Content Warning: This article contains frank discussion of suicide, as well as light spoilers for Disco Elysium
The title of this piece is a line referenced several times throughout Disco Elysium, attributed to its main character in some of his moments of deep despair. It's an apt summation of the state of his life around the time of the game, an alcohol-soaked haze of excess poorly masking bitter regret. The few people he hasn't pushed away with his self-destructive behavior can only barely tolerate him, so convinced of his inability to change that their concern has twisted into anger and resentment. He barely clings to the will to live, haunted by the memories of all his past traumas constantly threatening to overwhelm him. He is an emotionally shattered shell of a man who can't manage even the most basic functions of everyday living. And I relate to him far more than is healthy.
I want to be very, very clear here. I don't mean this in the colloquial sense of “haha I really like this character!” I mean that I actually see a lot of myself in him. Even then, you might think I'm saying “he says some funny lines about being sad that I like.” No. I related to this character so hard that I felt like I finally, truly understood why someone would abuse drugs and alcohol. I briefly wondered if I should take up the habit myself to help with my own emotional pain. I started to idly fantasize about developing retrograde amnesia so I could get a nice fresh start like he does. I saw such a perfect reflection of my own misery that I couldn't look away. It was bad.
But why did I feel such a strong kinship? It's not like there's any shortage of depressed characters in media these days. It's not even hard to find really good depictions of depressed characters! Shows like BoJack Horseman and You're the Worst are just two examples that I personally find really compelling and well done. Yet even these examples did not stick in my head and cause the level of direct personal identification that Disco Elysium did. There's something special to this game that really captures the feeling of abject, suicidal despair in a particularly evocative fashion.
Part of that is just the nature of being a video game. Directly controlling someone's actions, as opposed to passively watching them play out, naturally makes you identify with them a little more. This goes double for a game like Disco Elysium, where the majority of the gameplay involves directing the protagonist's thoughts and choosing what he says. It's not just a quirk of medium that makes the game so resonant though. This is a game built from the ground up to immerse you fully in the headspace of another person, to a degree few other games even attempt.
If you haven't played it, Disco Elysium is essentially a hybrid RPG and point-and-click adventure game where you play as a detective trying to solve a lynching. What sets it apart from similar games, other than its stellar writing, is how it chooses to represent the various skills you can invest in. Rather than passive bonuses, each and every skill in the game is an aspect of the protagonist's personality. The more points you invest in a skill, the more that part of your personality will chime in during conversations to offer their point of view. This can be as simple and straightforward as your Empathy explaining how someone else is feeling to as bizarre as your Pain Threshold expressing enthusiasm for a particularly painful therapy technique.
You can probably already see how this helps put you in a character's headspace much better than a unified stream of internal monologue does. Your different skills chime in seemingly at random, sometimes squabbling and offering conflicting advice and viewpoints. This chaotic, contradictory cacophony is a far better representation of how the thought process works than any other RPG I've seen. Not only that, it's a crucial part of why the game is so accurate in depicting the spiral of despair that comes with major depression.
A random interjection from one of your skills is a surprisingly effective way of simulating an intrusive thought. Those automatic, almost involuntary responses to the world around us are essentially little voices from aspects of our personality, jumping in with their particular insights. And here is where the game crosses from “only” a brilliant and innovative way of showing its character's thought process and becomes a stunningly authentic peek into an emotionally damaged soul. Because for many people, these sorts of thoughts are fairly innocuous and easy to ignore, to the point that you may not have ever really considered them before. But for Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harry Du Bois, and for lots of people like me, they can be an almost crippling experience.
Put enough points into Harry's Electrochemistry skill and his addictions will become overwhelming, as every little thing he sees that so much as reminds him that drugs and alcohol exist will cause Electrochemistry to demand indulgence. Put enough points into Authority and Harry becomes hypersensitive to any perceived lack of respect, the skill demanding that any affront be met as aggressively as possible. Even something as innocuous as Logic, if too many points are invested in it, will become preening and arrogant, popping up to tell Harry to flaunt his intelligence at every opportunity.
Your dialogue choices can really effectively show off the nature of an intrusive thought as well. Probe too deeply into the forgotten traumas of Harry's past and you may get dialogue options that really wallow in his despair. This can be as blunt and direct as a total non-sequitur choice of “Fucking kill yourself, you asshole” becoming available while reading an old letter. To those unaccustomed to this phenomenon, it may seem a jarring moment, but pressing on an emotional wound like that is painful. And in retreating to violent self-hatred, even to a suicidal degree, when confronted with things you'd rather not think about, I see more of myself than I care to admit.
It's the subtler moments that really got me though. One in particular left me thinking about it for days after it happened, despite being a pretty small moment all things considered. Roughly halfway through the game you're finally able to track down Harry's lost badge, but it comes with the painful realization that it was lost because Harry had trashed his station's expensive motor carriage during his drunken stupor. Reflecting on the full extent of the damage he's done, both to himself and to his standing as an officer of the Revachol Citizen's Militia, he despairs of ever improving. It's at this point that his partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, offers some rare words of encouragement.
Hearing Kim express hope for your mental, emotional, and physical improvement, you're given three options for how to respond. One is a simple acknowledgment of “Thanks. That gives me hope.” One is a more pragmatic observation of how difficult that would be, “I'm afraid there are no ex-alcoholics.” And the last is the title of this piece: “I don't want to get better – I want to get worse.”
This is not a particularly important choice in terms of game mechanics. I don't think there's even any difference in how Kim responds to these various choices. But I was still stuck on that screen for a long moment, staring at my choices. Something about the combination of these choices, in this situation, as a response to this conversation, just struck me all at once with the full weight of how comprehensively Disco Elysium understands what it means to be utterly overcome with hopeless, all-consuming despair.
For one thing, there's the sentiment of the last choice itself. It might sound like a strange thing to say, even kind of a joke, a comical expression of recalcitrance from an unrepentant drunk. But really, it's the simplest distillation of the worst thing depression does to you. To be depressed is to be stripped of all hope that you or your life will ever improve. It's to become utterly convinced that there's no way out, that your mistakes are irreversible and you'll never regain what you've lost. When you feel that powerless, why should you even want to cling to false hope? Much better to melt away into your worst impulses, quietly fading into oblivion – if you don't take matters into your own hands first.
It wasn't just that the last choice was such an incredible summation of that feeling, though. It wasn't just that I have plenty of Lieutenant Kitsuragis in my life that made me think a similar thought when they tried to cheer me up. It was staring at that last choice placed deliberately in contrast to the first one: the thought that bubbles to the surface when someone says something like that versus what I know they want to hear. I don't normally think of that situation as a choice, but here the game was laying it out with numbered dialogue options. And here is where we come to what I think is Disco Elysium's most brilliant marriage of theme and gameplay.
It's fairly common, in a game like Disco Elysium, for you to have a wide variety of options for how you can respond to just about any event or conversation. Usually this is done for humor or for the purposes of allowing roleplaying, but here it's actually an important part of what the game is communicating (and also for humor, the game is extremely funny). Every option you get in dialogue is something that Harry has thought to say. You aren't choosing what Harry thinks, you're only choosing which of his thoughts he decides to focus on.
This is a subtle but crucial distinction. Usually there's a tension between giving the player lots of options for what to say versus having a clearly defined personality for the main character. That means you end up with either a main character who is largely a cipher (such as in RPGs like Skyrim) or dialogue options that are mostly cosmetic in a pre-determined story (such as in classic point-and-click adventures like Grim Fandango). In Disco Elysium though, you both have a meaningful variety of choice and an extremely well-defined character in Harry. Harry is always the kind of person who might think he has psychic powers or that landlords should be executed or that all women are devil women, but your version of Harry might not be a person who ever expresses or acts on those thoughts.
And it's that aspect of the game that suddenly became very meaningful to me as I stared at the choice I'd been given. Because my initial instinct was to pick the last option. It felt like the appropriate response; after all, it's the kind of thought I'd have in that situation. It was also by far the most impactful of the choices. I had to look up what the other options were when I was writing this, while that last choice is still etched into my brain all these weeks later. But still, I hesitated.
I'll be honest, I mostly hesitated because I knew Kim wouldn't want to hear that. But think about what that means in terms of how things were playing out, both mechanically and narratively. After hearing some words of encouragement from a friend, my first instinct was a bitter rejection of the idea that there was any hope left. But I reconsidered expressing that thought, if only just to not disappoint that friend. This is a complex series of feelings that has literally happened to me in real life on multiple occasions, and the game just effectively recreated that with nothing but a couple of dialogue options. Since I knew these were all thoughts Harry had regardless of whether or not I picked them, I didn't feel compelled to choose the last option just because it felt like an authentic response. By making it clear you are directing Harry's thoughts, not choosing them, the game creates the space for this fascinating interplay.
And it all ties into the greater themes that Disco Elysium's story is getting at too. Because the game thinks that what you choose to express is just as meaningful, if not moreso, than what you think. The choices you make, even in seemingly innocuous or inconsequential situations, influence how Harry develops. Some of this is in fairly obvious ways, like choosing from a variety of ridiculous personality traits eventually unlocking your “Copotype” (the kind of cop you are), but it works in some more subtle ways too. The thoughts (little bonuses you can slot in to your character) that become available, your relationship to Kim, the way some characters react to you, all of it can be pretty significantly affected just by the dialogue options you pick and the skills you choose to invest in.
Everything in the game, every skill, every option, every action, is some part of Harry and how he responds to the world. But the truly important ones, the ones that shape him, are the ones you choose to focus on and express. Harry is a depressed wreck, a man who has marinated in his misery for so long that he can no longer see any life beyond it. There is nothing you can do to make him not feel that way; there's nothing you can do to stop the self-loathing or frustrated rage or suicidal thoughts from creeping in. But you can choose not to dwell on them, to let them pass over Harry and focus on something else instead. That, Disco Elysium argues, is what it really means to choose who someone is: not by controlling what thoughts enter their head, but by choosing which of those thoughts they latch onto.
Nothing illustrates how well the game understands both this concept and the true depths that focusing on your misery can lead you to better than what happens if you choose to do so. Harry is a man who has clearly struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past. You can hear from many different characters how he would make increasingly graphic “jokes” about his desire to die, how he would wave his gun around and threaten to finally do the deed. And if you focus enough on his despair, those thoughts come creeping back, worming their way into his mind until you're awarded the thought Finger on the Eject Button.
I only glossed over it before, but thoughts are little bonuses you can get based on your choices and actions in the game. They provide one set of bonuses (or penalties) during a period of time where Harry is thinking about it, and then a permanent set once he's come to a conclusion about it. Finger on the Eject Button is one such thought, one that represents the strange sort of freedom that comes from contemplating suicide.
You might not understand that sentiment if you've never felt that way yourself. But think about what I said earlier, about how in its worst forms depression saps you of all hope. You become convinced that there is no solution to your problems, no way out from the hell that is living. Except there is just one, exceedingly final way out. To be depressed is to feel utterly powerless to shape the course of your life. How freeing then, how powerful, to realize that you do have some option, some way to exert the control you feel you've been stripped of. Once you reach that point, considering suicide is almost intoxicating, a taste of the power you lost long ago.
Disco Elysium understands that power. When you're contemplating Finger on the Eject Button, you receive a hefty +2 bonus to both your Suggestion and Authority. These are two of the more important skills in the game, and they help tremendously in opening up dialogue options and reading other people when talking to them, so it's a considerable boost for Harry. From a pure gameplay perspective then, it's tantalizing to let Harry indulge in the fantasy of letting go, just for a little while.
But the game also understands that this power is a trap. To focus on something is to let it define you, to become a part of you. Spend too long contemplating Finger on the Eject Button and it evolves into its permanent form. There are no bonuses then, no benefits or boosts to your stats. All it does is give you the option, every night when you go to bed, to finally press the button. There is some freedom in considering that there is a way out, yes, but focus on it too long and soon it'll seem like the only way out. Then there's no more elation or control or power left. There is only the long, dark, lonely nights, facing down a future of unending misery and what you've convinced yourself is the only way to prevent it.
In the end, I went with the first option. It felt disingenuous at the time, like while I obviously really felt the third choice, I should say the first so Kim wouldn't get upset. I've done the same in real life. I've also not done it, charging ahead with option 3 anyway, more than is probably healthy. What Disco Elysium wants you to understand, though, is that those tiny little choices matter. Even if you don't mean it, even if that third option feels like the truth, the simple act of choosing to say something else is one tiny brick in shaping who you are. And over time, in the distant future, with enough of those choices, you might be able to see another way out.
Perhaps this is why I identified so heavily with Harry. Not just because I'm also an emotional wreck, a man almost congenitally incapable of getting over anything, a feeble imitation of a functioning human. Not just because Harry's darkest thoughts always creep in and he struggles to contain them in any situation. Not just because, between the absolutely stellar writing and the innovative design, Disco Elysium is better at getting inside a character's head than any game I've ever seen. But because I want to believe that glimmer of hope for Harry exists for me too. He's a video game character, so ultimately for him turning things around is just a matter of someone else wanting it for him. It's much harder to do it yourself. But maybe, with enough time and enough choices, I'll have another reason to relate to him.
this is really insightful! disco elysium’s handling of harry’s suicidality was something that stuck out to me on my first play-through. i really love your framing of it: that we’re not picking what thought harry HAS rather it’s what thought he ACTS on. i think that’s what makes it such an effective vehicle to express and engage with passive suicidality. regardless of whether i actually want to kill myself at any given moment, my mind often jumps to “you should kill yourself” in the face of any obstacle. like harry, i can either entertain that thought or brush it aside, but it’s there nonetheless. all this to say, i really enjoyed reading this! i’ve been trying to find people who are talking/thinking about disco elysium’s relationship to suicidality, and this is one of the best/most salient pieces i’ve come across. great stuff!!!!