.
I mean, that’s kind of promising if the core writers have formed a new company, right? 99.9% of the game’s appeal is the writing, and I have no doubt they could create a new universe outside revanchol…
Right?
The world building and core writing happened over many years. I’m sure they could produce a new IP but it would take a lot more than having their own company. Plus some of the magic is production quality and that was the rest of the team that now doesn’t want to work with them. My read is that management created a toxic environment and pitted groups against each other.
Maybe, but I don’t think they’ve formed a new company yet, although they should. At least I haven’t heard of any new project from them, just some sequel ideas from the original company, which is now divorced from its original founders and creative, so it will probably suck.
It’s also a world they’ve been developing since high school, so their next idea may not be as developed. Maybe it will just take them awhile to come up with something new which is why we haven’t heard anything yet? I think they played ttrpg games in it iirc. I’ve got some imaginary places like that in my mind, so I could sympathize with having it blow up, which would be amazing, and then taken from them, which must feel horrible =(
People Make Games made a lengthy documentary on this subject. It’s surprisingly more complicated than it sounds with many writers, artists, and developers within the company coming forward to say that the original lead writers were toxic to work with and rightfully removed from the team. They created an incredible world with huge potential, but much of the work of bringing it to life was done by a full team of creators who still work for ZA/UM. Ultimately, yes, I would really like to see Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere start a new game studio, hopefully having learned from their mistakes (both in business and in relation to their colleagues).
the People Make Games documentary about the Disco Elysium case was a heavily biased piece that unintentionally(?) served as a PR job for ZA/UM, meant to muddy the waters around the actual reason for Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere’s removal. It is indeed possible that Kurvitz was a complete slob and a total asshole during production, but that doesn’t erase the fact that a majority of the unethical business practises and abuse that happened at ZA/UM were due to Management.
GLHF reported yesterday that Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM planned on laying off around 24 workers and canceled its latest project, codenamed X7. Among the staff members to be laid off is the entire writing team that has worked on X7, which includes Argo Tuulik, the last remaining writer at ZA/UM to have worked on the company’s greatest hit.
Last Disco Elysium writer laid off by ZA/UM speaks out
for more on the PMG video
And people have made fantastic critiques of the PMG doc. Lemme link it https://youtu.be/K1b5zyvsUBY
been thinking about DE, does anyone know if it runs well on Linux?
I’ve only played it on Pop_OS! but it worked flawlessly.
As someone else said, with Proton/Wine.
Yeah, it needs proton or wine to run but it works flawlessly
Same.
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