THE PLAYSAPACE OF DISCO ELYSIUM : Multimodal analysis of gameworld diegesis and environmental narrative

Sammanfattning

This paper conducts a multimodal analysis of the environmental storytelling in Disco Elysium (2019). The analysis is done through the frame of the proposed term playspace which unifies the concepts of gameworld and virtual interface under one singular analytical frame. The analysis finds that Disco Elysium often engages multiple modes when communicating information about its world—primarily aural and textual in dialogue and visual and textual in gamespace. The analysis only finds a few examples of singular mode use—most notably the aural mode for non-diegetic music and as substitution for more graphically demanding sequences. The analysis highlights significant examples where several modes work together, what type of information they communicate and how they fit into the frame of playspace.