Love is a Battlefield – Divided Loyalties Part 2
So, last time I cheated on a Smurf with some kind of robot fish bowl vacuum cleaner thing. That’s not the kind of thing that often happens in the land of the sane. But if video game fantasies can allow us to do things – intentional or otherwise – we would never do in our day-to-day lives, then can a game present us with scenarios where divided loyalties aren’t just something we stumble into, but something we actively persue? And if they can, could we actively persue them for a reason beyond our own selfish interests, beyond playing both sides against the middle and reaping the rewards?
Planescape: Torment: The story of a man whose memories have died when he cannot. Resurrected on a mortuary slab, with a floating skull for company and a tattoo on your back telling you the skull is not to be trusted, you are The Nameless One. Grey, scarred, and plagued with nightmares that surface when you touch this or listen to that. You meet people you don’t remember, people who could never forget you, and over the course of the game you assemble a group of hapless misfits, some of whom you have met before in a previous life.
The kicker of the game is that you are responsible for your own Torment. This isn’t the clichéd amnesia tale where the murderer forgets he ever murdered – Torment goes far beyond that. In your former, forgotten incarnations you have murdered, yes. But far worse than that, you’ve decimated the worlds of the Planescape, cursing the lives you’ve touched, bringing friends down to your level, sacrificing loves, breaking minds, and driving your immortal soul further into damnation. Your final enemy is your own mortality, torn from you upon your command, hatching schemes from a Fortress of Regrets to kill the final facet of your living self as the spell that keeps it alive breaks and fades, taking the multiverse with it. This is the final enemy, but the ultimate enemy – the ultimate diabolical evil at the heart of the game – is yourself.
This is immutable. However you play the game, this is the secret at the very heart of it. But with your history set, you, the player can create your own destiny.
Deionarra - as ethereal as that girl you told all your schoolmates you met on holiday in Majorca
I met Deionarra in the Dustman mortuary. She was ephemeral, a phantasm trapped in the city of Sigil by her own regret, and that regret was her love for me. I discovered what had happened to her, what I had done, her abuse captured within crystals in a sensory library for any thrill-seeker or voyeur to watch and devour in the manner of an hallucinatory snuff film. Her death had been a sacrifice, except sacrifice implies I’d given something up. I hadn’t. This former, darker incarnation of me hadn’t. I loved her. I had to. The things I’d wrought upon her made me love her, because no matter how much she’d suffered at my hand she loved me still, beyond death itself. I could have pitied her. I could have scorned her, but I didn’t. I loved her for loving me.
I met Grace in a brothel that catered to intellectual rather than physical stimulation. She was the mistress there, and also a demon – her full name being Fall-From-Grace. She had leathery bat wings and the voice of an angel, and behind both was a mind so sharp it would never need a whetstone. She accompanied me on my quest to find myself, quipped when matters were dark, reasoned when cicumstances were irrational, and put up with the petty prejudiced jealousy that routinely and venomously spewed from Annah, a part-demon thief from an opposing faction, who hated Grace for reasons both racial and personal with a temperament that burned cold.
…Okay, so I might have told Annah that I loved her, but it was a lie, spun to ensure her return to my party. I liked Annah well enough, but she was a friend and nothing else. If she wanted something more from me, well, she’d just have to grow up and realise that people don’t always get what they want.
But Grace, Grace I loved.
Falls-from-Grace - She's a devil in the sack.
In the final moments of the game, fighting the shades of the victims I’d murdered, confronting my true identity and unravelling my mortality’s existance with a blaze of pure reason, I admitted my love to both of these women. Upon hearing the words she’d forever longed to hear Deionarra faded, promising we’d be reunited in the halls of death. My love for her was the love of incarnations past, now freed from their prison and absorbed into my very being. It was the love of my dead and former selves for a dead and former companion, and I felt no guilt for telling her such; It was the truth.
Neither did I feel guilty when I told Grace I loved her, or when she told me she’d seek me out in my final damnation as I died and rose in Hell, not in Torment but in final freedom. She’d been my constant companion across so many worlds and now she would follow me beyond death as Deionarra before her had done, only this time the companion would follow me of her own free will. I would go to the evil planes, the hell dimensions, and there I would fight in the Blood War that wracked the universe. I would fight in damnation, fight for penance, and perhaps one day my love would find me.
There was never a sequel to Planescape: Torment. Whether or not Falls-From-Grace will ever find The Nameless One and rescue him is a story that will never be told. Perhaps that’s for the best. The game ends on a bittersweet note, tragic yet uplifting, and that’s part of the reason it has become legendary in PC gaming circles, and why people still talk about it over a decade after its release. Its complex and mature treatment of love is but a single part of its charm. There are few games that can conclude with the player choosing not from a given menu of options, but by feeling out his heart and deciding to do the right thing, whatever the right thing might be.
Tenderheart Bear's promotion to colonel soon led to Germany's downfall
These are war stories. It’s true they don’t feature much in the way of gunplay or mechanized space marine armies, but then, not every game has to be about space marine armies. Some video games aspire to be something more than a shooting range because they realise Pat Benatar had it right all along: Love IS a battlefield.
And battlefields breed war stories.
– Campfire Burning
