Implications of Lemmings Revolution: Are We Actually the Bad Guys?

[Strato Incendus]

The first Lemmings games had a clear goal: They unambiguously made the players believe they were doing something good. Doing those helpless, "stupid" little Lemmings a favour by guiding them all through the dangerous level landscapes full of traps, water, and lethal drops to the exit. This holds true for Lemmings, Oh No! More Lemmings, all the Holiday Lemmings expansions, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, An All New World of Lemmings, and Lemmings 3D. I guess it also applies to the later addition that is Lemmings Paintball. But then there is still one "oddball":

Thinking about how many recent reboots of popular movie franchises have shown a trend of being less of a homage to the original work, and more of a critical deconstruction of the original (to put it politely - some of it can be more appropriately described as a nihilistic dismissal of the original, or straight-up cultural vandalism), I've been wondering whether Lemmings had such a thing, too - and, given the year of its release, if the example I'm thinking of is an accurate one, then Lemmings already did the "deconstruction of its own mythos" thing before it was "cool" and "edgy":

Lemmings Revolution starts with the premise given in the intro clip that the Weasels watched the preceding Lemmings games play out "for their own entertainment" - and hence have now captured the Lemmings to keep engaging in that form of entertainment. Which, given that we would have to assume Lemmings are sentient individuals within their universe, would be one of the most barbaric forms of entertainment imaginable.

In the context of the game Lemmings Revolution itself, while playing the levels, there still doesn't seem to be any deviation from the general premise: The Weasels are the ones who built the levels, and you, the player, are as always the person coming to the rescue to help the Lemmings escape.

But there has been an alternative interpretation going around: That the Weasels mentioned in the intro - you know, the ones who enjoyed all the previous Lemmings games "for their own entertainment" - are actually a stand-in for the players themselves. After all, the players' entertainment is contingent on the Lemmings' ordeals, including splatting, drowning, burning alive, being squashed or shred into pieces by various kinds of traps, or blowing themselves up for the supposed "greater good".

And even if, with the original Lemmings games, you could argue that DMA were actually the Weasels that built all the levels, and the players were indeed just there to "help" those "Poor Wee Creatures": By now, a lot of us have become level designers ourselves. And between the NeoLemmix community members alone, we've already created more Lemmings levels than DMA have ever made. In short, at latest by now, we are all Weasels, too.

This becomes even more cynical together with the realisation that there is no ultimate end point to level design: With Lemmings Revolution, the players could at least tell themselves that, once they had beaten all the levels and had helped all the Lemmings escape from the clutches of the Weasels, they would go back to resuming their lives outside the context of levels - as it is implied at the end of Lemmings 2 and 3. But now, with level design being open to anyone, any supposed "Happily Ever After" for those fictional beings can only ever last as long until the next Weasel maniac of a level designer comes up with a new pack, to put them all through the wringer once more.

Finally, due to the level-by-level nature of all Lemmings games (including Lemmings Paintball), Lemmings effectively only exist within the confines of a level. Thus, the only form of existence Lemmings could even "know" is indeed that of passing through a level: As soon as they've reached the exit, they cease to exist - there is no difference for a Lemming between "exit" and "exitus", since the game doesn't give him any chance at "life beyond the Thunderdome" of a level. And as soon as they're pulled back into existence, it is done for the purpose of passing through another level. Then the process repeats, potentially indefinitely.

Lemmings is a really dark game if you think about it for long enough.

[namida]

Finally, due to the level-by-level nature of all Lemmings games (including Lemmings Paintball), Lemmings effectively only exist within the confines of a level.

Is this really true for L2 / L3, though?

[Simon]

You can support both views.

According to the L1/L2/L3 manuals, we are the helping hand, and have to save the cute critters again and again. I don't have these manuals on hand, they're in a box at my parents' house. Still, DMA manuals should carry more canonical weight than non-DMA manuals, and Lemmings Revolution is not by DMA.

In the code, the main difference between exiting and dying is that exiting increases the save counter.

When you restart a failed level, do you get the very same 80 rodents or do you get 80 new ones?

-- Simon

[jkapp76]

I've been playing Revolutions lately. I have it working perfectly on my windows 10 laptop.

It's fun. Not as fun as I remembered it the first time I played it, but a neat game.

[namida]

When you restart a failed level, do you get the very same 80 rodents or do you get 80 new ones?

And, this logic can be extended to other games too. On a technical level, when you die in a platformer, what spawns afterwards is a new (Mario / Crash / Sonic / Samus / ...), not the same one.

[WillLem]

I believe that each lemming is unique, and once they have exited they are free to live their off-level life.

So every level introduces (however many) lemmings, and they are all completely new (hence their apparent naivety and daftness) and never reappear in any other level (or even any other re-visit of that level by the same player).

The weasels in Lemmings Revolution are indeed "level designers", and it's interesting that they are described as having enjoyed watching the previous games for entertainment, since this maintains the mystery of the previous scenarios (i.e. in terms of who the "bad guys" were for L1, L2, L3, etc).

As for community levels, each designer approaches level-making differently, so really only they know the reasons behind their levels and whether or not they want the lemmings to be mostly saved or mostly destroyed. Levels which require lemmings to die as part of the intended solution probably imply a degree of sadism on the author's part, whereas levels which require all lemmings to be saved imply a degree of benevolence, at least for the observed levels in both cases.

Whether level design is for the author's entertainment or the player's entertainment is, in many ways, impossible to broadly determine. I think that, like everything, the enjoyent of Lemmings as a game exists as a constantly flowing and changing spectrum between the two, and one which can in fact influence level design itself.

Interesting topic