Oddworld, a political appreciation

I want to talk a bit about a franchise that's near and dear to me. A daring little series that really went against the grain some 20 years ago and which, whenever it does release, is still respectable for wearing its heart on its sleeve. So let's talk Oddworld.

For those who never played it (and thankfully that is still rectifiable unlike many games of its era) Oddworld is a series of games that started in 1997. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee was a puzzle platformer, sort of what you'd get if you put together the original Prince of Persia and Lemmings... that isn't a helpful set of reference points. Put simply Abe can use canned phrases to direct his fellows to do things and is expected to attempt to rescue as many of them as possible while escaping Rupture Farms, the meat packing plant he works at. I'll get more in depth but what I really want to talk about now is aesthetic, story and politics because it ties into the thematics of the game design anyway.

So let's dig back into that plot summary. Abe's Oddysee starts with Abe as a dedicated floormopper at Rupture Farms "the biggest meat-packing plant on Oddworld." While Abe claims to enjoy his job, he is obviously a slave such a degree that his lips have been stitched shut to prevent him from talking. One night, while working overtime, he overhears a corporate meeting. The bigwigs in this meeting are concerned that profits are falling because they've overhunted all of their meat products to extinction. CEO Molluck introduces a plan to save their profits, take all of their slaves and turn them into the product. Abe, realizing him and his fellows are all in imminent and grave danger, sets out to escape and rescue as many of them as possible. Now any actual reading of what's going on there showcases a number of obvious leftist ideas at play. This is a literalization of corporate greed with (rightly, I would argue) little interest in subtlety. The slaves, a native race called the mudokons, are exploited, stolen from and then ultimately intended to be killed and literally eaten. The sequel ratcheted this up by showing that their ancestors bones were then dug up and turned into a drink. The short-sighted nature of industry and capitalism take center stage in most Oddworld narratives, along with the heinous mistreatment and murder of natives by colonizers. There is a very impressive willingness to engage with these subjects for any game, especially one in 1997, and none of its sequels ever shied from these themes. Oddworld chose to be a game that used the nature of storytelling in games and player interaction to make its point.

Let's examine that story and mechanical interplay actually. Abe's Oddysee does not work under the ethos that violence in this circumstance is unjustified, it's not only justified but mandatory. Possessing enemies and making them shoot each other, lobbing grenades, tricking them into getting killed by wildlife are all required elements to both finish the game and save fellow mudokons. In other words the game immediately dispenses with the idea that it is the duty of the downtrodden to be pacifistic to the oppressor. However, to reach the good ending it isn't enough for Abe to escape, if he hasn't rescued enough of his fellow mudokons (more than half) he'll find himself with no help during the climax and, spoilers, things turn out poorly for him. This is another case of the game marrying its gameplay and politics, lasting change and improvement requires cooperation and a movement ready to fight for them. Trying to tamp down this kind of cooperation is why the enslaved mudokons inevitably had their mouths sewn shut. The oppressors are keenly aware of how impossible it would be to stop a truly united force of the oppressed classes.

These are all pretty simple ideas and perhaps it speaks more poorly of many contemporary games that to explore them feels so taboo, but I appreciate them nonetheless. Oddworld was somehow one of my introductions to these themes, so I have a special fondness for it. Further games would expound on these concepts, Munch's Oddysee would show the beginnings of a cooperation between opressed classes to begin making a greater impact. Stranger's Wrath would give a more individual story but one with a strong theme that attempting to make oneself useful and acceptable to an oppressor class is never going to be enough, you will be exploited and cast aside for your efforts to play by their rules. The writing stumbled sometimes, it tried to marry a very very dark tone with a hope for a better future and sometimes quite juvenile humor, but it was hard to look at it and not get the sense that there was a very real and often effective intent to increase empathy.

Then it all stopped, with many projects rumored to be in concept phase and one more explicitly known to have entered some stage of production, Oddworld was gone. Keeping a publisher on the series was always seemingly a challenge, the games were nakedly political, inherently distrustful of corporations, implicitly critical of America and were in genres that were rapidly falling out of favor anyway. In order to keep the series going the IP would have had to have been sold to a publisher, and that wasn't happening. Oddworld Inhabitants internal development shut down for many years. I don't know what this did to many of the people working there, it may have been quite ugly, it' a concern I don't have enough information to speak to but it would feel wrong not to empathize with the plight of the worker, it is after all what the games taught me to do. 

Over the next half decade those who remained at Oddworld Inhabitants sought to create a movie and game franchise called Citizen Siege, little more than concept art seems to have ever publicly come from this. The avowed intention was to gain some Hollywood clout so they would have more leverage in funding negotiations but Hollywood isn't any better with these kinds of negotiations. Whatever grand plans existed for Citizen Siege the public never saw hide nor hoofmark of them. In the years since though, Oddworld has shown itself again. Remakes of Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus have both been released, reimagining them and making many tweaks to their plots. We may yet see the grand ambitions of Oddworld realized. Oddworld games are now made by seemingly a complicated network of contracting developers. It makes me happy to see them again but it does make me concerned, I don't know the ins and outs of how these are produced I just concern myself with whether these developers are all being treated fairly and equitably. Perhaps I won't ever know but I consider it a mark of the good the games helped do for me that it is a concern I can hold. The fear of a contradiction between the very worker oriented games and the method in which they are produced. More than many games the exploitation of those working on Oddworld would wound me. The nature of the corporation is to distribute work and concentrate resources and it is almost against their nature to fairly distribute those resources when all is said and done, I hope that those with power have avoided becoming what the games condemn.

Lorne Lanning is a name that has been absent from this article, I wanted to speak of the work he helped create rather than adulate the man specifically, but I feel he merits mention. Lanning is the credited creator of Oddworld, and I have no particular reason to think badly of him, but lionizing him isn't the point of this article in particular. Here though it feels relevant to mention his personal philosophy. Lanning wanted Oddworld to happen in the belief that entertainment could help bring change. Who can say for the world at large, but I have to admit Oddworld changed me growing up. Oddworld helped me have the tools and concepts to understand, on some minute level, the oppression in society. Not as a thing of the past but as an active ongoing project. It helped give me the tools to understand the short-sighted and monstrous nature of capitalism. I needed that to be able to be the person I am today. Oddworld didn't "brainwash the kids" it just helped me have a broader view and I found myself more in allignment with its vision of the world. So in that microsense, I think Lanning has a point, entertainment can be a force for positive change. It feels a little silly to say because it should be obvious, but that doesn't make it less worth saying.