Description
Revachol, the universe of the award-winner indie retro-RPG ‘steampunk’ computer game, from Estonian art collective and gone studio, ZA/UM, is rife with plot lines echoing political predicaments and sentiments from our own Late Capitalist universe. While character choice offers the basis of multiple different arcs within the game, it can’t be gainsaid that capitalism itself has enormous agency in the game’s overall dynamics. But this isn’t a game where you play the part of a capitalist, or even necessarily an antagonist of capitalism. Instead, the game play rotates around a detective story, where the player must not only solve a murder, and navigate its various labor disputes in a fictional dockland town, but must also choose a psychological pathway to navigate what Mark Fisher termed, in his book Capitalist Realism, hedonic depression. This paper draws on Fisher’s work to explore the strategic tension within the game, and it’s parallels with our own time, between Badiou’s “communist hypothesis” and what might be called the Marxist hypothesis. Thus, while the game’s embrace of a “disco” dandy aesthetic points to a kind of culturalist praxis of anti-capitalism, akin to Fisher’s “acid communism,” its portrayal of dockland labor struggles bespeak the enduring centrality of a certain proletarian realpolitik in anti-capitalist strategy.
