Author: claudiamallea

Can you survive the Waterless Flood? What will you learn as you try?

My concept for this project started out quite simple- an adventure game set during the apocalyptic event central to the MaddAddam trilogy: the Waterless Flood. The survivors we meet during the novels, such as Ren, Toby, Jimmy, and Amanda, survive due to their isolation from the general population. How would an individual who was exposed to the disease, as most would be, fare?

This question lead me straight into my first roadblock- how exactly was the disease spread? We get the gist of its effects from Zeb’s description of his supposed father as “raspberry mousse”, but what happened before that? This question took a bit of creativity to answer, and I went with the typical route of those trying to invent an illness: spontaneous coughing. One problem solved.

From this project’s conception, I had a good idea of who I wanted this character to be. I saw Nadia as a normal college student, a gamer who stumbles upon something bigger than she could imagine. The MaddAddamites were a secretive bunch, and undoubtedly good at hiding their tracks, as we saw through Crake and Zeb’s use of leap-frogging. It seems unlikely that Crake would have been able to round up every member of the shadowy group. I sought to answer the question of what MaddAddam would look like to an outsider, years after the fact. This lead to another problem- what did the MaddAddam homepage look like? I imagined it as a sort of message board, which could very well have been a point of reference for Margaret Atwood when she was writing Oryx and Crake in the early 2000s.

While writing this story, I found myself interested in elements of Atwood’s world that we only saw through the lens of her male characters, namely the adolescent Jimmy and Glenn. What might a young woman think of At Home with Anna K, for instance? This pulled me into the world of lifecasters and the politics surrounding them. I became similarly interested in female gamers and message board lurkers. This left me with a lot of ideas that seemed impossible to synthesize with the light-hearted, if gory, adventure game I was writing. In the end, I didn’t really combine the two. The more curious or sentimental players among us can learn about Nadia’s thoughts on gaming or CamGirls, while those interested in a more straightforward adventure can play the game without touching upon those issues.

I really enjoyed looking at the world of the MaddAddam trilogy from a perspective closer to my own. Doing so revealed revealed some of the gaps that are present in any fictional world, which can never have all of the color and texture of our own. I was less interested in filling those gaps than I was in playing with them and seeing what might fit. My classmates have exposed some of these gaps in fascinating ways, and I’m incredibly excited to play their games!

Overall, I feel so lucky to have been a part of this class. I can’t remember the last time a class has inspired such fruitful work and discussion! I’m so thankful to our wonderful professor and all of my classmates for making this such a special experience. Have a great summer, everyone!

Recommended Reading:
CamGirls/Lifecasters

Jennifer Ringley:

Hart, Hugh. “April 14, 1996: JenniCam Starts Lifecasting.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 14 Apr. 2010. Web. 24 May 2016.
A fascinating look into JenniCam, the website of Jennifer Ringley, then a college student. This article gives great insight into lifecasters and CamGirls, as well as their relationship with their fans and the privacy they are allowed.

Burgin, Victor. “Jenni’s Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude.” Critical Inquiry 27.1 (2000): 77-89. Web.

A more scholarly take on JenniCam, and the psychological implications of lifecasting. A bit Freudian for my tastes, but interesting nonetheless.

Ana Voog:

Kale, Sirin. “In 1998 This Webcam Woman Was the Most Famous Person Online.” Dazed. N.p., 27 Jan. 2016. Web. 24 May 2016.

An insightful interview with Voog herself. Voog views her cam as an art piece, one that explores her sexuality and identity. This perception is interesting, especially as the contemporary view of CamGirls zeroes in on how they are sexualized by the viewer rather than their own sexual agency.
A particularly interesting quote: “One of the mediums of the anacam project is time. It’s been going on for nearly two decades, and I’m the only artist out there doing this. It’s so vast. And it’s still a work in progress. Things will become more clear in ten years.”

Saul, Heather. “Ana Voog: What Happened to One of the First Ever Internet Stars.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 24 May 2016.

An overall look at AnaCam, and what has happened in Voog’s life since. Voog links lifecasting to Instagram, in that both use images to sum up the life of the person who is posting them. The main difference between these platforms is their level of automation- early lifecasts such as AnaCam posted a single image every few minutes of whatever the camera captured, while instagrammers choose what elements of their lives they want to reveal to the public.

Gaming

Bryce, J. & Rutter, J., 2005. “Gendered Gaming in Gendered Space”, in Raessens, J. & Goldstein, J. (eds) Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, pp.301-310
This article brings up the question of visibility in gaming, particularly for women, that is relevant to Nadia’s status as a lurker on the MaddAddam message board. At the time this article was written, 43% of U.S. gamers were women. However, these women occupied a far less visible space in gaming than men did, both in the spaces where they play their games (bedrooms vs. public game spaces) and in the games themselves. This article links that to damaging gender roles within video games and the gaming community.

Nonnecke, Blair, Jenny Preece, and Doreen Andrews. “What Lurkers and Posters Think of Each Other.” IEEE Xplore. 37th Hawaii Internation Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Web. 24 May 2016.

An investigation into Lurkers- who they are, why they lurk, and how they are viewed in the communities they observe. Lurkers are those who read a message board or online community without posting or becoming a member. This is especially interesting in the context of the visibility (or lack thereof) of female gamers, as discussed in the article above.

Agger, Michael. “4chan /b/: A New Academic Study of the Influential Message Board.” Slate Magazine. N.p., 28 June 2011. Web. 24 May 2016.

God, I love this article. Agger analyzes the influence 4chan has had on popular culture with the innocence and fear felt only for the few years in the early 2010’s in which it looked quite possible that 4chan could take over the world. 4chan, in those days, bore a few similarities to MaddAddam in its political and social influence.

The Beauty of the Death of Humanity

The waterless flood, the plague created by Crake to decimate the human population, left in its place not a vacuum, but a world filled with life. This can be related back to the moral implications of the waterless flood, which I discussed in my previous post. While the end of human life is inevitably a source of fear for even the most righteous of human beings, what follows may be an improvement upon human society.

The survival of Toby was dependent entirely on human lust and vanity, qualities absent from the Crakers. By using the products associated with the commercialization of these aspects of human life, she is symbolically creating life and beauty from human baseness. Toby, a former God’s Gardener, is holed up in AnooYoo, a spa frequented by aging upper class women such as Lucerne. AnooYoo can be seen as symptomatic of the vanity and greed present in pre-flood society. Concerns about aging and beauty, no doubt fed by the availability of child pornography and the total commercialization of sex, was fed back into the system of corporations, contributing to more greed and wealth imbalance. In AnooYoo, Toby is living off of the food she stored according to the Gardener beliefs as well as the fruit-and-vegetable scented skin products the spa had sold. There is an undeniable irony to Toby gaining sustenance from avocado body butter and lemon meringue facials, the kind of beauty products that have become defunct in the post-flood world. Toby is turning these symbols of vanity, so indicative of the greed of the pre-flood world, into something useful.

The pigoons, genetically altered pigs containing human organs and brain tissue, have developed a basic culture and even some form of religion, providing an example of the beauty that has arisen from human cruelty. In Oryx and Crake, the pigoons serve as Jimmy’s awakening to the brutality of the world. Jimmy hears his father’s coworkers at OrganInc Farms, the creators of the pigoons, make jokes about eating their hybrid creations: “This would upset Jimmy; he was confused about who should be allowed to eat what. He didn’t want to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself” (Oryx and Crake, 24). Jimmy’s identification with the pigoons and concern about eating them is mirrored in MaddAddam, where it is revealed that the animals are much more intelligent than originally assumed. A group of pigoons converge on the cobb-house, where the human and Craker survivors are living. The pigoons carry with them the body of a dead piglet, covered in flowers and foliage. This indicates that the pigoons have advanced enough to have funeral rites, a sign of religion or at least a kind of culture. The pigoons, while the result of human experimentation on the bodies of other animals, have developed their own society, one which may inherit the earth.

Ultimately, the earth seems to be in the hands of the Crakers, who have adopted human inventions and traditions into their own culture. Unlike their human predecessors, the Crakers have the potential to live on the earth in harmony with its other creatures. In MaddAddam, we learn that the Crakers are capable of writing. Toby frets that this will spell the end of the Craker’s idyll: “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?” (MaddAddam 204). Toby’s fears seem to be unfounded. For one thing, the Crakers have exceeded the expectations of their creator. They have formed a religion, centered around the mythical Oryx and Crake, and have assimilated human concepts into it, such as Toby’s explanation of Fuck. It seems likely that the Crakers will do the same with writing, make use of it in the context of what they know about the world.

The Crakers also have abilities that are not found in humanity, namely the ability to communicate with the pigoons. When the pigoons come to the human survivors and request help with protecting themselves from the painballers, they have to communicate through the Crakers. The humans seem to be out of the loop of communication, which could pose a problem considering the level of culture the pigoons have formed. This poses the question of whether humanity is compatible with this new, post-waterless-flood, earth. The flood, in both Jimmy’s mystical explanation and reality, was a result of human greed, vanity, and chaos. While the human survivors have done their part to rid the world of the remnants of their vanity, it remains to be seen whether they are willing to learn from the mistakes of pre-flood human society. If they are not, the fantastic beauty of the post-flood world, with its pig-societies and vegan, free-loving humanoid occupants, would be better off without them.

The Archetypal Flood in the MaddAddam Trilogy

In both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, mythology plays an important role. While the paganism of the Crakers, who deify Oryx and Crake, seems at odds with the God’s Gardeners’ monotheism, both groups can be linked by their belief in the waterless flood, an archetype that serves as an apocalypse for one group and an origin myth for another.

The flood, while a myth of end times for the God’s Gardeners, is for many cultures a myth that divides the past from the present. Some variation of this myth is present in the Mesopotamian, Hindu, Norse, Mesoamerican, and Greek cultures, as well as the bible. In Greek mythology, a flood sent by Zeus wiped out an early race of humans who the god viewed as being too militaristic. Only two people, Deucalion and Pyrrha, were left to repopulate the earth by making humans out of stones. This myth has relevance in the world of the MaddAddam trilogy.

In spite of Crake’s attempts to remove religion from the Crakers, they develop a form of paganism in which the key deities are Crake, their creator and spiritual father, and Oryx, the archetypal earth mother. Jimmy acts as a hierophant or religious leader, transforming the truth of what has happened into the stories that form the Crakers’ mythology. Jimmy describes to the Crakers the plague that killed most of humanity in aquatic terms: “Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the Chaos, and he poured it away” (Atwood 103). It is this pouring away that leaves the Crakers to repopulate the earth, just as the mythological flood left Deucalion and Pyrrha. And, like the flood in that myth, the flood Snowman describes in Oryx and Crake was sent by the gods. Jimmy accepts that the flood/plague was artificially created, but seems to justify the loss of lives, even blaming it on a chaotic human society where meat eating is rampant. Jimmy’s explanation of the flood relates to the prediction of the God’s Gardeners.

To the God’s Gardeners, the waterless flood is a prediction of the apocalypse, though not one without human survivors. The God’s Gardeners view the waterless flood as a repetition of the biblical flood, and like Noah (as well as Deucalion and Pyrrha), they have been forewarned. The God’s Gardeners belief in their own exceptionalism is in line with Jimmy’s explanation of the fall as being caused by the chaos of human lives, specifically the over-consumption of meat. The God’s Gardeners stock ararats, named for the mountain on which Noah’s ark supposedly landed, which they believe will allow them to survive the waterless flood. As we have seen, the “flood” was sent by Crake, a onetime ally of the God’s Gardeners. This link leaves us with more questions than answers. Did the Gardeners learn of the flood by the one who would cause it, or are they merely playing off of a mythological archetype? Did Jimmy know of the God’s Gardeners prediction, or is the language he uses to discuss the past with the Crakers just a coincidence? As the timelines of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood begin to converge, these questions may get their answers.