The World Politics of Disco Elysium

by Vic Castro (Editor), Nicholas Kiersey (editor)

The World Politics of Disco Elysium analyses the distinctive political claims and original arguments on a wide range of international political issues of the highly-acclaimed Marxist video game Disco Elysium (2019), which takes place in a speculative fictional world anchored in a post-Soviet Estonian perspective.

Disco Elysium (2019) has been repeatedly acclaimed as one of the best video games of all time. This detective role-playing game unfolds in a city ruined by a failed communist revolution and occupied by a foreign coalition. Furthering recent work in International Relations and popular culture, this book claims that the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of speculative fiction can produce theoretical and political novelty, beyond merely reflecting existing political dynamics. By placing a metaphor for the Estonian capital Tallinn at the centre of a world, Disco Elysium produces an estranged Estonian perspective on world politics that challenges dominant Anglo-American views of International Relations, while also undermining the opposition between a coherent West and a colonized Rest. The contributors, from International Relations and Cultural Studies, discuss the game’s claims on topics such as capitalism, (neo)liberalism, foreign intervention, law enforcement, fascism, colonialism, gender, disability, violence, memory, revolutionary politics, the European Union, political realism, and international security.

The World Politics of Disco Elysium will be of great interest to students and scholars researching the politics of popular culture, post-Soviet politics, non-Western International Relations, as well as game studies and cultural studies.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

278 pages, Hardcover

Published June 30, 2025

Reviews

[Afonso Dimas Martins · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Last review before moving indefinitely to StoryGraph because fuck Amazon)

This is without exaggeration the best textbook I've ever read. Not just because it explores one of my favorite games, but also because it explains so much about real international relations through world politics within Disco Elysium. For context, this is game of a seemingly multitude of contradictions: a dread-simulator full of humor, an ACAB narrative where you play as a hard-boiled detective cop, a Marxist game that criticizes communism, and so on. But of course those are not paradoxes but simply an intricate understanding on these political nuances, and it's great to see an academic work researching and disentangling so well what makes this game so real.

I don't know of any other game that simulated this well how political ideology actually affects how you play in a way that resembles real life. Games like Fallout: New Vegas did this to some extent. For example, if you choose to play as a fascist you'll say "funny things" and suffer the consequences from it sooner or later. But in Disco Elysium, you don't just get to say "funny things" - at some point, those things are all you'll be able to say. Like if you choose enough fascist dialogue options, you lose the ability to think in any other way - such as when you approach sweet old Lena and the only dialogue option left is a misogynistic insult. As Kurt Vonnegut said: "we are what we pretend to be". If you cosplay as cryptofascist edge-lord, you become a cryptofascist edge-lord.

More importantly, like this book details, this game goes beyond simply simulating real life world politics: it actually produces new and serious political arguments on neocolonialism, neoliberalism, disability justice, and many more. And this is done not just through mere dialogue options, but also through game design itself. For example, in this game you don't have to worry about inventory management, but you do have to worry about what you put in your head because you have limited Thought Cabinet space. In this way, the game is anti-capitalist not only in its writing, but in the way it forces you to think in ways that differ from the usual capitalism realist neoliberal lens we are raised to have.

Disco Elysium departs away from Mark Fisher's "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" by showing how the end of the world ultimately caused by capitalism may actually be the most fertile time to imagine an alternative to it.

[Gavin]

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scholars have focused on the complex circulation of ideas between first- and second-order representations of world politics. Revachol, the second-order speculative fictional city at the heart of the game is a cultural object rife with tensions echoing the predicaments of our own world politics.

This is cute but not apt. It's good to remember that political theory is not the same as political reality,, that this whole book, this whole field is just a representation. But political fiction like DE is not mostly second-order (a representation of a representation), except when the characters talk about theory (which some do). I think they're still trying to establish the seriousness of talking about videogames on the company dime. I thought that died out in the noughties.

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The larding (Hogg 1902) of citations (Schooly 1990) is hard to get used to again (Leech 2025).

[R]

‘In reaction to this literature, postcolonial scholars have highlighted the equal
importance of what has slipped into oblivion. A regime of remembrance, defined as “an
ensemble of statements, images, monuments of verbal and non-verbal knowledge about
the past [that is] authorized, taught, celebrated, and repeated,” entails the existence of a
parallel “regime of forgetting.” This regime of forgetting encompasses “an ensemble of
statements, of images, that a nation keeps repressed, unauthorized, and prohibited in and
through its institutions.” Former colonial empires are often
selective when creating the official narratives of their colonial history. Conversely, the
communities affected by present or historical colonization encounter challenges in
constructing a collective memory freed from domination. Collective memory is not
merely the aggregate of what is collectively recalled; it is also constructed by what has
been collectively forgotten.’