Video Game Turns Meaning of Freedom and Slavery on Head

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, published by Namco Bandai, and developed by Ninja Theory, is a video game that has moved me in a way few other video games ever have. I was expecting a good story, gorgeous landscapes, and intense melee combat with animal-like robots, but I never expected to be confronted with the philosophical issue of what freedom and slavery really are.

The central protagonist of this story, a nameless wanderer who goes by the nickname Monkey, doesn't have any responsibilities in life. He travels the lush post-apocalyptic America, wherever he “can find food and fuel,” as he describes to Trip, a woman that she encounters on a ship upon which they, and many other individuals, are imprisoned. Trip straps to his head an electronic headband that will kill him unless he does what she says, and keeps her alive as she seeks out her home. By a camp fire at night, Trip asks Monkey where he will go after she removes the headband, besides “breaking [her] neck,” she says. After a short silence, Monkey says, “wherever.” He has no direction in his life. No purpose.

SPOILERS: This is a stark contrast to the people whose minds are in the computer simulation of life before the “Great War,” which is what the man who calls himself Pyramid names it. According to him, he is not enslaving people, but “rescuing them from the wasteland,” by attaching their minds to this simulation. “They have jobs. They have marriages. They bring up their children. Their children go to schools . . . your world is a wasteland, in which you fight to survive. Pyramid is a world in which you can live.” Are the people of Pyramid really free? Certainly, they are free from having to wander the post-apocalyptic Earth, in which “you fight to survive.” In Pyramid’s simulated world, they have something to live for.

This is why Monkey chooses to remain enslaved to Trip, when she voluntarily deactivates Monkey’s headband on the eve of their final assault on the slaver ships’ central base. Trip tells him, “I’m not going to control you anymore.” Monkey asks if he is free to go, and she tells him, “If that’s what you want.” 

To this, Monkey bluntly replies, “Turn it back on.”

Monkey never had any direction in his life other than survival before Trip found him. He knows what life he would go back to if he is freed. Monkey gets something out of his captivity that he doesn’t get from being free. This is an entirely different freedom. It is the freedom to “live,” as Pyramid may call it. It’s the freedom to live for something, or in this case, someone, beyond himself.

Throughout Trip’s and Monkey’s epic journey, their relationship evolves from that of captor and captive to companionship. After Monkey takes down a giant mechanical dog that wanted to chomp them into a pulp, Monkey corrects Trip’s affirmation of “You did it,” by saying “We did it,” since it was Trip’s scan of the beast that identified its Achilles heel. He doesn’t even blame Trip for keeping the headband on him after he gets her to her home, as the deal initially was, after seeing her father was killed. She instead decides to journey west to “find whoever did this, and . . . kill him.”

“What did you expect me to say? You come home, you find your whole life wiped out . . . I get it.” Monkey goes from wanting to “break [her] neck” to showing real sympathy for her, or, perhaps, something more.

 So why doesn’t Monkey just stay beside Trip without having the headband activated? Note that he only goes wherever he “can find food and fuel.” Even before the headband, Monkey was a slave anyway, not to another person, but to himself, to his own survival instincts. By accepting slavery to Trip, he is free from his own slavery, since Trip’s headband forces him to keep her alive in order to stay alive himself.