While dice have long been a staple of RPGs, the roll of the dice has taken on additional anti-capitalist significance in recent indie appearances.
In Disco Elysium, ZA/UM Studio’s groundbreaking detective RPG from 2019, every decision was made by rolling a dice. Think you can wrestle a body from a tree? Good luck rolling a number high enough to pass the endurance test required to enter the sharp vicinity of the corpse. Want to try and fight Measurehead, the slice-like Semenese Supreme who stands between your detective and the union-controlled half of Revachol? With the right throw, you could deliver an impressive roundhouse kick. The wrong one can land you flat on your back.
In Disco Elysium, the roll of the dice determines your progress. Money helps! But the amount of money Harrier Du Bois can scrape together on the streets and dark corners of Revachol is insignificant compared to the kinds of wealth that the people who control the destiny of the city can scatter around. Instead, his (and by extension) the player’s currency is a coincidence.
The same goes for Citizen Sleeper. In Jump Over The Age’s indie adventure game/RPG hybrid, learning how to use dice to progress is essential. You play as an android, recently escaped from servitude, and trying to survive on a huge space station. In a game with three different currencies – energy, money and dice – dice are the most essential. You start the day with a set amount (which can decrease if you’re low on energy) and use it to perform each action. If the die has a high number, you are guaranteed to reach your target. The lower the number, the worse your chances get. If you run out of dice, your day is over, go back to bed. Then wake up the next morning and see what the dice chance has given you.
Dice as a result-determining mechanic is nothing new in RPGs. In fact, it dates back to the genre’s tabletop origins. In the 1990s and early 2000s, RPGs tried to adapt Dungeons & Dragons directly to PC and so often represented the results of actions determined by the roll of the dice. As time went on and RPG mechanics permeated every genre from action and FPS to sports and farming, pen-and-paper sausage making became increasingly hidden behind more viscerally satisfying exteriors. Fallout 3, while still an RPG at its core, eschewed the isometric perspective that defined the series’ early entries, in favor of letting the player view the ash-grey world through the barrel of a gun. In recent years, however, we’ve seen a return to the text-heavy isometric style, with games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper are part of this trend, and so are using dice as part of a wider integration of the mechanics and traditions of tabletop role-playing. But just as much, both games are left-wing critiques of capitalism, using dice to represent the element of chance inherent in scratching out any measure of success under a system designed to continually reward the rich, while only allowing enough ordinary people to be raised to wealth (and as rarely as possible) to convince the proletarian masses that it is possible to pull yourself up by your own shoelaces, that it is possible to go from rags to wealth.
Of course, it is possible. But it is possible in the same way that landing a triple salchow without prior training in skating is possible. Neoliberal capitalism remains the dominant economic and political system in the world because people from impoverished backgrounds can acquire wealth from time to time. While rich, connected people are much more likely to get richer and more connected (think: Elon Musk and Donald Trump), people who grew up in poverty (think: Kendrick Lamar and George RR Martin) can sometimes gain wealth. And, as the dice in Citizen Sleeper and Disco Elysium suggest, luck is often as important a factor as skill.
Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I’m somehow less interested in the weight and twists of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of the same talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” For every Lamar and Martin who is able to turn their talents into enormous success, there are hundreds of people of remarkable talent who, through no fault of their own, can never escape poverty. Placing the dice front and center allows Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper to reinforce this theme. While skill is important, progress ultimately depends on chance.
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