Dora Klind?i? had laid her dreams of writing for video games to rest. She was still inspired by the work but, over her years in the game business, she’d become increasingly dissatisfied with the industry’s management practices. So in 2019 she quit and recommitted herself to aerospace engineering. (Klind?i? is a trained physicist.) But that was the year Disco Elysium came out.

This role-playing video game was not, like most titles in its genre, about prophecies and powers. It was not set in a fantasy world and it was not expansive science fiction. Instead, it invited players to inhabit the mind of a mentally, physically and spiritually sick detective whose murder investigation took him on a tour of the historical defeat of socialism, the struggle between workers and owners, alcoholism, cryptozoology, fascism and race science. It was said to have been created not by a well-known video game studio, but a leftist art collective based in Estonia. Disco was entertaining, funny and alive with possibility. It was the video game equivalent of The Name of the Rose or The Sopranos, high art with great commercial appeal.

When she came across Disco, Klind?i? decided she “couldn’t live” without working on something like it and, in 2021, she took a job at ZA/UM, the company that made the game. What Klind?i? found was not really a collective at all but a conventional corporate environment whose executives were inspired by games like Minecraft and Among Us, both mass-market hits but neither of which have much to say about commodity fetishism or historical materialism. “I really felt catfished, to put it mildly,” she told me.