Strategies of Resistance: Munch’s Odyssey and Environmental Activism

Christian Buss

“If you get on a soap box and try to convince people that what you have to say is the right thing, people aren't going to listen. So if you can disguise what you're trying to say in irony, and make it funny, (and still get the message across) then gaming is the right medium, and any medium is the right medium.” (Lorne Lanning, President and Co-founder, Oddworld Inhabitants.)

“Collaboration, Coercion, Karma.” In a video game industry largely built around narratives of individual agency and militaristic leadership, these three concepts are rarely implemented principles of gameplay. With first person Shooters, Drive-by games of violence and strategy games that require systematized governance to obtain success dominating bestseller lists and retail shelves, a game like Munch’s Odyssey stands out. Combined with a narrative based upon resistance to industrial hegemony, the Oddworld Inhabitants gaming oeuvre appears truly radical in its aims. However, there is a break in the extant trilogy of games, shifting the directly radical politics of the initial game Abe’s Odyssey’s diegetic content, or back story, onto the body politics of Abe, Munch and his Fellow Mudokons. In Munch’s Odyssey, this shift pacifies the shock to the corporate systems that Oddworld Inhabitants has offered in previous games. Exploring Munch’s odyssey as a case study that pushes the boundaries of Video-game as art form also reveals how economic and artistic pressures compete to create the contested, bounded space of early twentieth-century video game art.

Munch’s Odyssey, the third in an planned sequence of five games from Oddworld Inhabitants is a visual tour-de-force and normatively well-developed game building upon the story of Abe and his fellow Mudokons, a race of pastoral pre-industrial bipeds enslaved by an industrial elite who exploit the environment, history, and the bodies of the simpleton Mudokon’s Through the first two games of the quintology, Abe and his race’s legacy is deeply inscribed within late 1990’s narratives of environmental activism. As Lorne Lanning, the Artistic Director for the games explains:

“Abe's Odyssey stemmed initially a lot from what was happening with the rainforest being burned down to grow cheaper meat. People didn't understand that the 99% burger was actually at the expense of half the lungs on the planet. That in many ways influenced the beginning of Abe's Odyssey, the third world laborer who worked in horrific conditions for a big corporation, with a big happy logo... everything seemed fine on the surface, but it wasn't quite the case underneath.” (Lorne Lanning, President and Co-founder, Oddworld Inhabitants.)

Abe himself is truly a modern day anti-hero, sickly, non-violent while bearing the physical stature of a hunger-striking Gandhi. In the first two games Abe saves his fellow slaves of industry, is crowned the savior of his people and witnesses his people's re-enslavement through devious tactics of mass-marketing. As such, Abe’s status is profoundly “outside” of the industrial system that fragments and enslaves and uproots his people. Abe himself appears truly alienated, resisting the apparatus of industry that has gone so far as to physically suture the mouth of the Mudokons shut.

Abe however, is also figured as an outsider from his own people with his experiences, a cynicism and an awareness of the ills that have befallen his society and their susceptibility to further encroachment by market forces. Abe is liberated from the very numbness of his people and in dramatically staged visual language, the only one who is in touch with the past of his people as shaman-like rulers co-existing in balance with the natural world, able to call on these dormant powers to regrow natural objects and even hypnotically coerce others.

In the first two games, Abe’s role is to save his people by defeating the industry that keeps them in check, literally by turning off the power to the factory that keeps them employed. This narrative of corporate resistance is deeply inscribed by a late-1990’s radical environmental politics espoused by groups such as Earth-First, visible in contentious Greenpeace projects and represented in the stories of Edward Abbey in “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” As Earth first’s mission statement claims: “It is not enough to oppose the construction of new dams. It is time to free our shackled rivers and tear down Hetch Hetchy, Glen Canyon, New Melones, Tellico and other concrete monstrosities” (Earth First Journal). This mission statement imbued as it is with a philosophy dubbed “Deep Ecology,” posits a biocentric philosophy in which “nature so envelops the human, that it becomes difficult if not impossible to discern any meaningful place for humanity in the world” (Callicot 1995, 38). Implicit in these arguments is that industrialization and all physical manifestations of capital (buildings, dams and roads etc.) are imbued with an almost complete alienation from the land and the environment. Within this bipolar matrix of Environment as opposed to Industrialization, Aldo Leopold has suggested that there is, however a workable role for the human, one contrasting “man the conqueror” with “man the biotic citizen.” (Leopold, the Land Ethic, 1966) For Leopold this biotic citizen is able to rebuild a connection to the land: “In all these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the searchlight of his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism."

This notion of man and land interlaced with a collective symbiosis lies at the heart of the Oddworld of Abe’s Odyssey. As the game developers describe the Mudokons “The Native species of Oddworld live in respectful balance with the land. Their lives are based around Spooce, a sort of spiritual currency earned by channeling energies from living creatures. They are intuitive and practical, and believe that what goes around, comes around. Their simple needs and honest approach to life makes them prey to rapacious Industrial races” (Munch’s odyssey instruction manual). Key to this environmental philosophy is the notion of land and its inhabitants engaged, mutually implicated and imbricated. As Irene Klaver has argued, the practice of environmental ethics is deeply concerned with phenomenological questions of place, of place’s status as “around us” from which we are severed, and varied attempt to rectify this situation , leading to “the implicit presence as co-presence which as the between connects separated realms such as the human and the natural” (Klaver 1995, p.69).

Taking this re-creation of an environmental union to its extreme are groups such as the earth liberation front, whose three-point agenda is to “1) inflict economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment. 2) To reveal and educate the public on the atrocities committed against the earth and all species that populate it. 3) To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and non-human” (www.earthliberationfront.com/about). Such a strategy of rectification is enacted in Oddworld dramatically in the destruction of the aptly named “Rupture” farms leading to the Mudokon’s return to their natural state, as those who are able to instantiate this reconnection with nature. As such, the Mudokon’s are not an undifferentiated element of Nature, as such, but are rather the idealized embodiment of what Ulrich Melle has called “a planet teeming with richly diversified life again, and in the midst of it, in symbiotic relationship with it, an equally rich diversity of human culture.” (Melle 1995, 121).

Munch’s odyssey is, however, structured quite differently, Rather than a storyline of guerrilla attacks on the destroyers of “natural balance”, of Earth Liberation Front style environmental attack, whose publications include texts such as “Setting Fires With Electrical Timers - An Earth Liberation Front Guide” Abe must instead help save a fellow creature-of-nature whose only potential offspring are going to be sold off as high-luxury food. Together, these two must work together in order to reach the research laboratory where Munch had been imprisoned and free both Munch’s eggs. To achieve their goals, they cannot however, simply attack the Lab, but must work with Abe’s ability to take control of other’s minds to make a member of the elite ruling class wealthy enough to enable him to take them both to the Lab. This person must then be controlled to spend his new found wealth on Munch’s eggs and give them up to allow Munch’s species to regrow. This shift, away from the direct destruction of the industrial complex that leads to oppression onto a scope of the body, dramatically staged as the organizing narrative of salvation of future offspring. The extremity of this break is dramatized by a closing video sequence that ends the game where Abe and Munch look over the lab that had sold the caviar-like eggs, and Abe turns to Munch, saying: “That’s strange, usually these buildings blow up when I leave and save the day.” The lab ultimately does explode, but this act of destruction is an indirect consequence of their acts of salvation.

Where Abe’s Odyssey is framed around a philosophy of a new environmental order centered within a “place” freed from industrial oppressors, Munch’s Odyssey stages the true win, the success of the game, in very different terms. Game Developer Lorne Lanning has often expressed the deep political aims of his creation claiming “The Oddworld Quintology is largely influenced by the acts and practices of the corrupt greed and power mongers that have bled the world's people throughout history and continue to do so today. Oddworld is about finding yourself caught up in an uncaring food chain. Are you just going to be eaten by it or are you going to do something about it?” (Lorne Lanning). In Abe’s Odyssey this is answered with physical destruction of the symbols of environmental dominance, in Munch’s Odyssey the buildings, dams and structures that cause so much environmental damage are left intact. Abe’s and Munch’s strategies are instead to bankrupt the companies who run the corporations. The laboratory that is the goal of the narrative is itself place-less, a flying laboratory that cannot be tied to any single location, further distancing this game from strategies of re-placing that map the earlier Oddworld narratives.

If reclaiming place is not the narrative goal of the game, yet the aims of the game remain resistance to industrial hegemony, how does the third game in the series enact environmental protest. The narrative shift to salvation of the future offspring of both Abe and Munch as the end goal serves as a guidepost. It suggests that saving the species is the act that allows for a reestablishment of an environmental “good”. So, what is it about Munch and Abe’s species that is so important to environmental protection? A quick answer could be that Abe and his people are members of the natural order and their protection prevents further environmental degradation. However, Oddworld Interactive frames these people as distinctly “outside” of nature, as somehow more than just another species living in balance. As the guide to the Oddworld Universe published at Oddworld.com makes clear, there are three elements of this world: The natives, the wildlife, and Industry. Munch and Abe are most distinctively not a part of the wildlife, that category so deeply associated with nature in its unmediated form:

“Oddworld's Wildlife species are those caught in the middle, natural creatures that want only to eat or be eaten. They are an expression of the life force of Oddworld itself, abundant when the world is in balance, and scarce when slaughtered for profit by careless Industrial goons.”

As Natives, Munch and Abe are categorized differently. They possess qualities that allow them to live in balance with the land, while not remaining entirely of the land. Saving them, then is suggested as a means by which to save the existence of a race of people who know the only effective way to live in harmony with the environment. In asking the player to save them, the creators are no longer asking us to destroy the perpetrators of environmental destruction, but rather to become more aware of how those live. We are therefore asked to examine the body politics of Munch and his fellow Mudokons.

What is meant by a shift in political agency to the level of the body? Ultimately, in Munch, the site of environmental protest that is enacted in the fantasy of environmental reclaiming is one that can only be instantiated through re-establishment of the social order of the Mudokons. Given the jump to an environmental ethics centered on the body(s) of this idealized race of individuals, an important line of investigation is opened by asking how does the body function within the game-world? In game analysis such analysis is complicated by tensions of how the narrative constructs the body’s role and the body as controlled by the player of the game, what I call the game-body. Looking at the game-body, Munch’s odyssey introduces an element of game-play that Oddworld’s creators call “Game-Speak.” With game-speak, both Abe and Munch are able to talk to each other and to the people they are expected to interact with along the way. Munch is able to work together with Abe, a dual-hero approach to game-play that is perhaps the most striking novelty of the game. But along the way, Munch must also work with fellow Mudokons to progress in the game, getting them to help him channel the earth-spirit to unlock doors and engage with the environment. As such, one cannot succeed in the game without, cooperation, also suggesting that cooperation as social principle is critical in any politics of environmental engagement. This question of cooperation has become critical in environmental policy debates, especially in the historical circumstances surrounding Leopold’s death, whose politics of biotic citizenship are so deeply inscribed within the game-world of Abe’s Odyssey. As Norton has demonstrated: “His [Leopold’s] death , and the height of his intellectual and leadership powers left the [environmental] movement effectively rudderless, (Norton 1991, 61) a threat that ultimately debilitated the movement, leading to its status in 1954 as “small, divided and frequently uncertain…the representatives of particular interest groups and hence no better than those whom they accuse.” (McConnell 1954). This fear of inactivity and paralysis was by no means limited to the period of the early 1950s. As Schleisman’s essay “What’s wrong with the environmental movement claims:

“Various environmental organizations have been competing with each other for limited financial and human resources rather than pooling resources for greater effectiveness. The money that these organizations do have is not always spent in the most efficient or imaginative manner.”

This is the alternative to the fantasies of destruction of the first two games of the Oddworld quintology. Why then this shift in perspective? Why this emphasis on a practical politics of environmental activism? As Lorne Lanning has suggested: “We think that everyone, on some level or another, identifies with what's going on in the world today. We're just trying to inject the dilemma that everyone feels into a package that they can interact with and ultimately overcome.” Agreeing that today’s system does not work is one thing, figuring out how to change it is another.