Disco Elysium - This is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them

I didn't wanto post this until I knew whether she'd bounce off the game or not, but personal top tier fav streamer LaurentheFlute (most well known for her Undertale streams) is currently playing the game on Thursdays at around 7EST (aka tonight). Come in if positivity and actual english lit and music theory commentary sound good to you.

The catch is that's she's not the fastest streamer, tends to go into long tangents and speculations. But for this game it's actually working out really well for this game. She's going through the game very slowly (spent an entire stream in the Whirling lol), but the flipside to this is that not a single line of dialogue or lore is going to go uncommented on, she's going to analyze the living daylights out of this game. And she has a scarily good batting average in predicting plot points miles before they happen.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIL_-nfjmoU


View: https://www.twitch.tv/laurentheflute/videos
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Structurally speaking she's on course to pour through the game section by section, character by character. Like last week's stream was basically entirely an exploration of Plaisance's bookstore. So really think of it less like a 'playthrough' of a video game where you go to see the player react to the content, and more a weekly Disco Elysium book club.

Also due to her specific quirks as a streamer she's zeroed in pretty strongly on playing as a Boring Cop and ironically might end up being more competent than 90% of other HDBs.
 
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I'll check it out but I'm not sure how interested I can be in someone who isn't investing in Inland Empire and Shivers. I've always wanted to see someone seriously analyze the shivers sections.

Edit: checked it out and her DE stream isn't for me, but I'm loving her H:ZD playthrough. Thanks for the recommendation!
 
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Since this thread is alive again, I have a question about Cuno, what happens to him after the tribunal? If Kim gets shot he talks about breaking away from Cunoesse and trying to stop taking speed in a way that makes him sound like he was doing both of those things before the shootout. Does he still do both of those things still if Kim makes it through the tribunal?
 
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One element of this game that really gets overlooked is how much self control you actually have. You don't have to do stupid or hurtful things just because the option is there or it's a quest or it seems like it will be entertaining to watch. You can - but you don't have to. You can actively choose which parts of the madness to participate in.
 
Alright so I watched the video and here's some key points:

When ZA/UM the studio was founded, it had two shareholders: Margus Linnamäe and Kaur Kender. Linnamäe is one of the richest men in Estonia and owned the majority of the company, while Kender is a very notorious 'transgressive' author who was friends with the founders of ZA/UM and was the one who originally proposed the idea of making a video game set in Robert Kurvitz's RP setting.

Kender later sold his share in ZA/UM to another investment firm, Koha Capital, which is owned by Ilmar Kompus. Another person heavily involved in Koha Capital is Tõnis Haavel, who started off as a co-owner but gave up his stake in the company following his involvement in the 'Baku Affair' investment fraud scandal while remaining 'employed' by the firm, and he is listed in the credits of Disco Elysium as an executive producer (for what it's worth, he does seem to have been very involved in the company and one of the writers says that he was instrumental in getting the game to ship).

A decent amount of time in the video is spent identifying some weird payment and holding company structures that look like they mostly exist to send money to Haavel's partner (Anu Reiman) rather than Haavel himself so that he can say he's broke and doesn't have to pay off the investors he defrauded.

There was an agreement in advance of the game's release, which was carried out when it became successful, for ZA/UM to purchase part of Linnamäe's stake and redistribute it between the founders of the studio. This resulted in the following distribution of ownership:

Linnamäe - 46.8%
Kompus - 22.4%
Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov (Lead Artist), Kender - 10.2% each
ZA/UM itself - 0.2%

Then, ZA/UM moved to London, in large part in order to expand its operations and be able to more easily recruit game devs. In the UK, there's a lot of weird finagling with holding companies for different parts of the property:
  • ZAUM UK is founded to specifically hold the Disco ElysiumIP, with five entities having equal stakes in it:
    • Robert Kurvitz
    • Aleksander Rostov
    • Kaur Kender
    • Ilmar Kompus
    • YesSirNoSir, a company owned by Anu Reiman (Haavel's partner)
  • Newelysium is founded to specifically hold the IP for the sequel to Disco Elysium, with the following distribution of ownership:
    • Linnamäe - 10%
    • Kompus - 5%
    • ZAUM UK - 85%
There's also other holding companies that get brought up but frankly the documentary is really bad at actually communicating how everything was structured. The key thing to note is that this arrangement gave Kurvitz and the others a higher ownership stake of the eventual sequel than they otherwise would have.

Also, at some point under very dubious circumstances Linnamäe sells his stake in ZA/UM to Kompus (with the exception of the 10% stake in the sequel), giving Kompus majority ownership of the studio. Kompus essentially seems to have borrowed money from ZA/UM to buy the company and it's not very clear who approved of this because there's like no documentation of any meetings or discussions between the various owners, if there were any (Kompus said everyone was kept in the loop, Kurvitz and Rostov say they were very much not in the loop about any of this).

What Kompus implies in his interview with PMG, and which PMG also speculate themselves, is that Kompus got (verbal, undocumented) approval from the others to buy out Linnamäe's share in order to secure increased stakes in Disco Elysium 2 for everyone. There's a bit of a hint towards this narrative in Kurvitz's own interview where he talks about how he was led to believe that Linnamäe was responsible for all the crunch and unreasonable deadlines that occurred during the original development of the game, and so Kompus buying him out was a good thing for everyone.

It is important to note here Kurvitz casually says during his interview that at no point during any of this process of moving to the UK and setting up all these holding companies and navigating all these bizarre ownership distributions, did he ever speak to a lawyer.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

Anyway, the big revelation of this documentary is that basically a whole bunch of ZA/UM employees come forward to basically say that Kurvitz sucked as a boss, particularly when work on The Final Cut was being done. Specifically:
  • Kurvitz was very rude and acerbic in his feedback, regularly telling people their work was 'shit'.
  • Kurvitz has been vastly overstating the amount of writing for the game he did himself
  • Kurvitz and Rostov took a long break after the original release of the game, which wasn't unreasonable following all the crunch but also left all the other devs (who had also crunched) to do The Final Cutthemselves, which made things even worse for them.
    • For example, Justin Keenan, the current lead writer at ZA/UM who's been with the company since 2017, says that he had to write the moralist and communist vision quests for The Final Cut basically all by himself, and that Helen Hindpere, the official 'lead writer' and Kurvitz's girlfriend, didn't do any writing or help the writers much and didn't tell the writing team about any of their deadlines until they found out themselves that they were a month overdue.
    • Kurvitz and Rostov's absence was also a problem because post-release was when ZA/UM really started to properly establish its working processes and structure going forwards after basically forming around the first game.
  • Kurvitz basically had an 'ingroup' of a few people he would talk to and collaborate with (or excuse when they did nothing) while effectively ignoring or being very hard to reach for everyone else, which was a problem when 'everyone else' included a lot of other senior writers and artists and so on.
  • Eventually, a new system was agreed to where Keenan and Kaspar Tamsalu would take over the 'lead' writer and artist positions respectively. This was so that they could handle all of the administrative aspects of managing the team and deadlines and so on while Kurvitz and Rostov could focus on the actual creative parts of process that they enjoyed. This seemed to work for a couple months but Kurvitz got increasingly upset about no longer being a 'lead', and ended up agitating for his original position back, which most of the writers didn't want to happen.
There's also Petteri Sulonen's claim (Sulonen being the lead technologist at ZA/UM) that Kurvitz had messaged him not long before his firing asking for Sulonen to send him the entire source code for Disco Elysium, and indicating that he was establishing another studio. However, Sulonen didn't tell anyone about this until after Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere were fired so it couldn't have been used as a justification for doing that.

Another thing worth noting here is that Argo Tuulik, a writer who'd been involved with the original ZA/UM art collective (and its predecessor) is a little more moderate in his criticism of Kurvitz's work ethic compared to the others. He emphasises that Kurvitz's criticism, though harsh, was beneficial to him as a writer and that Kurvitz and Hindpere definitely contributed and worked on The Final Cut. That said, he also describes Kurvitz's media statements following his firing as 'manipulative' and describes Kurvitz as regularly exaggerating the amount of writing he did himself on the original game. Tuulik also notes that Rostov was probably the one person who had to crunch the most for the original release of the game.

In their own interview, Kurvitz and Rostov generally emphasise the amount of crunch they had put themselves through and insist that the break they took was necessary and something they were legally entitled to under UK law. They also note that Haavel and Kompus had encouraged them to 'rest'. Kurvitz and Hindpere also indicate that the reason they didn't do as much direct writing for The Final Cut was because they were focusing more on the voiceover recording and had more of a recruitment and oversight/quality control role for the actual writing of the new content. Hindpere also says that the reason she didn't convey deadlines to the writers was because she was also kept out of the loop on them by the producers who were generally quite demeaning and verbally abusive to her, Haavel especially.

The video ends with Kurvitz's response to the various allegations made by the ZA/UM employees, which is mostly a bunch of waffle about how they're being pushed to make those allegations by the capitalists who took over the company as part of their ploy to divide the workers. It's messy and not very impressive.

Some overall takeaways that I have:

I'm left unimpressed by the video. There's a lot of superficially impressive work in terms of going to Estonia and sitting in a court hearing and landing all these interviews, but there isn't much in the way of scrutiny over what they're being told. And in the end there's no real conclusion or articulated stance on everything beyond a sort of vague 'ehhhh it's complicated and nuanced' which just feels intellectually bankrupt.

By avoiding an actual conclusion, the emphasis of the video ends up being predominantly on the workplace drama and toxicity rather than the ownership battle, and so we're left mostly with the impression that "Hey, Kurvitz is a kind of an asshole". Meanwhile the byzantine intellectual property and ownership arrangements of ZA/UM and the legal battle surrounding them are just briefly and confusingly explained at the start in a way that sort of implies without outright stating that maybe Kompus is right and Kurvitz is just whining in hindsight.

And the thing is that these are two very different issues. Whether or not Kurvitz was a rubbish wannabe auteur doesn't really say anything about whether or not he, Rostov and Hindpere got screwed over on the matter of ownership of ZA/UM, nor does it say anything about whether Ilmar Kompus should be the CEO and majority owner of ZA/UM or what sort of person he is.

I think it's entirely valid to conclude from the evidence presented in this video that, hey, Kurvitz sucks and it's probably for the best if he's no longer involved in writing for ZA/UM, and while the maneuvering to turf him is very shady the workers of ZA/UM might be better off with a capitalist ghoul who's professional than with a toxic leftist wannabe auteur who's out of his depth. But that is a stance that should be explicit and articulated, not something awkwardly reached by virtue of the employees and CEO giving the filmmaker more footage to work with.

That being said, the backlash I've been seeing to the video from supporters of Kurvitz on shitholes like Twitter has been equally unimpressive. The based leftist anticapitalist stance on ZA/UM can't or at least shouldn't be, "The intellectual property rights of two guys over something that hundreds of people worked on are more important than the allegations made by those workers, who are probably being paid to lie." That's just ridiculous. It should be possible to emphasise the absolute ridiculousness of ZA/UM's corporate structure and the path it took to being owned by some random investor, in a way that I think People Make Games largely failed to do, without putting a couple auteurs on a pedestal regardless of what they're actually like to work with.

One thing that I think has to be said, and this is how I've felt since this controversy first started, is that it's impossible to say whether or not the eventual follow-up to Disco Elysium or whatever ZA/UM does next will be good under its current ownership or would have been good if Kurvitz and co. hadn't been forced out. That's just not how art works. So the sort of attitude I've seen elsewhere of "Capitalism took from us what would have been a masterpiece of a sequel" is just a completely wrong-headed approach to this conversation.
 
What I took away from the video is that there were essentially two mostly orthogonal chains of events going on that were only fully entangled when it benefited each side to do so.

On the one hand, you have Kompus, Haavel, and Reiman, who primarily seem to be concerned with a. making a bunch of money and b. helping the latter avoid paying fines. They were perfectly happy to pick up the slack for all the auteurs as long as they made them money: corporate indulgences for personal sins, revoked when no longer useful.

On the other, you have the story of how Kurvitz [not sure about Rostov] was that kind of person who was a manager primarily to avoid being managed themselves, and because he had the big ideas and charisma to sell them, but lacked the capacity or interest to engage with the nuts and bolts of running a business, or - importantly - to engage with other staff as a professional leader/organizer, rather than as a charismatic type of leader: he was fine giving orders, but more than happy to let someone else see them carried out, and rather disinterested in what price he was paying for that service until it came back to bite him.

My guess - much like @CallMeIsmail is that Kurvitz was fired, bluntly, because his disinterest in management that had allowed Kompus et. al. to assume control had played its part, and his poor management and abrasive personality was now more trouble than it was worth. Rostov, I would guess, left with him because he had been attached to the charismatic persona/idea of Kurvitz and out of simple friendship.

My takeaways are:

1. Charisma is dangerous, organizations or groups relying on Charisma doubly so.

2. Governance and control always defaults to the interested who show up: if you don't care about management, you will be managed by those who do. If you want a fair business, a fair government, a fair dodge-ball team, a fair anything, active participation in governance by all involved is never optional.
2a. vaguely shady businessmen thrive on the disinterest of others.
 
It's a good splash of cold water to have it recorded that Kurvitz is an ass at running an organization and making others feel valued (not that shocking; there's a type with tortured artists) and alienated enough people that it explains why they became company men and are on board with a new, corporate ZA/UM without him, but I do believe something that his side with Rostov and Hindpere--I might call them The Artists so I don't have to name all of them at once every time--gestured at but were pretty bad at articulating: Their flaws are real but they are going to be ruthlessly exploited by the side with more money and media power in a way that is completely cynical. This is the same shit as MCU fans getting really into the idea that film auteurism is bad with a fig leaf of pseudo-socialist academic justice language about the number of different jobs going into a movie, dismissing great directors as just "egotistical white men", while in practice their opinion pieces against Scorsese and the like are just more valuable attention space to the benefit of the world's biggest media corporation.

Although, to be frank, this is making me sigh more because the Artists here come across as really bad at managing the media and image of this whole thing with the redacted interview and that "energy change" the video mentions, even if they have good reason to lawyer up and be scared of hit pieces. Kompus was slimy by dodging or corporate-speaking every question about the ownership stuff, but Kurvitz and Rostov acted shocked and cagey when the mismanagement stuff came up which you should never do because it's blood in the water for people to chase accusations like that by saying you're denying it.

Argo has this line I specifically recall where he said that Linnamäe, Kompus and Haavel aren't "demonic moneymen" because their resources helped get the game to ship, but with context like the Baku Scandal and all the shenanigans with share transfers and shell companies Kurvitz wasn't paying enough attention to stop (not to mention the fact that Linnamäe is an actual fucking oligarch who helps fund Estonia's far right but that's another topic) I think that's a pretty fair descriptor. It's just that demonic moneymen happen to be the ones with the money you need to get steady paychecks for a lot of people, move to the UK for better resources and talent, and generally support the many details and jobs you need to make a game sellable. Unfortunately, it seems that the Artists of the old ZA/UM collective felt they could deal with the demons relatively below their notice as a small independent team, then got too engrossed in poorly-managed crunch and then feeling like they could relax like Bohemian artists after the release made them wildly successful to notice that the rug was being shimmied out under their feet.

A story of hubristic artists fucking up and helping load the gun they're eventually shot with instead of being blameless victims, yes, but at the end of the day this isn't budging me from hating the new ZA/UM. Good high art needs authorial ownership, even if it's not just the one guy like Kurvitz presented himself to the detriment of Argo and others. Sure there are plenty of games developed under more of a studio identity and anonymity that can be fun or engaging, but they aren't Disco Elysium, and the goofy brand-image fandom-cultivation shit that's been going on in recent months gives me no hope that anyone left at that studio has it in them to even try their best at following in the footsteps with dignity.

Unfortunately I'm pretty cynical about any of the lawsuits coming to anything good; the law is written to benefit these moneymen and they probably had enough lawyers on the job making sure Kurvitz has no legal standing to reverse it. All I can really do is accept that there will never be a real sequel to Disco Elysium (although could there ever be?) and hope the Artists learn from their mistakes and handle their new studio, project, and corporate patron with care.
 

View: https://youtu.be/vnlcSXqquFg

So someone read through the book, Sacred and Terrible Air, which mind, is an unofficial translation, and did an analysis. It doesn't directly spoil the book aside from the, you know, big thing that happens in the future of Revechol, but it touches on the themes and of the coming apocalypse. Disco Elysium takes place 22 years before the events of the book, so it's pretty far into the future/past.

To those who still don't know about the big thing that happens, I'll put it under spoilers, because the video does spoil that:

To those already in the know, Revachol gets destroyed by atomic bombs thanks to a communist revolution. The same revolution that's suggested by Captain Price at the end of the game, which is why I personally think if we are getting DE2, it'll be a direct sequel. Chances are, Harry, Kim, and everyone else are already dead, if not by the bomb, then by old age, or whatever the hell can happen in 22 years.
 
Hykal94 said:
To those already in the know, Revachol gets destroyed by atomic bombs thanks to a communist revolution. The same revolution that's suggested by Captain Price at the end of the game, which is why I personally think if we are getting DE2, it'll be a direct sequel. Chances are, Harry, Kim, and everyone else are already dead, if not by the bomb, then by old age, or whatever the hell can happen in 22 years.
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No, Revachol was just the first target for a fascist-nihilist Innocence who took over Mesque and launched a war on the entire world, with Revachol being the first target of his declaration. There's no mention of Revachol having a new revolution before it got nuked as far as I could find. Which fits; remember, Shivers (La Revacholiere) knows about this future nuking and seems to think Harry's actions and presumably The Return can prevent this. They're potentially separate timelines.
 
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So, two timeline Harries?

One where he's a Fascist-Nationalist trying to fight against the Fascist-Nihlist (and maybe-probably failing.)*

Another where he's a Communard-Returner trying to kickstart the revolution and Revanchol (and maybe-probably failing.)*

*This is Harry, and this is Disco Elysium, failure's pretty likely.
 
It should be noted that in DE proper high Shivers gives you a conversation where The spirit of Revanchol itself tells Harry that he will need to save the city

I watched the people make games bit a few weeks ago so I forget the names. I remember coming away with the conclusion that 'He's a dickhead and he's not wrong that he was screwed over. Everyone's awful or seems like they have spines of styrofoam. This is both the least disco option and the only fitting one for this damned game'.

I hope a sequel would be good but I have so many doubts. Everything from the risk of them hollowing it out, to the move to the UK to the moneymen and the fact that I really don't think another Disco Elysium can exist. Doubly so under these conditions.
 
@Geckonator I ... I specifically spoilered it for newcomers who happen to come by the thread. Why did you spoil it by quoting it?

Like, thanks for the explanation, but why would you do that?
 
The Laurent said:
So, two timeline Harries?

One where he's a Fascist-Nationalist trying to fight against the Fascist-Nihlist (and maybe-probably failing.)*

Another where he's a Communard-Returner trying to kickstart the revolution and Revanchol (and maybe-probably failing.)*

*This is Harry, and this is Disco Elysium, failure's pretty likely.
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Well, I think, getting back to the game's plot, that my impression of The Return is that it's change and most sensibly by inference some kind of uprising against the Moralintern, but it's not going to necessarily be a New Commune in specific ideology. Keep in mind the two budding factions in Revachol West ready to pop: the Union which by the end of the game has always seemingly won its strike seizing the harbor with Joyce slinking off to tell Wild Pines to regroup, and the RCM where as long as you don't really fuck up and get fired Captain Pryce knows Harry will "side with Revachol."

The Return will not be people waving the black and white flag and quoting Mazov and Dobrena and Abadanaiz again; "The material base for an uprising has eroded, the working class has betrayed mankind and themselves", to quote The Deserter. But Communism is not just the one specific formulation, but "The Real Movement that abolishes the present state of things." The Return will most likely be the escalating rejection of Moralintern rule by the Union which now has a massive independent economic base, the RCM which seems to have a secret network of civic nationalists in the upper ranks without a strict ideological program, and perhaps even the gangs running wild everywhere in the west. It will probably be incredibly contradictory and motley, but it's the last possible push for the World Spirit to return to Elysium. It will be everything, and also *Hard Core*, because Hard Core is one of the last organs of the World Spirit which the Innocences have not stolen yet.

All ideologies of Harry seem to be guided by fate/La Revacholiere towards The Return. I think it's notable that the only Political Vision Quest where logically following the ideology through in action will give you a game over is the Moralist one. Oh, complete fascism will make Harry a pathetic wreck that immediately alienates everyone with what I can only describe as an Aura of Fascism derived from the Icebreaker portrait, but if you show complete credulous loyalty to the Moralintern and tell them about the 2mm hole in the world or agree to be taken away by the airship, that's it; the story cannot continue from there. And Kim, the game's most sympathetic front for Moralist ideology, pulls you back from that edge.

Which is to say, I think Sacred and Terrible Air is the timeline without Harry at all, and that the touch of La Revacholiere is generally guiding things towards one last break that could avert the Nihilists' dissolution of the world into Pale.
 
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