The Signs
Today I was thinking a lot about a game I’ve slowly been playing over time called Disco Elysium. It’s a Story-based RPG set in a failed capitalist society that is facing abject poverty and crime rates at an all time high. You take the place of a detective who is at a low point in his own life, drinking himself into oblivion and losing his memory the morning you wake up in his shoes.
The game doesn’t shy away from political messaging, the main story of the game is focused on a murder that takes place the night before behind the hotel you’re staying at. The person who was murdered in question was lynched by a group of Dockworkers who were part of the local dockworker union, which was in ongoing strike against it’s corporate ownership Wild Pines Group. Throughout the game, you’re presented with dialogue and choices in a unique system that allows you to be empathetical or nasty, moral-bound or corrupt, and more in engaging and groundbreaking ways.
It’s really interesting watching and interacting with these conceptual ideas of where the “Metaverse” is going and how technology will further implement with our species. It makes me think a lot about Heather Snyder Quinn’s idea if “Design Futures”, the speculative idea of creating artificial futures using design as a medium and storyteller. When I looked back at these videos with the lens of art rather than just experiencing them as content, I gained a new insight into a possible path of something I could enjoy or explore myself. Could this mixture of design futures with a spice of content creation in a multi-media format be the language I could use to express my own interests?
Disco Elysium, Revachol; Martinaise District Town Square
The interesting part of this and why I think it ties in to my writings here is the world-building and lore set in and around this world, thousands of years of history built up all for just this fantastic game. One I haven’t even been able to finish yet even with 30 hours invested over the last year or so. The ability that the developers showed in crafting meaningful and realistic conversations, people, and locations sticks with me to this day. I find myself just thinking about it now and then.
Disco Elysium OST - Instrument of Surrender
Why do we find post-industrial collapse, or just any collapse for that matter, beautiful? The games uniquely painter-like world and characters of course are fantastically done, but something of the collapse of it, the ruin of old structures that stood a thousand years before, the rotting of a factory site abandoned just 20 years ago, humans (especially me) seem to have an innate fascination with the post-apocalyptic and destroyed. The sound of Revachol, the horns that play a sad, distant melody of a town long past it’s prime, embellished trumpets of a once thought utopia. An almost nostalgic listening experience even on your first listen, a fading memory of a location in your head you’ve never even been to.
In my mind, I think of the places I’ve been. My hometown, which of course is not as bad as these fictional places. I can hear the sad melody of the town lying at the end of it’s time, The people there marching through the rhythm of life, trapped in a vicious cycle of a system that never allowed them an opportunity to escape like I could. The factories shut down, the money left with them, but the people remained. “Grind culture” tells them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, that being in this impoverished conditions is their fault as long as they keep buying their Starbucks coffee and eating McDonald’s. Just save your money!
Nobody wants to speak about the reasons behind these conditions, nobody wants to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the fault lies instead with the system in which they live, not the lives they lead trying to survive in that system.
Throughout my time playing games, these stories always stood out to me with visual imagery I found captivating, and concepts I fell in love with. The Fallout series, for example, is a alternate timeline from ours where a nuclear crisis was realized, and the world fell into apocalypse from the mass atomic bombing of WW3. A world stuck in it’s time of the 1940s-1950s, where people are barely getting by in the wastelands of post-nuclear America. The look of the 1950s era vehicles and buildings, the “futuristic” technology that looks like a amalgamation of the Jetsons tech and old science fiction, and the popular music of that era really immerses you in this idea a living, breathing, and dangerous world.
Fallout 4, Massachusetts, River Bridge
Fallout 76, West Virginia, Fairground Area
The people in these places are working hard trying to live in a world that literally blew itself up around them, is it their fault that happened?
Although I would never want to live within these worlds myself, I’m very happy just enjoying my time within them digitally, I find it interesting how interconnected we are with this idea of “Reclamation.” In time, the world will take back all that we build and our footprints will fade. Steel turns to rust, rust turns to dust. “Overgrowth” and the cycle of regrowth in that sense becomes something that is an inevitability for us as humans, as civilizations, and even as a species.
“Wild Mammals Roamed When Covid Kept Humans Home” By Emily Anthes, 2023
During COVID-19, humanity had a new obsession with animals reclaiming the spaces we typically used for the hustle and bustle of daily human life. It got a lot of people thinking about how the rivers became clearer, the stars more visible, and the air cleaner. It painted very vividly a picture of the beauty in the midst of a global crisis.
The Last Of Us, Part 1 - Giraffe Scene
During this time the catchphrase of the year was “Nature is healing,” but whether it was meant sarcastically or not, it was clear that nature was healing because we weren’t there.
Nier: Replicant BG Concept Art
In the series Nier, director Yoko Taro explores this concept by showing the cycle of humanity very clearly. It would be easy to believe that these pictures are backwards, that the right art is actually taken at the same time or before the left. However, in Nier, humanity (or well, the concept of “humanity” as humans are at this point far extinct) has been going through the cycle of technological growth for nearly 20,000 years. The concept of “ancient ruins” is flipped on it’s head, as the people in the game are unable to understand and interpret “modern” technology and thus consider it undecipherable. The ruins in this case are not stone temples or tombs, but instead old factories made of steel and other materials that could possibly take thousands of years to fully decompose. It brings about this interesting contrast of a medieval style society exploring the ruins of a forgotten factory, a concept typically thought of the other way around.
Nier: Automata BG Concept Art
The late Japanese artist “Nujabes”, who is often credited as one of the inventors of lo-fi hip-hop as we know it today, had a song from the 2005 album “Modal Soul” Called “The Sign (feat. Pase Rock)”. It speaks about the state of the world and the warnings that we have failed to read as we move further towards our own dystopia.
The song itself is a hip-hop spoken poetry style piece with a distinct Foley sound which, to me, sounds like ice sloshing around in a drink. In my interpretation, I view the scene as a jazz band playing at a club trying to give a warning to the audience, but the audience just sips their drinks and watches on, not truly listening. The opening lyrics say:
“You wanna watch it all fall apart?
Every time I walk I watch
I look, I notice, I observe
I read the signs
And the signs are pointing in the wrong direction
The signs are not naming the streets
Or leading you to the highways
The signs are naming names
Tombstones to mark the death of children not even born
And I don’t mean abortion I mean what is to come
The signs are telling me to turn back around
The signs are telling me to research my past
The signs are telling me to learn from my mistakes
The signs are asking me questions
Do you wanna watch it all fall apart?
Do you have any control?
Is there anything that you can do?”
What will society look like 10, 200, 3000 years from now? Will humanity heed “The Signs” and move to the correct path, or will we end up like the town Revachol in Disco Elysium, will we end up like the wastelands of Fallout, or the forgotten empires of Nier? I think it’s important to view these pieces of media as warnings. Sign of what happens when we as humans lose control and continue down the paths we lead without second thought. Capitalism, Nationalism, Racism, and more issues just like those have led to a boiling point that feels like it could tip over at any point in our lifetime. I don’t have the answers or solutions to this either, I am just one person who sees the signs, and fears for our future.
Viewing humans as a main problem centered around these issues isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and the argument won’t really get you anywhere except for being called a “Doomer” who just sees our world as a lost cause, so let’s be clear here:
