On The Record: Olga Moskvina | Narrative Writer & Designer | Developer Interview
Welcome back to On The Record, our behind-the-scenes series exploring the minds, methods, and inspirations of the Hopetown team.
Joining us today is Olga Moskvina, who joined the Hopetown team earlier in 2026. Olga was a key writer and editor on Disco Elysium, and has joined Longdue Games as a writer, editor, and narrative designer, alongside other original members of the Disco Elysium team such as Martin Luiga and Veljo Hagu that are designing and crafting Hopetown with care.
Olga has also worked on a range of other video games and has an academic background in comparative literature, which has proved essential to the development of Hopetown’s narrative as we aim to draw from real world inspirations to craft a compelling story.
Image credit: Olga Moskvina
Q: You were one of the writers on Disco Elysium, a game that continues to have enormous cultural influence. What lessons from Disco Elysium still shape the way you approach narrative design and writing today?
A: There were quite a few, but the most important was audacity. The writing was brave—the irreverent humor, the challenging social and political themes, the literary texture of our sentences. But we also had to be audacious to believe that a game that was largely beautiful art and a lot of words, made in Estonia by people most of whom had never worked in game development before, could find a global audience. It’s not that we weren’t riddled with doubt and anxiety, we absolutely were, but we believed that we were making something important. Even if the studio had run out of money, a number of us would have kept working on Disco Elysium without pay. It was foolhardy, and absolutely magical. I think how serious we were comes across in the finished game; players connect with the story emotionally because we put so much of our genuine selves into it.
In many creative and professional fields, including game development, there is a tendency to become overly focused on calculation, best practices, and the approval of gatekeepers. Those approaches have their place, but they’re not a substitute for trusting one’s instincts, or one’s colleagues. You have to let go a bit to catch lightning.
Q: Your role on Disco Elysium included a lot of editing, and you also have an editing credit for Stasis: Bone Totem. How would you describe the purpose and value of editing in game development?
A: Editing is critical to clarifying ideas and unifying tone, especially when there are multiple writers on a project. One can and must edit one’s own writing, alongside performing QA and correcting scripting errors, but it’s helpful to have a more objective pair of eyes too. Most players aren’t grammar nerds like me, and that’s a good thing, really. But I do believe that players sense consistency and polish in details, even if they don’t notice them consciously.
Q: Before getting into game development, you taught writing and rhetoric. Has your teaching experience made you a better narrative designer?
A: I didn’t fully grasp that writing was always communication before I started teaching. I understood it theoretically, but not viscerally. When I started guiding students through writing their papers, it clicked. I had always made the same mistake they were making when writing academic work: my writing had been, at best, a conversation with myself, plus proof that I had read certain texts and absorbed the relevant professor’s idiom. As I worked to dismantle my students’ assumptions about what an essay should look like, I was also teaching them—and myself—to think in terms of addressing a real, flesh-and-blood reader. The university’s rhetoric-focused composition program was a particularly good context in which to develop audience awareness too.
When designing and writing for games, I don’t think about audience constantly. Generally speaking, I think a skillfully made video game creates its audience rather than pandering to one. At the same time, I try not to lose sight of the work as an act of communication, first with the rest of the team, then, hopefully, with players. That tends to cut down on impulses to insert egregious quantities of lore, overlong NPC monologues, and unnecessary rhetorical flourishes; the point isn’t to show off all the cool ideas we’ve come up with, or how fancy we can get with language. It’s to connect.
Q: Your academic background includes comparative literature and critical theory. How has studying literature shaped the way you think about Hopetown, which directly engages with themes of power and competing narratives?
A: With a theory background, thinking in terms of power structures and competing narratives is like breathing. It’s simply what one does. Hopetown is a natural fit for that.
Also, before college, my knowledge of literature was mostly limited to the Russian, Western European, and U.S. traditions. Studying literature in undergrad exposed me to literature from other places and perspectives, as well as postcolonial theory. In graduate school, I had the privilege of taking a class with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on postcolonialism and African narrative, and I consider Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind essential reading for any literature scholar.
When you look at new games appearing on Steam or in mobile app stores, you see a lot of Western European medieval settings where one would be hard-pressed to imagine any critique of feudalism. (There are also games with medieval settings that offer realistic complexity and critique too, but they are exceptions.) There’s nothing wrong with occasional escapism; I personally binge-watch detective dramas of varying quality. But one hopes for more unique and challenging creative projects alongside the expected ones.
Hopetown has an original setting with power structures informed by the history of colonialism and race relations in South Africa, and the pain and legacy of apartheid. When I first heard the concept, I was, like, “Yes! Here’s something historically informed and socially meaningful.” That Hopetown’s setting and story are relevant right now was underscored by Navi Pillay, who is an inspiration for one of Hopetown’s major NPCs, recently being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope (no pun intended) we can do justice to the concept’s promise.
Q: Both Disco Elysium and Hopetown explore the relationship between personal stories and larger social forces. Do you think CRPGs are particularly well suited to exploring this intersection?
A: CRPGs offer a very specific set of tools with which to interrogate tensions between larger social and historical forces, and individual motivations. That doesn’t mean they’re better suited to the project than works of fiction in other genres or media, just different.
Role-playing a character similar to oneself in a setting that isn’t like one’s own reality can make one more aware of how one’s thinking and actions are shaped by outside forces, from one’s family to political systems. Role-playing a character not like oneself can, theoretically, expand empathetic capacity, because now you’re confronting larger forces as someone with a different kind of background, opportunities, and constraints. Even playing the “evil” version of the player character is informative.
CRPGs at their best also have sprawling settings that model the complexity of real-world institutions, hierarchies, and international relations, and most CRPG audiences aren’t averse to reading codices and keeping track of this complexity in dialogue.
Finally, branching narrative and dialogue are great for exploring contradictory interpretations and narratives, and how they shape our perception of what’s real, what’s true, what matters… and how narratives are weaponized by competing factions, institutions, and nations.
Q: What do you think stories about transgenerational trauma and historical memory offer to contemporary audiences, particularly in a game like Hopetown?
A: A reminder to study the past so as not to repeat it. It’s a banal answer, but real.
This was Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s explanation for an ideal planned version of “Monument to a Lost Civilization”: a windowless, claustrophobic underground museum filled with installations meant to serve as a reminder of what it felt like to live under totalitarianism. And then a green park over it. “Feel what this felt like” is the invitation. “Now, make sure it never happens again” is the takeaway.
To get a little more nuanced, though, I think we’re often oblivious to how much we’re affected by family and community histories. (This is more true in some places than others; in Croatia, where I am now, history is very much alive.) Anything that we don’t know about ourselves can come up as repetition of toxic patterns, anxiety, reactivity towards others. So engaging with historical memory serves an outward-facing ethical and political function, and can also be a source of self-understanding and, potentially, healing at a personal level.
Q: Looking forward, what excites you most about the continued evolution of narrative-driven CRPGs?
A: I’ll preface this with: I like good combat, especially turn-based combat. However, I am also excited about CRPGs, and RPGs in general, exploring systems beyond combat. Combat is very expensive to implement, and it’s not easy to do something new with it, especially for indie studios. If we don’t assume that satisfying gameplay in a CRPG has to be combat and focus on “role-playing” as the central feature of RPGs—that is, having the freedom to create or at least co-create the player character, and make impactful decisions—I think there’s a lot of interesting work that we can do.
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Until next time,
— The Hopetown Team
