Games are for simulation

By researching Disco Elysium

 

Outline

This research project is to explore the design method of game-Disco Elysium compared to the classic and standard experience and also discuss the meaning of the game design at a more fundamental level.

This requires some advanced preparation and research: First of all, play more Disco Elysium as possible; find the remaining material and second-hand information about the creators-ZA/UM in terms of life experience, ideology and identity, and figure out the idea inspiring them to make this game.

As the game simulates the mind, build valuable links between the ZA/UM’s preferences and some existing research and ideas for perception and mind. The essay will pay more attention to the ethical level and less to the traditional game design solutions like mathematics, balance and feedback mechanism. The research and ideas for perception and mind will introduce some frames and mapping to fit the ZA/UM’s preferences and ideas to make this research sensible and reasonable.

Through the setting for modules, worldview, characters, dialogues, objects within the game, analyse how to simulate the perception for humans and how to apply these ideas to game design. Also, find the ZA/UM’s interview and archive to prove the design idea.

Finally, explore what the creator’s approach to design offers today’s players and game design experience. Summarising some basic opinions for game design to explain the importance of the game and what position is for a game nowadays.

There are two main audiences for this essay. One is the player who likes to explore the game design, and the essay will give a new view to think about the game design. The other is for the people who don’t play games often but have some aesthetic consumption experience, and this article proved to them that game design is also an important form of innovative aesthetic experience.

 

The reason why the project needs to be undertaken is that the path and experience of game design in the market are becoming more and more dependent. We rarely get out of these patterns and try to push the boundaries. Disco Elysium is a pioneer to connect literature and CRPG in order to simulate perception.

 

The research object is Disco elysium, which containing an enormous amount of material. We are mainly focus on the world view, Character Skill, Thought Cabinet.

The text, Denise Ferreira da Silva: Toward a Black Feminist Poethics, Karen Barad 2017 ‘No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness and Strange Topologies of Spacetime Mattering’ and Biao Xiang, Self as method including related podcast seminars, help me have a mapping to think about the Linear and Non-linear area and provide a frame to think about the concept of “category” and position the different elements about the outside world.

The frame is to help us better understand the relationship between self and world and how the “category” works: Self is a method; and we use self to analyse, think, understand and reflect the world outside. And then the process will reflect us with the influence of behaviour and emotion. Moreover, people always use “category” to think about a thing and organise information because of the education for “category” which is efficient in terms of education; how we apply the “category” mechanically is abstract logic forward and associated words.

In the elements of mapping, the text, John Stuart Mill – On Liberty and Asma Abbas – Voice Lessons, will give us an entry point to explore the main branch of the mind of simulation in Disco elysium-ideology.

ZA/UM expresses the Thought Cabinet-THC by a painting from Anton Vill called the thought horde. In this artwork, each little composition on that image is one “Thought”. However, these compositions don’t have clear boundaries. I suppose the selection of the painting is in the form of “category” mentioned above. When finishing the Thought research among the game, an abstract composition emerges, with some vague links to other compositions. The blurry, floating figure expresses how we began to acknowledge the world; it’s gathering some similar information together, understanding it as a “category”, remembering it and when something invokes this “category”, using it to judge and recognise instinctively, or reflect sometimes.

 

 

The personal motivation for the research is that I’ve been playing games since I was a kid, I’ve been observing games, and recently I’ve found two main things I want to explore. First, game is a typical industry that develops faster than theoretical research, so it needs more precipitation to start better. The second is that games now need to be justified by more mainstream voices than just dopamine-producing consumer goods.