ranzware
Independent publisher Verso Books recently published Marijam Did’s Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World, and to promote that work Did has been streaming with game designers. First she played Wolfenstein: Youngblood with Josh Sawyer, and now she’s played the original Fallout with Disco Elysium’s game director Robert Kurvitz while chatting about politics and art.
Kurvitz is a particular fan of the first Fallout, like everyone else who is correct and right about things. During the stream he calls its character creator “the best thing on Earth” and draws attention to the way it informs you, via a dead body in a Vault suit found in the tutorial cave, that you weren’t the first person sent out into the Wastes to find a water chip. That’s right, skeleton storytelling was part of Fallout from its opening moments.
At the end of the stream viewer questions are asked, including this: What would Karl Marx’s favorite Fallout be? “Second Fallout definitely,” Kurvitz answers with confidence. “The first Fallout is like a perfect mood capsule that’s almost Biblical in its annihilation. Humanity is truly on its knees. It makes other post-apocalyptic worldbuilding seem like an amusement park—except maybe Threads or some of the really darker TV series. It’s a mood piece, but the second one is really very very about trade and social economics and about all of these settlements influencing each other, and so on. It’s definitely Fallout 2. I’m 100% sure that Marx would not have gone for any of the Bethesda Fallouts. I’m just talking about Marx here,” says Kurvitz, who is definitely just talking about Marx’s opinion on Fallout and not that of anyone else, “but he would have had no respect for any of those.”
It’s not all politics and deep thoughts, though Kurvitz does call Fallout a Gesamtkunstwerk before the video’s even 15 minutes in. He also delights in the squeaky death of a rat, saying, “Fallout has wonderful violent sounds. It’s not as much a thinking man’s game as people make it out to be.” He says this while wearing cat ears on his headset, because we all need to feel pretty in these trying times.
The topic does turn to Disco Elysium briefly, like when Kurvitz suggests the value of any work of art, videogame or otherwise, is not the thing itself, but the people it draws together. “I think that art is like a bonfire,” he says, “but there need to be people around the bonfire talking about it, and then it does something.” Did calls this, “another Kurvitz quotable,” which he laughs at before carrying on. “I have OK metaphors, but they don’t mean as much as they sound like,” he says. “But I think what’s worked is probably people have played Disco Elysium and they’ve connected to other people who’ve played Disco Elysium and then they’ve talked about it.”
Kurvitz and two other members of the ZA/UM diaspora, Helen Hindpere and Alexander Rostov, have formed a studio called Red Info. Last we heard they were involved in a legal battle with Studio ZA/UM over the rights to Elysium, and had submitted a copyright for something called Corinthians. Meanwhile, the shambling animated corpse of ZA/UM has been flogging a poverty-chic Disco Elysium plastic bag.
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Kurt Indovina
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