In Dark times, Should the Stars Also Go Out?: Disco Elysium & Melancholic Agency
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Keywords: disco elysium, capitalism, melancholy, affect, video games
There is no shortage of scholarly work on Disco Elysium, and for good reason—as Morrison (2026), Rivera (2024) and Castro and Kiersey’s (2025) collection, The World Politics of Disco Elysium, have demonstrated, the game’s intricately crafted world and explicit engagement with political themes lends it easily to critical study. The essays in The World Politics of Disco Elysium and Rivera (2024), in particular, parse the game for resistive strategies against what Mark Fisher has termed capitalist realism: the idea that neoliberal capitalism has stifled our imaginative capabilities and, in turn, foreclosed any alternative socioeconomic possibilities. Adding to this growing body of literature, my paper figures Disco Elysium as a video game that attunes the player to melancholic agency as a potential resistive orientation against existing neoliberal structures. Conceptualized by Bargetz (2024) as “an affective mode of holding on to an imaginary as well as to the idea that something could be otherwise” (p. 71), melancholic agency can be thought of as the exercise of one’s will to “[stay] with the melancholy”, so to speak; to dwell in the grief of one’s foreclosed futures, yet also to draw from this grief an emancipatory impetus to keep open new possibilities. Ultimately, this affective ambivalence, I argue, is what Disco Elysium foregrounds as the pathway out of the current ideological impasse.
References:
Bargetz, B. (2024). Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past. In Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis (1st ed., pp. 63–78). Routledge.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003356271-8
Castro, V., & Kiersey, N. (2025). The World Politics of Disco Elysium (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032620343 Morrison, S. (2026). Capitalist Games: Disco Elysium’s Critique of Capitalist Logics of Play. DiGRA.
Rivera, T. (2024). Asian, Adjacent: Utopian Longing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco Elysium. In C. B. Patterson & T. Fickle (Eds.), Made in Asia/America (pp. 66–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478059264-005
In Dark times, Should the Stars Also Go Out?: Disco Elysium & Melancholic Agency
Narratives & Worlds
Keywords: disco elysium, capitalism, melancholy, affect, video games
There is no shortage of scholarly work on Disco Elysium, and for good reason—as Morrison (2026), Rivera (2024) and Castro and Kiersey’s (2025) collection, The World Politics of Disco Elysium, have demonstrated, the game’s intricately crafted world and explicit engagement with political themes lends it easily to critical study. The essays in The World Politics of Disco Elysium and Rivera (2024), in particular, parse the game for resistive strategies against what Mark Fisher has termed capitalist realism: the idea that neoliberal capitalism has stifled our imaginative capabilities and, in turn, foreclosed any alternative socioeconomic possibilities. Adding to this growing body of literature, my paper figures Disco Elysium as a video game that attunes the player to melancholic agency as a potential resistive orientation against existing neoliberal structures. Conceptualized by Bargetz (2024) as “an affective mode of holding on to an imaginary as well as to the idea that something could be otherwise” (p. 71), melancholic agency can be thought of as the exercise of one’s will to “[stay] with the melancholy”, so to speak; to dwell in the grief of one’s foreclosed futures, yet also to draw from this grief an emancipatory impetus to keep open new possibilities. Ultimately, this affective ambivalence, I argue, is what Disco Elysium foregrounds as the pathway out of the current ideological impasse.
References:
Bargetz, B. (2024). Staying with Melancholy? An Archive of Futures Past. In Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis (1st ed., pp. 63–78). Routledge.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003356271-8
Castro, V., & Kiersey, N. (2025). The World Politics of Disco Elysium (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032620343 Morrison, S. (2026). Capitalist Games: Disco Elysium’s Critique of Capitalist Logics of Play. DiGRA.
Rivera, T. (2024). Asian, Adjacent: Utopian Longing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco Elysium. In C. B. Patterson & T. Fickle (Eds.), Made in Asia/America (pp. 66–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478059264-005
Bio
Shannon is a first-year Master's by Research student at the National University of Singapore. She received her BA in English Literature from the same university. Her current research interests include exploring the relationship between video games and work and examining how video games represent life under neoliberal capitalism.