Metaleptic experience of literature in "Disco Elysium: The Final Cut"

Literary texts appear simultaneously as diegetic and non-diegetic entries in the contemporary video games. That dual role and interactive properties of the medium allow their readers to observe and enact the affiliations between literature, thoughts and objects. The affordances of literary texts are therefore reshaped and reexamined, while metalepsis, the transgression of narrative boundaries, occurs. This article discusses literature as a phenomenon functioning in a complex system disclosed in a digital environment. The analysis of how books are used in the video game Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021) serves to explicate how the metaleptic experience of literature can be achieved through the game medium. Object-oriented ontology, unnatural narratology and ludology provide the methodological framework for the research.