Clown Karaoke with Tom

Arrggh! A Video Game Podcast from The Waffling Taylors

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Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Content Warning

Because the game we discussed in this episode deals with some pretty tough topics around mental health, we wanted to give you all a fair warning about it. We don't just discuss the mental health topics in the game, but we also take a moment to talk about how important it is for those who are suffering to get help.

As such, you may want to skip this episode if mental health issues are a particularly triggering topic.

But we'd also like to say, in the words of Stephen Dubner:

Take care of yourself, and if you can someone else too.
- Stephen Dubner

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

Tom from Kölncampus ECHO wanted to join us about Disco Elysium, so we invited him on the show to tell us what's so great about it.

But the first question to ask was whether we had played it. Jay hadn't, and Squidge had only played a little of it:

I essentially looked round the main area that you get in the tutorial: the tutorial area. Adn I realised that me trying to be a good cop is a bad idea. And it's one of those where you've gotta set up your skills, and I don't think I set them up right, so I got dead ends at every turn.
- Squidge

Tom handily passed on the studio's short description of the game by way of tempting him to play it:

DnD meets '70s cop show. What do you imagine the game to be, just from that sentence?
- Tom

Which lead the chaps into a discussion about the clever design and story-telling trick of having the main character forget what their name is.

You, the person, are the character; the character is an avatar through which you interact with the world. By having the character not know their name, you're providing a blank sheet for you to become. You're saying, "this is the person, this is what they look like, but you can choose the name you want."
- Jay

But the clever design doesn't stop there. As Tom points out, standard RPGs have you design a character of your own, setting stats, picking out a head, body, hair, and whatever; and you provide the character traits for the character through your choices. Whereas with Disco Elysium, the character already exists, and your job is to rediscover their character traits - through the use of virutal die rolls, your choices, and how with the game altering it's story slightly based on both of those.

Standard RPGs have skills like Defense, Attack, Initiative; whereas Disco Elysium has skills in things like "electro-chemistry" which reduces the affects of drugs and alcohol. The other difference being that each of the 24 skills in the game can talk to the player. The electro-chemistry skill, for example, talks to the player trying to get the player to have the character take more drugs and alcohol.

The thing that makes Disco Elysium brilliant for me is [that] it does not only depict the trauma - a lot of video games try do that, or do that. But it let's you play the trauma. It lets you really experience being in a situation, playing as a character, that has a lot of trauma in him... and you get to play with them, and experience living with them, because they constantly tell you things. You don't get a break. Every time you got to sleep in the game, you have dreams about them.
- Tom

The fact that game itself started out life as a table-top RPG game is rather telling. The detail put into the gameplay mechanics, the frankly huge amount of lore (and how regularly it is delivered), adn how it is designed really bear this out. Apparently, the game that Robert Kurwitsz (the designer of the game) would host game nights where his bandmates would play the game - he even wrote a book, expanding on the universe of the game, in 2013 called "Sacred and Terrible Air" - at the time of writing these show notes, it's only available in Kurwitz's native Estonian

...

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

What have you been playing recently? Do you agree with the anonymous review that Chief read during this episode? What would you take with you to the Thunder Plains?

Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, leave a comment on the show notes or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Tom on Twitter
• Tom's interview with Brian David Judkins about his podcast "Encounter Party"
  • Tom's podcast is mostly in German
• Moon logic
• Resident Evil Heardle
  • It's like Wordle, but with the music from the Resident Evil games
• Wordle is a daily dose of delight, despair, and sometimes smugness

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The Waffling Taylors is a proud member of Jay and Jay Media. If you like this episode, please consider supporting our Podcasting Network. One $3 donation provides a week of hosting for all of our shows. You can support this show, and the others like it, at https://ko-fi.com/jayandjaymedia

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