Planetdeath Disease: The Anthropocene in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Disco Elysium

Abstract

How do games articulate discourses of climate crisis? The article compares a particular discourse of climate change—the Anthropocene—in two digital games: the 4X strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) and the computer roleplaying game Disco Elysium (2019). Comparing two games separated by decades, production context, and genre reveals productive differences and similarities in the representation of the Anthropocene. The article presents an overview of the Anthropocene discourse from its origins to its relationship to complementary and competing concepts such as the noosphere and Capitalocene. The fictionalized Anthropocene(s) presented in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Disco Elysium are then read for their resonance with these real-world visions of the Anthropocene. The article demonstrates complications to the tendency of various digital game genres to articulate specific discourses of the Anthropocene, ranging from games’ narrative genres and the broader political currents during game production.

Introduction

In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC; Firaxis Games, 1999), the gestalt consciousness of an alien planet nervously asks human colonists if they have brought with them the “planetdeath disease” that killed Earth. In Disco Elysium (DE; ZA/UM, 2019), a giant stick insect reveals that the evolution of the human mind has created an anomaly that is physically destroying the planet. Made two decades apart, both digital games use science fiction conceits to confront players with the catastrophic consequences of human activity on the planet. Increasingly, digital games are concerned with the social and environmental impacts of the real-world climate emergency (Enhesa, 2025; Gordon, 2024; Lumb, 2023; Sanders, 2024) and game studies as a discipline is showing a growing interest in “ecogames,” games that are “ecological” in some combination of content, production, distribution, and play (Abraham, 2022; Chang, 2019; op de Beke et al., 2024), which Germaine (2025, p. 192) has called an “ecological turn” in the field. The shape of the climate crisis, its causes and its solutions, is spaces of contentious discourse that digital games themselves are implicated in—not only through their material impact on the planet and the economies that support their creation and play (Abraham, 2022; Gordon, 2024; Mayers et al., 2015) but also the discourses the games themselves express (Pötzsch, 2024).

I look at digital games representing one particular idea within climate change discourse: the concept of the Earth transitioning to a man-made geological epoch called the Anthropocene, as attributed to Crutzen and Stoermer (2000/2021). Examining the Anthropocene itself we find a fractured terrain of related concepts—complementary or oppositional framings. A comparative analysis of two digital games as text, the aforementioned SMAC and DE, reveal distinct articulations of the Anthropocene. I place these games’ visions of the Anthropocene within their respective production contexts, and within their genres of play and story. I demonstrate that game genres and their cultural context of production influence a game's positioning within competing discourses of the Anthropocene. Though neither game explicitly positions itself as about climate change nor the Anthropocene, I take my cue from Abraham and Jayemanne's (2017) approach to studying themes of climate change and human–nature relations outside of games explicitly marketed or analyzed as climate change games. Approaching two commercially successful and critically acclaimed titles, separated by genre, era, and production context, lets us study how mainstream titles articulate ideas of climate change, through the Anthropocene as a specific discourse. It also lets us discuss differences in portrayal of climate change that we may attribute to the aforementioned differences in genre, era and production context.

I begin the article with a summary of Anthropocene discourses, setting the stakes for the analysis to follow. I then turn to relevant research to inform my analysis of my chosen games, particularly my interest in considering the games as examples of both their ludic and narrative genres. Discourses of the Anthropocene in SMAC and DE are then analyzed. The discussion section brings these games’ respective Anthropocenes into conversation.

Discourses of the Anthropocene

In 2000, Crutzen and Stoermer (2000/2021) argued that the Holocene was over. Humans had changed the planet geologically enough to identify a new geological era—the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene hypothesis has drawn scientific support across a range of disciplines for drawing attention to the scale of human-induced environmental change, though supporters debate the origin points of the Anthropocene (Lewis & Maslin, 2015) and whether it constitutes a new geological epoch as such (Waters et al., 2016) or simply describes the scale of human impact on the planet (Autin & Holbrook, 2012).

Fairclough (1992, p. 3) defined discourses as “different ways of structuring areas of knowledge and social practice.” Discourses delineate the (heterogenous and contested) limits within which a phenomenon can be understood and acted upon. The various starting points proposed for the Anthropocene reveal the discursive nature of the concept. Most starting points frame the Anthropocene as the consequence of European technological acceleration—such as the invention of the steam engine, the start proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000/2021). Some starting points are however themselves politically meaningful beyond their ecological cost, with proposals ranging from the beginning of European colonial extraction in the Americas to the peak of nuclear munitions testing (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). Shoshitaishvili (2021) argues that the name “Anthropocene” itself is discursive, casting humanity as the protagonist of a new era. According to Shoshitaishvili (2021, p. 2), the Anthropocene is a paradigm shift; its advocates aim to use its very novelty to invite conscious reflection on the planetary consequences of human activity in an era of climate change. Also approaching the Anthropocene as a discourse are geologists Autin and Holbrook (2012) who have described the Anthropocene as “pop cultural,” less scientifically valid than politically useful to spur climate action. Evans (2018) through an examination of works of climate fiction also argues that the Anthropocene is “science fictional,” a radical concept that forces us to consider our relationship to nature through the awareness that for decades (or longer, depending on which starting point of the Anthropocene one supports) humans have been altering the very geology of the planet, in much the same way science fiction introduces alterity to present reality and makes us consider alternate ideas of past and present and the potential for different futures. The discursive view of the Anthropocene is thus less interested in its geological validity than what the term can achieve for climate action.

There are critics of the Anthropocene concept who take issue with some of its discursive implications, notably the notion of climate change as the responsibility of an undifferentiated “Anthropos.” For example, Malm and Hornborg (2014) argue that it is incorrect, if not perverse, to attribute to humanity at large, including historic and ongoing victims of colonial violence, the consequences of the actions of the Global North. As an alternative to “Anthropos” as the culprit of climate change, Moore (2016a) has advanced the idea of a “Capitalocene,” arguing for a view of the Anthropocene as the product and crisis of European industrial capitalism specifically. The Cartesian notion of a human/nature divide is, according to Moore (2016b), instrumental not only in the colonial and capitalist exploitation of nature that coincides with the proposed start dates of the Anthropocene but also in the transformation of vast swathes of humanity itself into “nature”—to be colonized, disregarded, or exploited as resources.

In contrast to critical views of the Anthropocene, some scholars have turned their attention to the concept of the noosphere as an optimistic alternative form of the Anthropocene (Nowak, 2025; Shoshitaishvili, 2021; Vidal, 2024). The noosphere is the philosophical concept that alongside a lithosphere (the geology of the planet) and a biosphere (all life on the planet), there exists a noosphere of human thought: connected human culture and technology transforming the planet. The concept was proposed in the aftermath of World War II as a Utopian vision of the cooperative human mind's boundless potential (Vernandsky, 1945) and exists within the genealogy of ideas Crutzen and Stoermer cited in their initial description of the Anthropocene (2000/2021). The noosphere's planetary gestalt is comparable to the Gaia hypothesis, wherein the biosphere acts as a vast, self-regulating superorganism (Kirchner, 1989; Lovelock, 1972; Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), though unlike Gaia the noosphere is technologically produced. Shoshitaishvili (2021) presents the noosphere as a complementary stream of discourse to the Anthropocene’s dire warnings of the consequences of human activity to the planet, and argues that its optimistic vision provides inspiration direly needed in resolving the Anthropocene. For Vidal (2024), the noosphere is a valuable concept in the Anthropocene that needs rescuing from New Age formulations of planetary consciousness and instead put toward achievable visions of human technology and connectivity transforming human beings and the planet for the better. Such utopianism is present in Crutzen’s (2002/2021) own arguments for geoengineering and the responsible use of technology toward a managed Anthropocene. Nowak (2025) in an otherwise critical reading of the noosphere as naive under the capitalist control and production of technology describes the idea as still useful in its imaginative potential.

Having established that the Anthropocene began through technological advancement (Lewis & Maslin, 2015), the noosphere imagines technology as a solution to climate change. However, Altvater (2016) argues that the same technologies that produced the Anthropocene cannot resolve its consequences. As an alternative Utopian vision beyond technology and capitalism there is Haraway's (2016) notion of the Chthulucene. Haraway questions the centering on Man as such as protagonist in the salvation of the planet from his own depredations, arguing that the Anthropocene is the material and discursive outcome of patriarchal, colonialist attitudes to the world. She writes instead of a vision of a Chthulucene, taking her cue from Lovelock's (1972) Gaia Hypothesis, wherein humanity learns to see themself as one form of life among many species in a planet constituted by the actions of more-than-human entities. For Haraway, ideas such as the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene open up the humbling possibility of a world beyond human-centricism and the need to use technology with dubious planetary impact (2016, p. 50). The Chthulucene imagines the world allowed to repair itself.

Competing visions of technology and capitalism, human beings and nature, and the ideas of planetary consciousness (i.e., noospheric, Gaian, Chthulucenic) thus constitute the fertile, discursive terrain of the Anthropocene. These themes will reemerge in my examination of SMAC and DE.

A Ludnoarrative Approach to the Anthropocene in Games

In comparing SMAC and DE, I analyze the games’ narratives of the Anthropocene, and how the player experiences these narratives through the games’ rules and interfaces.

Game narratives cannot simply be accessed as text. They require effortful navigation and interaction with virtual worlds (Aarseth, 1997). The classic problem of which to emphasize in games analysis—the ludic or the narrative?—has produced the concept of ludonarrative dissonance wherein these two elements of the game are identified to be in contradiction (Hocking, 2007). However, reconciling apparent clashes of ludic can lead to more sophisticated readings of games as ludonarrative objects that present nuanced, even ambivalent discourses (Grabarczyk & Kampmann Walther, 2022). My approach is ludonarrative, considering gameplay and story in conjunction.

Bogost (2007) argued that gameplay embeds and enacts political arguments and discourses through games’ rule systems, as “procedural rhetoric” predisposing the player to only experience textually what the game developer programmed to be possible, which in turn are the product of choices contextualized within the cultural values of the time of the game's creation. The rules of the game are interacted with via its interface, which Jørgensen (2013, p. 3) calls the gameworld, “world representations with a particular gameplay in mind and characterized by game-system information that enables meaningful player interaction.” Gameworlds for Jørgensen are particular to the type of interaction enabled by the rule system, and vary across genre in terms of coherence, verisimilitude, and immersion, but they are always “first and foremost ludic world environments” (p. 62).

Abraham and Jayemanne (2017) developed a heuristic for studying human engagement with gameworld environments. Abraham and Jayemanne proposed four modes of human–environmental relations in games: environment as backdrop, environment as resource, environment as antagonist, and environment as text. The environment is a backdrop when it has limited to no interaction possibilities beyond the player avatar's traversal. The environment is a resource when play requires it to be exploited in an uncomplicated fashion. The environment acts as an antagonist when the world is actively hostile to the player and must be “beaten.” The environment exists as text when the narrative emerges through interaction with the gameworld. Within this model, Abraham and Jayemanne do not differentiate between manmade and natural environments, taking their cue from Moore's criticism of the Cartesian dualism that separates man from nature (Moore, 2016b; in Abraham & Jayemanne, 2017).

Abraham and Jayemanne created their typology to approach themes of climate change in video games, at the time lacking games that directly addressed climate change. The typology is suitable for the analysis of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) nor Disco Elysium (2019) which is only indirectly about climate change. I chose them for analysis due to the uncanny similarity of both having gameworlds in science fictional Anthropocenes created by the human mind itself. They share other similarities. They were both highly acclaimed examples of their genres (Brown, 2021; Tito, 2005) ¹ despite being unusual examples—both are far more text-based and focused on politics, philosophy, and ecology, than is typical in their respective genres. Such similarities are striking for the games’ otherwise clear differences in production and genre. Twenty-year gap aside, SMAC was produced by an American studio as a spin-off within a successful (and still ongoing) games franchise, Sid Meier's Civilization; DE is an original work created in the United Kingdom by a studio founded by an Estonian art collective. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a turn-based strategy 4X game, where the four Xs are EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate (Chalk, 2025) and is set in a science fiction universe. Disco Elysium is a computer roleplaying game (CRPG) and combines science fiction with detective fiction.

Digital game genres typically are classified according to their ludic qualities, with each formally distinct genre containing a wide array of narrative or aesthetic genres (Apperley, 2006; Vargas-Iglesias, 2020). It is significant that despite being in separate ludic genres, SMAC and DE are science fictional in narrative, given Rebecca Evans’ argument that the Anthropocene itself is a science fictional concept (2018). Evans reads the Anthropocene as a novum (Csicsery-Ronay, 2008; Suvin, 1979), an element in science fiction that introduces the alterity separating the imaginary world from the real; similarly, the Anthropocenes in SMAC and DE are novums in their strangeness. The games’ gameworlds represent the fictional worlds appropriate to their aesthetic genres of science fiction and detective novel through the interfaces and rule systems particular to their ludic genres of 4X turn-based strategy and CRPG.

Researching SMAC and DE I have used the games’ respective wikis (Alpha Centauri Wiki, n.d.; Civilization Wiki, n.d.; Disco Elysium Wiki, n.d.) . I have also used the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment (n.d.), a fan-made resource for reading the dialogue trees of DE. I have verified the text on these sources through comparison with video recordings of gameplay uploaded by fans on YouTube (Limmy, 2025; matsku84, 2006; quill18, 2022; Revachol Forever, 2021). These external sources make easily referenceable what would otherwise be gated behind ludic navigation, which would make the text contingent on player skill and choice (Hale, 2016; Sköld, 2017).

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

After developing the first two installments of Sid Meier's Civilization (1991, 1996) under Microprose, the newly minted Firaxis Games created Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) as a spin-off. The Civilization series is the example per excellence of the 4X style of turn-based strategy games. The first two Civilization games allowed for a “Science Victory” wherein the first player to build a spaceship to colonize the distant Alpha Centauri star system wins the game. SMAC takes this as its point of departure toward a dedicated science fiction game.

The colonialist, statist, and Eurocentric worldview of the Civilization series is well analyzed in academia (Ford, 2016; King, 2021). Scholars have written about SMAC within the wider context of space games (Bainbridge, 2018) or the Civilization series at large (Camargo, 2009; Douglas, 2002; King, 2021). Examples dealing with SMAC directly include an analysis of the game's depiction of future economies (Chohan, 2025), its usefulness in pedagogy (Gandolfi, 2018), and an analysis of Utopianism within the game's fiction (Henthorne, 2003). Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri's portrayal of the Anthropocene has not yet received academic attention.

The consequences of the Anthropocene kick off SMAC's plot. In the year 2060, the United Nations sends out the spaceship Unity to escape an Earth torn apart by war and climate catastrophe to colonize the planet Charon in Alpha Centauri. Disaster strikes the ship and the various factions of survivors band together based on ideology as they each vie for supremacy over Charon, which the game refers to primarily as Planet. Planet is found to be coated in “xenofungus” that not only makes traversal difficult but is home to indigenous animals, colonies of psychic mindworms that are hostile to humans. The xenofungus is soon revealed to be a planetwide organism, a gestalt mind that speaks to the player as a Gaia-like entity called the Voice of Planet. The game often simply calls this organism Planet as well.

The Alpha Centauri mission goes from a victory in Civilization I and II, an endless frontier of space expansion by a confident global hegemon to what seems a moment of failure and indictment of humanity's disregard for its home habitat. The game is however ambivalent. It warns against the hubris of planetary exploitation but celebrates space colonialism.

As befits the 4Xs of the genre Planet is a gameworld to gradually explore, to expand the player faction's presence across through building bases, exploit through the terraforming of the land to build “improvements” such as roads, kelp farms, and boreholes, and upon which the player fights to gain victory against the other factions of humanity while fending off the hostile incursions of mindworms (extermination). All four Xs are mandatory for play. The procedures of the game reproduce rhetoric of humans in mastery over nature as the gameworld. The gameworld enforces a technocratic gaze through its interface of menus, tiles, and sprites. The player has perfect information over the gameworld, which is presented to the player as a top-down interface. The map appears as tiles with exploitable terrain listing numerical yields for food, minerals, and energy. Even the ecological impact on Planet is tracked as actionable information: ecological harm as a statistic is generated through the player's building of tile improvements and base facilities that disturb the ecosystem, and the menu of policy choices allows a player to adjust their impact on Planet alongside other metrics such as Growth and Economy. The interface and rules of the Civilization series offer an apparatus of knowledge and control to the player that feels even more at home in the transition to science fiction.

Technological advancement is key to SMAC's gameplay, unlocking new units and capabilities. These technologies are also accompanied by quotations presented largely as from diegetic sources within the gameworld. These quotations are the primary avenue for conveying its science fiction setting, the ideologies of its faction leaders, and the plot of the game. Technologies fuse ludic benefits with narrative progress. For example, a technology that enables the player to build roads through the xenofungus is accompanied by a quote by Lady Deirdre Skye, a Scottish botanist and leader of the ecological faction Gaia's Stepdaughters, expressing her suspicion that “someone or something is managing the ecology of this planet.” These are triggered by the research of technology and a range of other circumstances which reveal the growing relationship between humans and the Voice of Planet. ²

Planet is initially hostile toward humanity. After researching Aeronautics, the quotation text has Planet reveal its awareness that humans “buried [Earth] so young among the aeons” and asks Lady Deirdre, “Are you a breath of life to invigorate a complacent world, you earthhumans, or an insidious cancer which must be excised?” In interludes, Planet responds with mindworm attacks as humans prod at the biosphere and lithosphere of the planet. It reveals a capricious, playful, curious personality, notably asking the player if humans are individuals or a gestalt like itself—upon receiving confirmation that they are not a singular entity, Planet cheerfully slaughters human colonists because this will not interrupt its conversations with the player character. The violence with which Planet attacks humans is horrifying: mindworms mentally paralyze their victims and crawl inside their skulls to lay eggs. However, such unsettling detail is entirely within the game's narrative text. The actual gameworld interface represents combat with low graphical fidelity. The abstraction of the 4X system renders the textual representation of the environment as antagonist almost into an environment as backdrop (Abraham & Jayemanne, 2017). Planet's resistance to the player adds texture and challenge to the exploitation of the gameworld and its resources. It is only in the interludes and the technology quotes that the Planet shows its teeth.

Planet is also ultimately tamed. As the game progresses, Planet asks Deirdre:

You are the children of a dead planet, earthdeirdre, and this death we do not comprehend. We shall take you in, but may we ask this question–will we too catch the planetdeath disease?

Planet shifts from hostility and playful killing to a cautious acceptance. Does Planet acquiesce willingly, or does it succumb out of fear of the intent and capability of this planet-killing species? Its confusion in the face of the planetdeath disease becomes more complicated by the revelation later in the game that Planet is at a late stage of a life cycle that will end in mass extinction. The fungal network achieves a critical mass of intelligence that sends a psychic shockwave across Planet which kills all other forms of life. The ecosystem falls apart and the fungus mentally regresses until enough animal life evolves for the gestalt to achieve critical mass again.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri thus layers its Anthropocene. Humanity flees the consequences of the Anthropocene on the Earth, to meet an entity that has so fully colonized its planet, the game makes no distinction between biosphere and lithosphere—it is all Planet. If naming a geological epoch after humanity is the height of arrogance as Haraway (2016) argues, “Planet” is the logic taken to the extreme. The xenofungus’ inevitable destruction of all life also takes to the extreme McBrien's (2016) concept of the necrocene: capitalist exploitation of Earth has ushered in an era of mass death that in turn feeds the engine of capital. Planet must grow until it kills everything else. Humanity's own exploitation of Planet then is layered atop, in competition with Planet or in partnership to become the dominant planetary species, advancing in technology and intelligence toward extinction. The ecological choice within SMAC then is to intervene in Planet's growth, the ludic necessity of planetary exploitation in harmony with an ecological narrative.

In the ecological way to win the game, Humans enact a managed Anthropocene through technology that enables Planet to flourish under human care. To prevent Planet's critical mass of consciousness killing humans alongside other life, the player faction invests in technology that ends with uploading all human consciousness into the fungal gestalt to live in transhumanist harmony with Planet. Other ways to win in SMAC only defer the question of how to deal with Planet's capacity to destroy all life. Planet cannot simply be left alone. Humans either go extinct or force Planet into what the game calls Transcendence.

Transcending creates a noosphere in the strict sense of an interconnected world mediated by human technology, and in the literal sense of a planet with a layer of thought superimposed over the biosphere. A final interlude portrays humanity as a multiplanetary, transhumanist civilization. The player character as faction leader is the driver within the gestalt, whereas the Voice of Planet is rendered a “ponderous but playful” sidekick. Nature is mastered. The new hybrid civilization of transhumans is stated in the Interlude to seek new worlds to colonize and new species to induct into the gestalt. Dark in its implications, the game casts this as a moment of triumph. Transcendence presents a technologically optimistic, noospheric view of the Anthropocene, wherein human exploitation of Planet and its spaceborne environs continues with the partnership of human and more-than-human entities working together—with humanity as the sovereign. It is an endless cycle of expansion and exploitation of planet after planet by the new entity, Anthropos merged with an alien mind through technology—noosphere, necrocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, and Anthropocene at once.

However, we should be critical of the conflation of Planet the entity and the natural world of Charon. There exists nonfungal life on Charon, which is rendered extinct in Transcendence. By rendering invisible other nonfungal life and centralizing Planet's dominant species, the game reenacts the Anthropocenic framing of all life on Earth as subordinate to human ordering.

Nor is it only nature on Planet that is rendered subaltern. The working class is also invisible in the game's reification of the technocratic faction leader as player character. The terraformers and base facilities imply a working class exists, but they are only directly represented as Drones—angry, red-tinted faces in the interface for players’ bases, who start devastating riots if they outnumber technocrat citizens (Talents). Interlude texts make clear that in Transcendence only the faction leader and their chosen elect survive. Moore (2016b) observed that the capitalist splitting of Human and Nature, rendering Nature exploitable and discardable, also rendered human beings into Nature. The working class is made invisible in the conquest of Planet, except as Drones—irritations to solve, rather than citizens with a stake in the direction of the player's faction, as ineffectual an antagonist as the mindworms the Planet generates in response to ecological interference. The happy, noospheric ending of these technocrats turning a planet-spanning alien intelligence into a junior partner takes place amid the deaths of all “lesser” life on Planets: the working class and other animals. The Capitalocene simply moves relocates itself to another planet.

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium was released in 2019 by the UK-based games studio ZA/UM. ZA/UM started life in Estonia as a cultural collective of communists. Communist ethos were carried over in the transition to video games, demonstrated by the team thanking Marx and Engels at a 2019 award ceremony (Taylor, 2023). Disco Elysium's success did not spawn a sequel due to disputes over copyright following the departure of the game's original writers (People Make Games, 2023). However, the game's influence is considerable, with a host of self-described successor studios with games currently in development (Warnock-Estrada, 2024). Disco Elysium has similarly attracted much scholarly attention despite its recency. Scholars have written on the game's narrative, aesthetics, and gameplay (Bodi & Thon, 2020; Medvedeva, 2022); others have discussed its philosophy and politics (Banfi, 2024; Gekker & Joseph, 2021; Maqbool, 2024). The game's politics were the subject of a recent book (Castro & Kiersey, 2025). However, DE has not before been analyzed through the lens of the Anthropocene in this robust scholarship.

Disco Elysium is a CRPG. It is set in an imaginary world called Elysium that roughly reflects contemporary Earth but gradually reveals itself to have had very different national histories, technological and social progressions, and even geologies. The player plays an amnesiac detective called Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, to solve a murder tied to a labor dispute in the dilapidated harbor district of Martinase, in the city of Revachol—a former world capital now ruled by an international coalition that crushed the country's communist revolution decades ago. The game reveals Harry's personal history alongside Revachol's political history as the player directs him toward solving the murder before it sparks a civil war. Eventually both Harry and the player discover the true novum at the heart of Elysium, the existence of great zones of entropy called the Pale which will one day erase the whole world. I will analyze the Pale as analogous to climate change, and its treatment within the game as reflecting discourses of life in the Anthropocene.

Schules, Peterson and Picard (2018) identify the early importance of game mechanics from tabletop roleplaying in the CRPG genre: a formal progression system in player character ability, randomness of outcome, and quantification of characters. As the genre matured, narrative engagement became the primary motivation to play a CRPG. Disco Elysium has the mechanics, interface and narrative focus of a classic CRPG. It is also a strange example of the genre. Harry is the only controllable character, with his partner Kim Kitsuragi as a sidekick who offers help and guidance. The game's randomized successes and failures are often ambivalent, where failure can produce outcomes that still move the plot along and successes can be harmful for Harry and those around him. Disco Elysium lacks the focus on combat endemic to the CRPG genre. The gameworld is presented in an isometric view common to CRPGs, which the player interacts with via trees of dialogue options. The game makes no distinction between dialogues with people, animals or objects. Harry's inner voices chime in during dialogue, offering suggestions both useful and detrimental. The CRPGs typically place players in positions of authority, able to enact their will through violence and coercion to decide the fate of the world. Disco Elysium scales the player down to a single policeman who must dialogically interact with the world, with little agency over and understanding of the world. The grounded stakes, narrative embeddedness in the realities of the gameworld, the uncertainty, all subvert the ludic CRPG genre toward the conventions of the aesthetic genre of detective fiction. Even as detective fiction, Rossdale (2025) has argued that DE's limited and uncertain player agency is an invitation against the illusion of the policeman's mastery over the world.

The precarity of life under capitalism and the coercive power of the international order are omnipresent themes of the game. In Martinaise, corporations nakedly exploit a working class left behind by everyone except a corrupt labor union. Nationalists and royalists are bitter men lost in fantasies. The moneyed classes are treated by the game largely with contempt. Communism is dead and buried, remembered as a bogeyman. Communists are portrayed sympathetically but critically as fools who would doom everyone in pursuit of a righteous dream. As the player reinvents the amnesiac Harry's psyche, they can pivot him toward any number of political views, often to comedic effect. The cynicism with which DE treats the ideologies of the gameworld is tempered by the game's Marxist leanings; however, both game critics (Spacetwinks, 2020) and academics (Kiersey & Vasquez, 2025) have diagnosed the game as lacking the convictions of true Marxist belief in the future of the proletariat, instead succumbing to the depressive pessimism of a world where capitalism has achieved totalizing ideological victory—Fisher's notion of Capitalist Realism (2009).

The Pale manifests the end of the world as capitalism triumphs in Elysium. The Pale is a substance with no physical properties, described as “Achromatic, odorless, featureless” and “the negation of being.” It divides the world into archipelagos surrounded by vast tracts of oceans, called isolas, cutoff by the Pale. The Pale is expanding constantly. Seemingly the Pale's periphery is far from Revachol but during the investigation Harry finds a foothold of the Pale growing in a church in Martinaise. Martinaise is at the end of the world, both as event and location.

Despite this existential threat, the game does not let the player stop the Pale as Harry Du Bois. Characters tell him that in Elysium people try not to think about the Pale and simply carry on with their tasks. Capitalist labor must continue. The Pale has even been integrated into the global economy. Techniques for navigating the Pale are old, and refined by modern technology. An “Entroponetic Business Class” crosses the Pale on yachts, though only up 22 days a year. Cargo airships carry lorries full of goods across the Pale. As Pale psychically poisons these workers’ minds, their work will be automated someday. The Pale is, in Abraham and Jayemanne's typology (2017) antagonist and backdrop, and part of a hostile natural environment to be used for resources. It is even possible to buy in-game vodka aged in the Pale. The Pale acts as a parable to capitalist production continuing through climate catastrophe, exploiting a working class forced to labor through the impending destruction of the environment until their services will no longer be needed by a business class more than willing to exploit entropy. The Pale in fact has little consequence to the murder Harry must solve. It evokes the circumstances of labor under the real-world climate emergency: an ever-present context of doom unacknowledged in our modes of production.

The parable is made more explicit by a late-game encounter with a creature called the Insulindian Phasmid. The Phasmid is a giant stick insect, indirectly responsible for the murder. In a (possibly hallucinated) conversation with the Phasmid, Harry learns that the Pale appeared in the world alongside the human mind. It is the mind's excrement: “Instead of air, you exhale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.” The Pale is intrinsically man-made in a way climate change is not—humans have no choice but to create the Pale. Elysium is in an Anthropocene created by the human mind itself. The capitalism the game critiques is not destroying the planet. All political thought and technological advancements that could be used to address the Pale are themselves products of the same mind that created the Pale. The Pale is the antinoosphere, the psychic layer upon the planet that destroys lithosphere and biosphere and then itself; created by an unaware species. As the Phasmid declares, without rancor, “Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing—just by accident.”

However, it is possible to read DE outside of the depressive framework of climate resignation. For all of Martinaise's gloom, there is no shortage of individuals dedicated to imagining a better future. These efforts in the backdrop of the Pale are not portrayed as ironic. Rather than dismiss the game's deep commitment to politics, history, and ideology because of the lack of a clear resolution to climate change, we may see it as an affirmation of the need for politics despite climate change. The game's framing of the Pale as unsolvable by a police officer of an occupied city is in this reading a reminder to the player to not succumb to climate despair but to carry on living and politically organizing at the scale available to them.

It may even be possible to stop the Pale through countercultural expression, as Harry discovers by helping set up a rave inside the church afflicted by the Pale. The rave music arrests the progress of the Pale. Counterculture and the refusal of the status quo are rejections of the Pale as manifestation of Capitalist Realism, Kiersey and Vasquez argue (2025, p. 86). The Coalition occupying Revachol sends military forces through the Pale to intervene internationally to crush opposition to capital, an integration of the Pale into a Capitalocene. The Pale may be a fact of life, but it need not be a Capitalocene can be rejected. Through the Phasmid too the game entangles humans, in the manner of the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), into political relations with more-than-human entities that are not passive but articulate the consequences of the Anthropocene on all life, with deep, mutual sympathy. Harry can tell the Phasmid, “Of all the creatures I’ve met, you are the kindest.” In turn, the Phasmid can say, “Turn and go forward. Do it for the working class.” Political transformation and countercultural awakening are possible within DE's Anthropocene, as is an age of more-than-human, Chthulucenic connection.

Discussion

In both SMAC and DE, the Anthropocene is a fait accompli. By the year 2060, Earth is a write-off; sending colonists to space is the United Nation's consensus. The Pale will consume Elysium, regardless of any active human input. Yet neither game focuses on this destruction of the world. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri stages the Anthropocene on Earth as the prelude to the real adventure of creating the Anthropocene on the planet Charon. Disco Elysium firmly relegates the Pale to the background. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri makes the Anthropocene actionable, enactable, in fact requires it of the player. Disco Elysium informs the player that there is nothing to be done about the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene looks different from the vantage points the games require players adopt. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri aligns the player with the side of world leaders, the fantasy of fully informed technocrats shepherding humanity's nearly unlimited potential to develop technology to shape a new planet to their will. This is the noospheric idea, the creation of an Anthropocene that rises above disaster to connect humanity in a technological utopia, a world of the mind that subordinates nature itself. These fantasies are politically loaded. Questions of colonial resource extraction, the exploitation of workers, the rendering of nature as a body to exploit and other hallmarks of the Capitalocene are elided by the game's procedures.

Disco Elysium aligns the player with the people, capitalists and working class, who are in the shadow of the Pale. The lack of agency the player has is diegetic to the character of Harry Du Bois and all the people he encounters. The game's relative disinterest in the Pale, despite being such an arresting novum of its science fiction, is productively understood in comparison to SMAC's robust engagement with its Anthropocene.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was produced as part of a successful franchise by an American studio in 1999, well after Fukuyama's (1989) declaration of the triumph of liberal capitalism at the End of History. Disco Elysium was produced by self-described Communists from a post-Soviet state, in an era well into Mark Fisher's description of Capitalist Realism enacting a literal End of History—liberal capital blots out other ideological alternatives as we see climate change steadily erode the world. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a story of human hubris and self-destruction serving as a launchpad for Utopia in the stars. Predating Crutzen and Stoermer's (2000/2021) influential use of the term by one year, SMAC confidently allows the player to control the Anthropocene. Disco Elysium is written at the cusp of the world's end under capitalism, with no promised aftermath to the Anthropocene. It is a product of today's world deep in climate anxiety (Wu et al., 2020). From the individual perspective DE adopts, the Anthropocene is a fearful presence that must be acknowledged, but to think too much of it is to invite the paralysis of climate change. The game urges political imagination and organization, engagement with the world around the player (one dialogue at a time) and counterculture (which is the only thing that seems to stop the Pale). Such a political message elides the question of what to do about the Anthropocene as such, but it does not seem less politically engaged than SMAC's fantasy of the United Nations abandoning Earth in favor of colonial intervention across the reaches of space. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri argues that the only solution to the Anthropocene's disaster is to have a tabula rasa to build a noospheric Anthropocene in space. Disco Elysium refuses to detach itself from the world despite the disaster looming.

The technocratic lens and the street-level view of SMAC and DE, respectively, are enabled by their ludic genres and the rules and interfaces that typically come with them. However, it is not the case that a 4X-style turn-based strategy game by its nature would produce positive discourses of technology and resource extractivism in the Anthropocene. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri could have made Planet a more ambivalent entity than one that requires human intervention, and the planetary environment itself could have forced the player faction to adopt new, harmonious modes of relating to nature. Conversely, a typical CRPG would give the player agency to defeat the Pale as antagonist (perhaps a personified force such as the Voice of Planet). It is an oddity of DE as a CRPG that it keeps its narrative within the confines of the detective genre. Decisions of narrative ultimately organize the games’ ludic elements toward the reproduction of specific discourses of the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

In this article, I compared the depictions of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000/2021) in the 4X turn-based strategy game SMAC (Firaxis Games, 1999) and the CRPG DE (ZA/UM, 2019). The comparison between SMAC and DE reveal that both games, despite their genre and production differences, depict Anthropocenes produced by the human mind as such. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri enables the player to enact a positive, Utopian Anthropocene on an alien planet. Disco Elysium presents the Anthropocene as outside player control entirely. I discuss the political orientations of these two approaches to the Anthropocene in relation to discourses such as the noosphere (Vernandsky, 1945) and Capitalocene (Moore, 2016a). This comparison draws broader relevance to questions of how games represent climate change. Games’ ludic genres tend toward rules and interfaces enable certain discourses of Anthropocene (and climate change as a whole). However, these ludic elements are not prescriptive of the discourse offered by a game; narrative elements are necessary in the analysis of how ludic genres work to produce discourses of the Anthropocene. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is technologically optimistic about climate change in ways that align with its 4X genre, and DE is pessimistic about individual human agency in climate change in ways that align with the CRPG genre's affordances—but either game could have stayed in its genre and articulated different political leanings. Through this analysis, I contribute to the study of ecological themes in mainstream digital games.