#wompty-dompty dom centre

[upst--rs]

What the hell is a Wompty Dompty-Dom Centre, and who the hell are Keith and Guy Joost?

... this might be the funniest sequence of dialogue in the game. 😂

[potatotalksculture]

More thoughts on Disco Elysium

[SPOILERS for Disco Elysium ahead.]

I’ve been dubbed the “pretentious wanker” for internalizing the though about a art gallery with a name similar to some chocolate bar out of Charlie’s Chocolate Factory. I was hoping for something absurd or maybe written in an imaginary language. What I got is a (quite accurate) critique of the modern, high class art world. Like in Velvet Buzzsaw. Or the latest season of You, if you’re feeling pretentious.

And also my “Actual Art Degree” consists of colorful invectives. Nothing is good enough for the Art Cop. He criticizes everything. Everything is mediocre for him. Why is he like that? Is he part of the milieu at the Art Centre? Or was he never allowed to enter and that made him bitter?

I learn the philosophy presented in Disco Elysium as I go. At the beginning you wake up as a dude who knows nothing. He’s literally and metaphorically NAKED. You, the player, know as much about the character, the identity, the story, the cloths and the surrounding of this protagonist as much as he would know himself. Isn’t this a perfect starting point for an RPG?

I know nothing about RPGs. I never played any kind of pen and paper, nor did I engage in similar games that include creating an identity for your character and sticking to it. In theatre, at work, I prefer the logistics and managing over imagining stories and creating meanings. Communication is hard enough as it is. No need to over complicate it by including made up stories and character traits in it.

This are two reasons why Disco Elysium was perfect for me. (I have finished playing the game as I’m writing this post. The origin of this post is a draft I’ve written sometime while still playing.) I DIDNT HAD A CLUE HOW TO PLAY THIS KIND OF GAME. I was as lost as the protagonist.

As I moved through the world, interacted with figures and objects, I was learning the philosophy implemented into this game. Without looking into the fandom.com wiki, I think about communism and capitalism. There’s also moralism. And some form of neoliberalism, I think. Somewhere around the first or second in-game day I got the task to Rebuild the Communism. Me? The guy, who assumes he’s a detective but is not completely sure and who just some hours ago has found his second shoe? Sure, comrade! Let’s go! But wait! Now I also have some moralist pants on and… we’ll, get points for saying this or that.

The points system was the first thing that made me think more about the representation of the four different school of though within the dialogues. Capitalism is about making money, having money and seeing people though their monetary value on the market. Neoliberalism is about wanting the state to leave the people alone. Moralism is about being somewhere in the middle and trying to keep everyone calm. Communism is about sharing everything and eating the rich. Easy! Or is it?

As I was progressing, I kept losing track of the thoughts. I felt really drawn to the whole rebuilding communism concept, as a strong anti-capitalist myself, this school of though was closest to my own believes. But as soon as it was about violence and killing, I took a step back. This was not in sync with me. And since that’s how I’ve chosen to play the game, I started choosing the less violent, more non-descript dialogue options. This has brought me onto the Moralintern though. This got me thinking:

In real life, when your looking for a moral compass, it’s hard to a stick to one principle. Cuz usually the universal definition of the chosen philosophy is not completely in harmony with your personal believes. So more often that you’d like to you are confronted with some personal inconsistency. And with every consistency you learn something about yourself. The most of it being: You are not black and white. And so is the world you live in. Inconsistency is part of the reality. Evolving is part of being a human.

(Interestingly enough, when you interact with the books about Dick Mullen often enough, you enable a new perspective on the world. A black and white perspective, which proposes an insightful contrast between the real world and the fiction. You are not a fictional detective with all the evidence in front of you. And you also contradict yourself.)

And also: no philosophy within the game is only good or only bad, or rather explicitly positively or negatively coded. There’s the “lucky” racist that was supposed to grant wishes. There’s the brutality and bloodthirsty of communism which was supposed to be about sharing. There the brutality of the humanistic Dolores Dei, who was trying to do some people not human.

[miafeystits]

not to keep rambling about the mechanics of disco elysium’s thought cabinet, but i was thinking today about how this post came about via me trying to figure out why it seemed i was gaining xp at a much slower rate in my current run of the game (as a moralist) vs earlier runs (both times as a communist), and i had a bit of a realization

while i think having internalized kingdom of conscience instead of mazovian socio-economics (and thus not gaining that sweet sweet communist xp) is at least part of the equation, i’d forgotten about a key difference between my earlier runs and my current one-- i’d always played as an art cop before, the second time around with conceptualization as my highest or second-highest stat (i can’t remember exactly) which, after internalizing actual art degree, translates into a not-insignificant amount of bonus xp:

which leads me to an interesting fact that i hadn’t really noticed before: while most thoughts do have some mechanical effect on harry, thoughts that grant extra xp to the player are pretty rare. in fact, there’s only four of them: jamais vu (derealization), mazovian socio-economics, actual art degree, and wompty-dompty dom centre

which. okay. i’ve already talked about mazovian socio-economics in a different essay, i won’t get into that again here. jamais vu? the extra xp makes sense-- if we’re reading the acquisition of xp as a way of illustrating harry’s character growth through game mechanics, it tracks for jamais vu, a thought about harry trying to better understand the world around him and his relationship to it, to give a small amount of xp for making an effort to explore your surroundings (and also mechanically give you the opportunity to learn more information!)

but like. actual art cop and wompty-dompty dom centre? why? why those in particular?

well, imo, the reason that both of these thoughts are able to offer so much xp is the same thing that ties them to each other thematically: they’re thoughts about art.

and even though both of the thoughts are textually quite critical of the art world and the culture surrounding it (the wompty-dompty dom centre describes the art crowd as the “unholy symbiosis of esthetics and tax optimization,” and the solution to actual art degree is literally just a bunch of ways to call something mediocre lmao) the mechanical benefits to both of these thoughts indicate another underlying argument: that not only is it still worth it to engage with art, but that engaging with art and trying to (as the description for conceptualization puts it) “see Art in the world” gives harry more tools and opportunities to improve as a person

because that’s what a skill point fundamentally is, right? it’s a new opportunity for harry to grow, either by leveling up a skill or by learning something new about the world or himself (via unlocking more space in the thought cabinet). internalizing these thoughts does what good art can do-- they make the world a little bigger, and make that world a little easier to survive

[code31-onthedancefloor]

oh mein gott a liberal

original under cut

[soledadcatalina]

i keep misremembering this guys name and calling him chapman

[mariautistic]

hey your intellect and motorics playthrough inspiried my own and good gravy its incredible

HELL YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[disco-elysium-via-polls]

Final Thoughts

All in all, I think this blog has been a great success. My goal when I started this was to show off as much of the game as possible in a single playthrough, and I think I've achieved that.

If there's anything I could change, it's that I did the earliest parts of this playthrough without knowledge of FAYDE, and I wish I could redo them while able to see which choices mattered.

I'll also admit that as the blog went on I started writing longer and longer updates and leaving less up to the polls. Partially this was because, with FAYDE, I could see which choices had long-term consequences (it's fewer than it seems), and partially because after a while I felt I could predict which way polls would go (like when it came to political choices, for example). Then again, there were a couple of times the results genuinely surprised me, so maybe the game would have gone a different way if I let you make more choices? Still, I think this was best decision, as it let us actually finish the game in a reasonable time frame.

As to the playthrough itself, this was a very successful run of Disco Elysium, by which I mean we got pretty much all of the best possible outcomes. Getting both Wompty-Dompty-Dom Centre and Actual Art Degree allowed us to get much more XP than you would on a 'blind' playthrough and that combined with some solid luck got us some pretty high rolls. That's... nice, but in some ways I can't help but feel it goes against the spirit of the game. So much of DE is about failure and recovery and the mechanics play into that, and I can't help but wonder if we cheated ourselves out of the experience of failing more often.

But, that's all of my thoughts about how the playthrough went (though I'm open to questions if you have any). That brings us to the end of Disco Elysium, and the end of this blog... at least for now.

I'm going to be taking a break for a while longer, but I am open to the idea of playing other games in the future. I have a few ideas myself, but if you have any suggestions for choice-based narrative games (especially ones that are text-heavy), I'd like to hear them.

[thecrabman]

have we talked about the diegetic explanation for the wompty-dompty dom centre yet? how does thinking good give harry 2 real dollars? the solution mentions tax evasion schemes in relation to the art market, so maybe it's representing harry's worldly knowledge/pretentious snobbery passively increasing his wealth? with precisely tracked money i wouldn't think exchange of funds would be happening off-screen, but we can presume things *are* happening off-screen. we don't see the leads eat or piss, unfortunately, so.. maybe he's.. stealing and justifying it by thinking about cool rich assholes? not tipping on food he's paying for with extra tare-collection money? spotting money on the ground more easily by thinking about how knowing things and flaunting your knowledge can make you money? or maybe he just gains the ability to physically manifest $2 in his pocket by remembering trivia

[yellow-yarrow]

director's commentary for this post (lmao) because I like yapping

the reason why I choose these artworks is not just because they looked good, I thought it was interesting how they treat colors, light and rot

Damien Hirst's Black Sun is made of many dead flies, people have said that this artwork smells gross up close. Its theme is obviously death and disgust (like most of his works), he has also said the flies represent people, and quotes Hobbes saying that people's life without a government is bad and tragic (which I HEAVILY disagree with)

Hirst sells his works for millions of dollars, it's highly commercialized, some have accused him of money laundering and such. Insert the Wompty-Dompty Dom Centre thought:

Problem It's Wednesday evening and something heinously exciting is under way. People have gathered beneath the billowing roof of an oddly shaped trophy building, sipping wine and exchanging opinions. 29-year-old wunder-twins Guy and Keith Joost are the stars of the show, with their bomber jackets and white sneakers -- head curators of this art exhibition. It's the wompty-dom-di-dommiest event of the year and all the cool kids have RSVP’d. Where are you, if you are not there? Solution You're at home, stupid cop, not with the art crowd. You hate them, everyone hates them, even they hate themselves. It's nauseating -- an industry built on sprezzatura and sparkling wine. And, let’s be honest, tax evasion schemes. The Wompty Dompty Dom Centre is the heart of this unholy symbiosis of esthetics and tax optimization, and now that you've internalized it – you can have a piece too!

personally, for me, it invokes disgust both on an aesthetic level (dead flies) and in a conceptual level (rich guy using death to make millions). Tieing this into black being the color of money in Elysium, and the end of the world.

Malevich's Black square is a painting without an object, it doesn't represent the material world, it is independent of it. but at the same time, black is the density of matter in the white empty space.

He said this about this art: "[Black Square is meant to evoke] the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing." "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins." (x) ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’ (x)

Important context for this work (like many other black paintings) is that it was made around the time of the world wars, and the russian revolution. Black paintings express the trauma of the world wars, and in this case the revolutionary approach to art too.

quoting from the article I linked:

Malevich had been collaborating with the musician Mikhail Matyushin and the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh on a manifesto which called for the rejection of rational thought. They wanted to overturn the established systems and hierarchies of Western society. Together with poet Velimier Khlebnikov they staged Victory over the Sun, where the characters aimed to abolish reason by capturing the sun and destroying time. The libretto used Kruchenykh’s zaum – a new language of sounds that had no meaning. This sparked something in Malevich.

Similar things apply to White on white. The Moma website describes it better than I would:

[Malevich] "wanted White on White to create a sense of floating and transcendence. White, Malevich believed, was the color of infinity and signified a realm of higher feeling, a utopian world of pure form that was attainable only through nonobjective art. Indeed, he named his theory of art Suprematism to signify “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts”; and pure perception, he wrote, demanded that a picture’s forms “have nothing in common with nature.” In 1918, soon after the Russian Revolution, the connotations of this sense of liberation were not only aesthetic but also social and political. Malevich expressed his exhilaration in a manifesto one year later: “I have overcome the lining of the colored sky. . . . Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.”

These molding fruits made out of gemstones by Kathleen Ryan make me think of Damien Hirst's bedazzled Skull artwork, decadence, kitsch, death. The gemstones make the mold feel like it has value, importance, like it's almost sacred. The pale as a "sacred and terrible smell"

Rothko's paintings heavily empathize colors, paintings like these invite us to really experience those colors and be moved by them.

From the Disco Elysium artbook:

Eyes are direct, unmediated input to the brain. You like or dislike something before you have a chance to reason about it. It affects you emotionally without offering you a chance to throw up intellectual defenses first. Witnessing death and good art are materially equivalent experiences: they are visual information transmitted straight to the centers of emotion by way of the eye. This might explain why a person could tear up in the presence of a Rothko painting. If you’re a sensitive enough instrument, seeing his Orange, Red, Yellow in real life feels intense. It doesn’t work on a computer screen though, you’re just staring at some bright pixels imitating the appearance of the painting the same way seeing a dead person is different from seeing a picture of a dead person.

El Lissitzky was also an important figure in russian avant-garde, like Malevich. Well. I put this one in here cause it looked nice and because of the theme of light and the lack of (it's a gelatin silver photograph).

maybe this adds something to the discussion of the symbolism of colors and light in Elysium

[disco-archetypes]

REACTION SPEED - Wait. Did he just say *Wompty-Dompty-Dom Centre*?

SUGGESTION - He did it! He said *Wompty-Dompty-Dom Centre* like it's the most natural thing in the world.

[bugslaststraw]

Trant is so funny. He's bright in an almost unnerving way. We all collectively decided he smiles like that 24/7. He's got a gun. He's not even a cop. How did he even get that? He's a single father. Is that a German accent? He's not a psychiatrist but he's so autistic he can do the job of one by dint of pure nerd spirit. It rubbed off on his son. He's been to the Wompty Dompty Dom centre. He will not be there to prevent the civil war. That is a German accent isn't it.

[copyprotection]

and its funny, right, despite Trant being presented in-game as generally kind and optimistic, a lot of people appear to have immediately responded to his character by assuming he was hiding something sinister - i see a lot of people saying he gives off patrick bateman vibes or whatever - and i cannot for the life of me figure out why that is. what is it about this guy who is entirely just some guy that makes everybody think that he's Hiding Something. do you just hate the wompty-dompty dom centre for contemporary arts that much? you don't want to go to the wompty-dompty dom centre? womp??

[discoitstimetogobaby]

You're at home, stupid cop, not with the art crowd. You hate them, everyone hates them, even they hate themselves. It's nauseating -- an industry built on sprezzatura and sparkling wine. And, let’s be honest, tax evasion schemes. The Wompty Dompty Dom Centre is the heart of this unholy symbiosis of esthetics and tax optimization, and now that you've internalized it – you can have a piece too!

-2 Suggestion: Pretentious wanker

Encyclopedia passives give +10 XP and +2 reál

I’m obsessed with this thought. Where does the money come from? Does it spontaneously appear in any available pocket, did Harry forget about the hundreds of reál in his Friette bag?

Is Kim thinking about how he pawned his spinners so Harry could have a place to sleep and days later he’s watching him pull a wad of reál out of his pocket to buy a 120 reál Kristallsprach Model 9 portable transceiver from the pawn shop.

[erovalkyrie]

THE WOMPTY-DOMPTY DOM CENTRE

[thegrimreaperisanerd]

extremely underrated part of the game though is when Trant says "Wompty-Dompty-Dom Centre" and Amnesiac Harry Du Bois who accepted The Pale pretty well, and just sort of started doing the murder investigation when nudged into it, and processed the revolution with only mild - moderate perturbance, goes "Fuck off it's not fucking called that."

While Trant continues. "That is not it's name." He's getting ignored. "Kim, Tell him to stop saying Wompty-Dompty-Dom centre." Kim also ignores him.

[flhoarder]

Just thought about Peter Svatik and how he managed to say Wompty-Dompty Dom Centre so matter of factly and with a straight face