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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Who has been following the drama around Disco Elysium? Disco Elysium, of course, is the 2019 CRPG that has received numerous accolades for being the savior of Western computer role-playing gaming, the best game in a long time etc. I've played it through, and it deserves the accolades; many here have played it as well, and it is not surprising that a forum like this would have many aficionados for a game that basically consists of reading vast oodles of texts about one drunken failure cop's personal psychodramas and politics and a well-realized fictional somethingpunk setting, and so on.

The game was been made by ZA/UM, an Estonian developer / art collective, around a world created by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, and is quite obviously Estonian-influenced if one knows anything about Estonia (starting with the fact that Revachol, the city where the game happens, is very visually remiscient of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, once known as Reval).

What's the drama? According to Wikipedia:

In October 2022, ZA/UM member Martin Luiga announced that he, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere of ZA/UM had "involuntarily left the company", stating that ZA/UM "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on." Luiga also affirmed that the ZA/UM cultural association had also been dissolved.[92] In an interview, Luiga stated that the other three members had been fired under false premises.[93] A spokesperson for ZA/UM stated that "Like any video game, the development of Disco Elysium was and still is a collective effort, with every team member's contribution essential and valued as part of a greater whole. At this time, we have no further comment to make other than the ZA/UM creative team's focus remains on the development of our next project, and we are excited to share more news on this with you all soon."[94]

In early November 2022, conflicting reports of the events were announced. According to Kurvitz, Zaum Studio OÜ, the development studio, was originally owned in majority shares by Margus Linnamäe, was then acquired by Tütreke OÜ, a holding company owned by studio CEO Ilmar Kompus through a share purchase in 2021. Kurvitz and Rostov claimed that the funds used for that purchase were pulled from the studio itself, making it a fraudulent purchase, upon which they started to challenge the purchase and recover their IP from the studio.[95] Zaum Studio dismissed the charges in a statement, and said that former employees had been let go for creating a disruptive environment at the studio. Other employees of Zaum Studio speaking anonymously with GamesIndustry.biz claimed the situation lied between these points.[96] Kurvitz and Rostov were seeking legal options against the studio.[95]

How Kurvitz and Rostov explain it:

We have now learned that Tütreke OÜ must have obtained control over Zaum Studio OÜ by fraud. We believe the money used by Tütreke OÜ to buy the majority stake was taken illegally from Zaum Studio OÜ itself, money that belonged to the studio and all shareholders but was used for the benefit of one. Money that should have gone towards making the sequel. We believe that these actions — which in our view, and the view of our lawyers, amount to criminal wrongdoing punishable by up to three years imprisonment — were perpetrated by Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel with support from Kaur Kender, another minority shareholder. This is hardly surprising given that Tõnis Haavel, who we believe to be the ringleader, has been convicted for defrauding investors on a different matter in 2007 [https://www.riigiteataja.ee/kohtulahendid/fail.html?fid=303963621].

I've also seen suggestions that Kurvitz et al believe that Tütreke, Kender etc. are planning to compromise their vision specifically for upcoming Amazon Disco Elysium series, presumably so that the political (anti-capitalist - Kurvitz is a self-described communist, very much a rarity in Estonia) aspect of their work would be compromised.

What ZA/UM says:

Speaking to Estonian newspaper Estonian Ekspress (translated by Google), ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus said the studio suffered from a "toxic environment," and accused Disco Elysium designer Robert Kurvitz and 'Saandar Taal' of "humiliating colleagues and intending to steal IP."

ZA/UM confirmed that Saandar Taal is an alias of Aleksander Rostov.

Kompus accused Kurvitz and Taal of "belittling women and co-workers," claims that echo those made by GamesIndustry.biz's own sources.

"They treated their co-workers very badly," Kompus told the Ekspress. "Despite talking to them repeatedly, things did not improve. Therefore, the company was forced to fire them. Robert [Kurvitz] is said to have been known for belittling women and co-workers in the past, but this was previously unknown to the company. It would be very short-sighted of a growing international company to tolerate such behaviour."

More context from an Estonian Redditor

Anyway, so by the time we first heard the news of this video game project, Za/Um as a cultural movement was already dwindling. For an Estonian art-adjacent person, Za/Um has basically been dead since 2017. That's why Luiga's decision to disband the movement doesn't really raise an eyebrow here. It's old history, man.

Other than Kender, the rest of Za/Um was a bunch of nobodies to the mainstream. The members were well known enough in art circles, so they definitely weren't a bunch of amateurs or something like that, but they weren't well established figures in the broader sense. But first and foremost they are artists. Not aspiring video game developers but writers, painters, musicians. They went for a mad plan to do something completely out of their wheelhouse and I personally think this is what made Disco so interesting. It was an art project more than a video game but through some sheer genius it turned out to be a hugely successful and hopefully influential video game as a side product.

For me, Disco Elysium was the last hurrah for Za/Um, and what a hurrah it was. Of course I'm sad with the outcome but all you socialists out there, you saw it coming, didn't you? We got a miracle of a game out of this and there are only so many wins we get on the left.:

Perhaps it's not necessary to specifically mention all the ironic aspects involved in this, and if we indeed see Disco Elysium as an art project, it feels like a fitting capstone to the project, in a way.

Nothing to say except this is a fairly strong case in favor of generative AI. The smaller a studio needs to be for viability, the lesser is the probability of such shitshows with extra hires, HR, publishers, complex ownership structures, and Gervais-style dynamics.

I'm a fan of games made by artists and writers, even extreme barely playable examples. Mor.Utopia and Turgor are great! Planescape:Torment is rightfully considered a masterpiece, Disco is fantastic. And in general, daring genre experiments with a focus on worldbuilding and narrative, even to some detriment of gameplay, are to be encouraged. I liked Hellblade a lot, Morrowind is of course a work of genius, Perimeter and Vangers are gems of my youth (btw their creator has died a few days ago in Kaliningrad, RIP). We need more of that, and therefore we need artisan studios.

But artists are barely able to function in a friendly collective. People who optimize for business process can run circles around them.

Unfortunately, this sort of problem seems present even for incredibly small projects, even separated from conventional ideological frustrations. The NeosVR Saga had a lot of 'developers', but they overwhelming majority were only not volunteers because they were paid in monopoly money; the real crux was a battle between the two guys at the heart of the project. And I've seen non-game business battles with a half-dozen employees, generally split between the Growth Uber Allies and the internal designers.

It's not even necessarily the business guys running circles around them -- even when they take really simple approaches, or have the right position (after all, 'artist goes so far up their ass you don't have a sellable product before you run out of burn' is a failure mode that happens often!) -- so much that there's a lot of tools each side has for a really phyrric victory, really easily.

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