Buss
Christian Buss
cbuss@butterflystorm.com
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, there 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 oevre appears truly radical in its aims. However, despite highly visible rejections of video-game norms pressures of conformity deeply restrict self-professed aims to create an alternate gaming world that the game's creator has so vocally argued for. Ultimately, the Oddworld Inhabitants games become a case study in the limitations of engaging environmental philosophy and activism with industry.
Ironically, while apparently rejecting all-encompassing corporate dominance within their diegetic content, Oddworld Inhabitants reveals a cultural split that confounds mass-market engagement with the individualistic patterns of environmental activism. In response 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 yet still remains locked into market structures characteristic of the high-stakes, high capital practices of modern game-development shows how Economic and Artistic pressures compete to create the contested, bounded space of early tw!entieth-century video game art.
Christian Buss is a German and Film Studiues doctoral student at UC Berkeley. While an undergraduate at Reed College, Christian completed a B.A in German Studies, completing a thesis on the conflicts of gender construction in Expressionist drama before being Shanghaied by a second major in Economics resulting in a published study of enrollment demand at American liberal-arts Colleges. Most recently, he spent two years continuing his economics work at a high-technology research company in Boston, developing a alternate corporate IT architecture for Global 3,500 firms designed to take advantage of Internet-centered computing. He is presently interested in the developments in social exchange and the potentials for exploration of new media culture in Germany, as well as third-generation ŽmigrŽ writers in Germany such as Zafer Senocak, and Feridun Zaimoglu.
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