MaddAddam

At various points in the trilogy, Jimmy, Pilar, and Zeb all bond with Crake over games. To Crake, games seem to be a way to silently gauge intelligence and gullibility. He and Jimmy spent many afternoons playing 3D chess, Blood and Roses, Extinctathon, Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, and Kwiktime Osama. Even without details about the rules of most of the games, they suggest a culture of desensitized violence. Three-Dimensional Waco presumably references the standoff between David Koresh and US federal agents in 1993 that ended in a fire that killed 75 Branch Davidian cult members. Kwiktime Osama probably references Osama bin Laden and the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Crake plays some of these games with Zeb at the HelthWyzer barbecues, sometimes on computers and sometimes with boards. With Pilar, Crake played chess. When Crake lost a game to Jimmy or Zeb, he demanded a rematch, almost as if it were impossible to lose. It’s impossible to know for sure how much Crake felt affection for others and how much he saw people as pawns to be used, but Jimmy was his closest and longest-standing friend, and he was Crake’s final and most personal betrayal.

It’s notable that Extinctathon, the secret chat room that served as a hub for MaddAddam, uses a game as a cover. Zeb notices what Jimmy observes, which is that the game is painfully boring. Presumably, Zeb thinks, to discourage people from wandering in, but it is also another case of a game abstracting something that is horrific in real life—the sheer numbers of animals that have gone extinct—but that society has lost interest in. Users take on the names of extinct animals as code names, and most of these animals are still extant in the real world. This contrast shows readers how much destruction the Corps have done to the environment, and these organizations don’t even try to pretend to care. Crake plays the game for years after Jimmy forgets about it, becoming a grand master with access to the secret chat room. It’s never clear when Crake was brought into the chat room, although his association with Pilar, and possibly Adam, predates his transferring to HelthWyzer High and meeting Jimmy. In the chatroom, secret users are talking about their acts of ecoterrorism and sabotage against the Corps. Whether Extinctathon was ever meant to be played like a game, Crake plays it and makes a killing sweep, using the game to track down the MaddAddamites and force them to work in his lab. As refugees from the Corps, they can either go and do what they’re told, or they can be killed like Crake’s father.

Crake’s final plan to wipe out the Earth’s population and install his designer humans is like a game of Blood and Roses. In Blood and Roses, one side has all the atrocities committed by the human race and the other player has all the accomplishments. They trade: atrocities erased from history for the eradication of accomplishments. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy complained that the Blood side (the atrocities) usually won the game but winning meant that they “inherited a wasteland.” Crake decided that he could sacrifice the future accomplishments of the human race in a trade for the future atrocities of the human race. The Crakers meant a future with neither. In the balance of atrocities and accomplishments, the atrocity of first murdering all living humans apparently leveled the scales. Notably, the seed of the idea begins with the contents of a chess piece, willed to Crake by Pilar with a sealed letter. Zeb and Toby speculate that Pilar, and by extension Adam, who knowingly sent the chess piece to Crake, knew what Crake would eventually do. Perhaps Pilar’s letter even gave him the idea, but even in his last moments, Crake is playing chess. He uses Oryx as a gambit and cuts her throat, although he is already carrying her because she is unconscious, suggesting she might be sick. Jimmy reacts by shooting him. Crake likely wouldn’t have been able to kill himself and resist watching his experiment, and he needed Jimmy to shepherd the Crakers and get them started in the world.