Danny Hinrichs is enrolled in the master program ‘Cultural Sciences: Culture, Arts and Media’ at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. There, he is writing his master thesis on the relationship between the gamification of labour and the labourification of videogames, and how both converge in the logic of neoliberalism. His main research interests include critical theory, philosophy, and political aesthetics.
If he could add one book to the canon of game studies, it would be Alfie Bown’s ‘PlayStation Dreamworld’.
Between Pre- and Post-Apocalypse: Disco Elysium and the Critique of Apocalyptic Escapism
FROG 2024 – Talk
Apocalypses are convenient. Fantasizing about how asteroids, the zombie super virus, or madmen with nukes destroy humanity might be more comfortable than the more realistic prospect of slowly rotting away through bleak decades of ever-decreasing living standards. Apocalyptic fantasies project humanity’s self-imposed horrors onto external threats. They serve well to delegate responsibility and reduce the social complexity of impending doom, be it of social, ecological, or economic nature. It’s what makes them cathartic.
Now that our pop culture is saturated with highly aestheticized doomsday scenarios and equally stylized post-apocalyptic hellscapes, one must ask: Why are we drawn to the catastrophes that end ’life as we know it’ at the exact time when ‘life as we know it’ becomes the catastrophe? Is it a most ironic sort of escapism? Or was Walter Benjamin right when he declared that “humanity’s self-alienation has reached a point where it experiences its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”?
The answer might lie in a city at the end of history, trapped between post- and pre-apocalypse, where a late-stage alcoholic cop wakes up from a botched suicide attempt. Disco Elysium’s city of Revachol effectively underwent a post-Soviet shock therapy and was left at the mercy of financial colonialists and rampant poverty. At the same time, its world is slowly rendered uninhabitable by a mysterious force reminiscent of our world’s global warming.
Subjected to this dual crisis, our protagonist can declare himself the “Cop of the Apocalypse”, if the player wills it. But no matter how much the harbinger of doom doubles down on his apocalyptic prophecies, the game still declares that “it’s totally a coping mechanism”. It turns out that being devoted to the end of the world is just as much an escape fantasy as naïve optimism. Both stand in equal opposition to a sober encounter with an increasingly unpleasant reality.
With the help of the not-so-unreal world of Disco Elysium, my talk aims to shed light on how the crises of our world give rise to the popular aestheticization of apocalypse.
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