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2“Time is Not Your Enemy, Forever Is.”
3Planescape: Torment As A Deconstructive Work
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5I - A Game Unable to Die: An Introduction
6Planescape: Torment is a strange game - it’s regarded as one of the best narratives in video games by many, in spite of video games often putting narrative on the developmental backburner. It’s an RPG (Role Playing Game) that potentially has hours long stretches without casting a single magic missile, often bordering on being a novel with a game interface. It’s high fantasy which avoids Tolkien as much as possible, a hero's journey made extremely personal, where the grotesque and the undead are treated with more empathy than humans. A game where fighting the final boss with words is likely more satisfying than fighting with weapons and spells. It’s a story where in the best outcome, the main character dies and is sent to hell to atone for multiple lives worth of sins, and it’s somehow still an incredibly satisfying conclusion to the 40 hour campaign.
7In this essay, I will be applying a generic critical lense towards Planescape: Torment to show how the work deconstructs clichés and tropes within the genres it makes commentary on. I will begin by describing the history and legacy of the game along with the generic movements it finds itself in order to contextualize it amongst contemporaries. Then I will summarize the plot to give the reader a general overview of the work. Finally, I will describe how the creative direction the game took was deconstructionist at its core, how that mindset manifested itself in the game, and how Planescape: Torment fits into its generic cannon.
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9II -  Immerse Yourself in the Memory: A Generic History
10Planescape: Torment was developed by Black Isle Studios, published by Interplay Entertainment, and was released in December of 1999. Chris Avellone, the lead writer and director of the game, is most often associated as being the central figure behind the game’s development. The game saw fairly modest acclaim at first, most of the praise coming from the construction of its narrative and world. As time went on and the games Black Isle developed started to be cited as major influences, it grew into a cult classic with it regularly being named in best of all time lists, especially ones which focus on PC games or RPGs. PC Gamer for example, named it the 9th greatest game of all time in 2008, and the best RPG of all time in 2015.
11Its strange and unique approach towards narrative and gameplay are the result of a critical approach towards many of the clichés that have developed within high fantasy and video game narratives. Planesc ape: Torment is a highly influential and revolutionary work within video games not in spite of its constant deconstruction of high fantasy and western RPG tropes, but because of it. Its legacy has largely centered on how this deconstructionist game design philosophy has developed a wholly unique narrative and world through means such as shifting the narrative/gameplay and life/death binaries, an almost complete removal Tolkienesque high fantasy tropes, and the ways in which the text and subtext poses the ubiquitous central question of the game, “what can change the nature of a man.” In its throwing away or reworking of as many tropes as possible and starting anew, Black Isle created a masterwork in how to approach game design and game narrative.
12Planescape: Torment is a part of the late 1990’s/early 2000’s isometric RPG genre, a specific subgenre of western RPGs. Western RPGs are games which take influence from character progression systems invented by tabletop games released primarily in Europe and North America, with the most notable influence coming from Dungeons & Dragons. Isometric RPGs go further than just using tabletop leveling systems for the sake of the character progression though--the genre was specifically built out of an urge to translate the tabletop experience into video games in as accurate a manner as possible. Because of this, isometric RPGs are unique in the specific degree in which they adapt tabletop mechanics, often using engines which are built as direct clones of specific tabletop rulesets. Fallout and Fallout 2 are based on GURPS for example, and like other games within the Infinity Engine, Planescape: Torment uses the Dungeons & Dragons 2.5 ruleset. 
13In isometric RPGs, there is an important emphasis placed on questing and player agency in general, usually with many ways in which the player may complete the same quest. In Dungeons & Dragons, it is entirely possible to justify almost any solution that a player may think up, as long as the dungeon master says it’s okay and comes up with a dice roll. Because video games cannot be as improvisational as tabletop games due to being closed systems, the next best thing within this limitation is to create multiple solutions to the same quest so that the player may still express themselves within the game through their specific playstyles. 
14Even the camera angle is one that recreates the table top experience, as the word “isometric” describes a specific perspective. An isometric view is one which looks at a cube at three perfect 120° angles such that one of the corners is perfectly centered, and all three dimensions are scaled equally. This is similar to a perspective which a player would likely see when playing a tabletop game, because the player would be looking at the table at an angle rather than from the top down.
15The major result is that compared to other attempts to gamify or take influence from tabletop RPGs, the isometric RPG is significantly more direct. For example, the use of roleplaying mechanics in the immersive sims of the late 90’s such as System Shock 2 or Deus Ex are utilized in a way which utilizes character progression and is used to emphasize unique play-styles within more visceral, action oriented genres such as the stealth and first person shooter genres. On the other side of the sea, Japan’s approaches to role playing games was to mostly discard the idea of positioning, and instead reduce combat down to the specific commands in a sort of team fight approach. This can be seen in Nintendo’s JRPG franchises such as the Mother and Pokémon series.
16    Thematically speaking, Planescape: Torment is a work which draws on high fantasy, but applies a unique angle and scope to the genre. Black Isle’s pitch to Interplay when trying to greenlight the game was described as “avant-garde fantasy,” and their mission statement for the team specifically reads: “This is avant-garde fantasy, not high fantasy. Everything you create should reflect this” (Last Rites Team, 2007). This mission statement urged the development team to work against what base assumptions and clichés they think of when trying to make a high fantasy game. However, this still means that it is grounded within a high fantasy framework, it just takes a different approach towards aesthetic choices, what lenses it applies, and which elements it emphasizes or deemphasizes in that high fantasy setting. There are still dungeons to be crawled, magic to be cast, and an excess of the words “the” and “of” when referring to specific nouns.
17However, the most striking creative strategy Planescape: Torment takes in its attempt to use a high fantasy setting without any of the tropes of the genre is the discarding of as many Tolkienesque elements as possible. The fictional races that are almost required in order for a work to fall under the genre--such as elfs, dwarfs and goblins--are nowhere to be seen. There are no dragons in the game, and there are only three swords. Instead, Planescape: Torment focuses on more obscure races, weapon types, and traditions that are not emphasized as heavily within the Dungeons & Dragons lore, ones that don’t find as much use outside of the occasional enemy, or unique campaign at most. For example, of all the party members available, the only one who is human other than The Nameless One is Ignus, a man who is constantly on fire. Two other party members are Morte and Vahlior, a floating skull and a sentient suit of armour respectively, which means they don’t really have a specific race per se. The other four potential party members include Annah, a Tiefling; Dak’kon, a Githyanki; Nordom, a Modron; and Fall-From-Grace, a Succubus. But not only does it take advantage of these less common races, it crafts unique characters out of them by having them all face some sort of torment which is at odds with how their races are regularly characterized within the Dungeons & Dragons lore. For example, Fall-From-Grace has willingly taken an oath of chastity in spite of being a succubus, and Dak’kon is metaphorically enslaved by The Nameless One, in spite of the freedom from Illithids being one of the most important historical and cultural events of the Githyanki race.
18Another distinction is a clear influence from horror aesthetics, body horror in particular. Like much else in the game though, its implementation is fairly unconventional. Planescape: Torment uses the grotesque, gross, and hideous descriptions of its characters in a way which intrigues and characterizes rather than scares or disgusts. In an essay titled Space, Navigation and Affect, writer Diane Carr compares the aesthetics of Planescape: Torment with those of Silent Hill, and explores how those aesthetics are contextualized differently through the use of gameplay. She comes to the conclusion that while both games share themes of death and regret and both use imagery associated with the grotesque, the surreal, and the horrific on the surface, it is through the difference in their genre and the difference in how they are explored through the Deleuzian concepts of the maze structure (one specific laid out path) and rhizome structure (multiple paths, multiple endings) that they significantly differ. Silent Hill aims to scare the player, and so it creates a maze with its environments in which the player experiences a linear structure so that they may become emotionally immersed in how the game is trying to scare them. It does this by using using dark, claustrophobic corridors with limited supplies to continue. Planescape: Torment on the other hand is extremely open, and uses its imagery less as a way to instill fear within the player, but as a point of interest and as metaphor. The Nameless One’s body being covered in thousands of years worth of scars is imagery that could easily be adapted within a game like Silent Hill, but Silent Hill has a sense of the normal being distorted by the abnormal in that its maps consists of schools, hospitals and other small town environments. Planescape: Torment on the other hand is a world constructed exclusively of the weird, the fantastic, and the surreal. Because of this, the thousands of years worth of scarring feels mostly within place of the world of Planescape, with the aspects that still seem “off” to the player working as fuel for the player’s investment in the mystery. To quote Carr’s essay: “Despite a shared preoccupation with zombies, death, loss, and fleshy transformation, there are significant differences between Planescape: Torment and Silent Hill. These differences reflect in their genetic status and they are underpinned by dissimilarities in the games navigational structures” (Carr, 2006).
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20III -  What All The Journal Updating is About: Setting & Plot Summary
21Planescape takes place on The Great Wheel, a circular structure where each of the nine alignments have their own unique plane. Each alignment has three options on its two axes, good/neutral/evil on its moral axis and lawful/neutral/chaotic on its ethical axis. Each 45° turn yields a different alignment plane, with the plane in the center of the wheel belonging to the true neutral alignment. On this wheel, two of the planes are constantly at war with each other in a near-endless, eons long conflict known as the Blood War. This war is waged between the lawful evil plane of Baator and the chaotic evil plane of The Abyss, with the conflict being over the question of whether bureaucratic evil or primal evil is “better” way of implementing evil. Any evil being who has died will be forced to fight in this war for all eternity.
22There are also three rules inherent to every Planescape campaign, which includes tabletop versions. The first is the Rule of Threes, which says that things that happen tend to happen three times over. The second is the Unity of Rings, which says that stories tend to end where they began and many things are cyclical. The third is the Center of All Things, which says that the planes are infinite, and so everyone is at the center of their own universe, which implies an individual's self importance and perspective is justified within being at the center of their own reality. Because of the Rule of Threes, Planescape: Torment more or less takes place in three acts. Each act has its own narrative arc which consists of finding one of three different characters, each from different locations on the good/evil alignment spectrum. 
23We begin with the protagonist, The Nameless One, waking up on a slab in the middle of a mortuary and is greeted by a floating skull named Morte. The Nameless One finds that he is an amnesiac, his body is covered in scars that should have killed him thousands of times over and he has tattooed instructions on his back to find a man named “Pharod.” Morte suggests that The Nameless One should escape the mortuary and find out who Pharod is. After talking to Dhall, the scribe of the Mortuary, The Nameless One finds out the reason he is covered in scars because he lacks the ability to die, his mortality and his memory have both been stolen from him. Before leaving the mortuary, The Nameless One is visited by a ghost named Deionarra who claims to be his lover, or at least a lover from a past life. She tells him that  “[he] will meet enemies three, but none as dangerous as [himself] in full glory,” that he will have to ”destroy what keeps [himself] fully alive,” and that he will end up within a “prison of regret.” 
24    Once The Nameless One leaves mortuary, he finds that he is in a city known as Sigil. Sigil is a city that is run by two major unique laws. The first is that power comes from belief. The strength of a god comes from how many followers that god has, and in Sigil this applies to everything in existence. The second law is that the entire city is constructed around portals and that in any number of holes, arches, or doorways exist portals that can lead to anywhere else in the multiverse. In order to open one of these portals however, you must have the appropriate key. Keys can be any thing or action varying from literal keys, to thoughts, to people, to specific urges or lack thereof. Pharod is located behind one of these portals, living in an entire village underneath Sigil constructed out of mountains of garbage.
25    When The Nameless One finally meets Pharod, he has become the leader of a group known as the Collectors. Out of the three alignments Deionarra mentioned earlier, he is the neutral. The Collectors return dead bodies to the Dustmen in the Mortuary in exchange for money. Pharod says that he knows of The Nameless One’s past but requires he finds a Bronze Sphere which is located in the catacombs below. In looking for The Bronze Sphere, The Nameless One finds there are two warring villages, one of cranium rats and one of various kinds of undead. Both hold a way to reaching the catacombs below, and The Nameless One ends up aiding one of them to gain access to the catacombs. The Nameless One finds the Bronze Sphere, but also finds a tomb which seems to be constructed specifically for The Nameless One. He enters alone, and finds a temple which requires that he dies at least five times in a certain manner to reach the center treasure room. In the treasure room, there are hints written by The Nameless One from a past life, warning about how dying causes him to lose his memories and sense of self, how there is power in names, and how Morte should not be trusted. 
26The Nameless One gets the sphere back to Pharod. Pharod reveals that he does not actually know The Nameless One’s past other than that he was asked a long time ago in one of The Nameless One's previous lives to return his body to the Mortuary if it was ever recovered. He does show The Nameless One where his body was last found however, and his adopted daughter Annah leads the way. Annah brings The Nameless One to a location known as The Alley of Lingering Sighs. As The Nameless One is examining the area, the city itself turns out to be a living being with some level of consciousness, and tells him that it witnessed one of his past lives being struck down by shadows. Later, if Morte is still in the party, a man named Lothar steals him and places him in his massive collection of skulls. Lothar demands that he be brought a skull of exceptional quality in exchange for Morte’s return. After returning Morte, Lothar mentions that a nighthag named Ravel Puzzlewell might have the answers to The Nameless One’s questions.
27    After exploring two factions in the upper and lower wards, the Sensates and the Godmen, The Nameless One finds a dodecahedron journal and a portable portal, both left over from a previous life. Later, he finds out that the portal leads to Ravel, and that the key to the portal is the blood of a relative of Ravel. After using the portal, The Nameless One has a long conversation with the evil Ravel where she reveals that she provided The Nameless One with immortality because begged her to eons ago for reasons she does not know. She helped because she was charmed by this first incarnation, as it made her feel less like a hag. The ritual came at a cost however. On death, The Nameless One can potentially lose almost all of his memory. This was found out when after she finished performing the ritual, where she killed the first incarnation in order to test the ritual’s effectiveness. When the first incarnation awoke, his memory was gone. She does not know the location of his mortality, but she does know that an angel named Trias does. 
28    Trias is located under a town known as Curst, which exists on the border of two planes which are constantly fighting for control of the town. In order to find Trias, The Nameless One performs various quests so that he may obtain five pieces of a poem which allows him to teleport underneath Curst. Trias is chained under the city and is mostly powerless since he doesn’t have his sword Celestial Fire. The sword is being used to power the Curst prison, so in exchange for information, he has The Nameless One infiltrate the prison to regain control of the sword. After freeing Trias, he sends The Nameless One to Fhjull Forked-Tongue, a demon who Trias cursed into doing only good deeds that are asked of him. Against his own will, Fhjull helps The Nameless One go to Baator where he can ask a pillar of skulls questions of his mortality because they hold much of knowledge of the planes. A skull is tormented to being trapped on the pillar if in their own life, they had told a lie which led to somebody’s death. They don’t know where The Nameless One’s immortality is located, but they know Trias lied about not knowing. Returning to Curst, the town has been driven into disarray because of The Nameless One’s questing from earlier. Since the town is on the border of two alignment planes, any action too far in one direction will tip it into that direction. Trias’ power stems from being a lawful good character in an area of chaotic evil, so he is strengthened because of the chaos of Curst, where he plans on smiting the town. In order to weaken Trias, The Nameless One drives it further towards the alignment Curst was in on before by doing good deeds. After defeating Trias, he reveals that the portal to The Nameless One’s mortality is located in the Mortuary that he awoke in, and that the key is to write down a regret in blood, and to feel that regret strongly. 
29In keeping with the Unity of Rings, the game circles back to the Mortuary, where The Nameless One enters a portal into the Fortress of Regret. Deionarra is in the Fortress of Regret, and says that the Nameless One’s evasion of death came at a price--that for every death he should have experienced, someone else died in his place. The shadows which have been stalking The Nameless One have each been the soul of an individual life which was sacrificed so that The Nameless One may avoid death. Following instructions left by a previous incarnation, he reaches a large crystal. It turns out The Nameless One’s mortality has been made sentient, now known as The Transcendent One, and has actively been trying to avoid The Nameless One as much as possible so that it may survive. Because of this, the crystal was a trap meant to imprison The Nameless One. In the crystal, he meets three other previous iterations of The Nameless One’s life--The Practical One, The Paranoid One and The Good One. The Practical one was incredibly intelligent and charismatic, but also incredibly exploitative and disconnected from empathy. He killed Deionarra in the Fortress of Regrets by feigning love for her so that he may have someone to watch over and scout the fortress. The Paranoid One was the one who laid all the traps for any “body thieves.” The Good One is the most important of the three, as he was the first incarnation of The Nameless One. He asked Ravel Puzzlewell for immortality because he had committed many atrocities during his lifetime, and realized that he would be drafted into the blood war on his death. His plan was to become immortal in order to give himself more time to clean up his evil alignment and regrets, avoiding the blood war. But because Ravel killed him, The Good One lost his memory, and was not able to enact his plan. He can unlock the bronze sphere, which turns out to be a sensory stone, an item that if touched, fills the user with the memories and sensations contained inside. The bronze sphere is filled with the memories of The Nameless One’s first incarnation, the regrets that of all of the other incarnations experienced, and The Nameless One’s name. In doing this, The Nameless One is able to self-realize as he finally has developed something to call himself. Deionarra aids The Nameless One one last time in helping him escape the crystal, and he confronts The Transcendent One. There are 8 possible ways to complete the game, with only two of them being combat oriented. The other endings have the player use their stats, knowledge, or even The Nameless One’s self-realization in order to convince his own mortality to recombine. In regaining his mortality, The Nameless One finally dies, and is sent to fight in the blood war.
30While all of this can be seen as an accurate summation of the events in Planescape: Torment, the narrative of the game can be fairly difficult to discuss due to its open ended rhizomatic structure. While many of the major plot points are likely going to be similar from playthrough to playthrough, Planescape:Torment has enough of a variation of ways to solve the same problem, detailed characterization of party members, sidequests, and the possibility of skipping over specific story beats, all of which could easily be seen as crucially important in a discussion of the game.
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32IV - Unlocking The Unbroken Circle: The Deconstruction
33Deconstruction is a critical tool which was popularized by French linguist and philosopher Jacques Derrida, with the purpose of taking established tropes, binaries, and hierarchies which have established themselves within a certain set of systems, and to critique them by, “including what is left out of the text, or is ignored or silenced” (Lagasse, 2018). Derrida used deconstruction most famously in his work Of Grammatology, in order to critique how the Structuralist philosophy saw the linguistic concepts of signifier and signified. In short, Derrida applied a structuralist lense on structuralism itself, and showed that by applying the ideas of signifier and signified with a large enough scope, language eventually becomes an endless chain of meaningless signifiers with no single signifier having any meaning divorced from every other signifier. As poststructural and postmodern philosophy became more popular amongst academic circles, Derrida’s deconstructionist techniques became more widely applied to other fields such as feminist theory, queer theory, and film theory as a tool of critique. 
34Planescape: Torment’s specific approach in its world building and narrative can be described as critical and deconstructionist due to how it actively recontextualizes, takes apart, and is self aware of tropes of the genres it bumps elbows with. This is not just a single section or any one specific area within the game, this deconstructionist mindset was integral to how the game was creatively designed and directed. In an interview with RPG Watch, Chris Avellone described the creative process behind the Planescape: Torment’s development saying: 
35“When I first came to interview at Interplay, the director of the TSR division at the time was Mark O’ Green. One of the questions he asked in the interview was ‘if I were to design a Planescape game, what would it be like?’ I told him I’d start on the death screen, and what happened to the player character after that… One of the directions for the theme of the game was to turn a lot of RPG clichés on their head, and a number of encounters, situations, and game mechanics revolved around that” (Brother None, 2007).
36After this quote, Avellone lists off multiple instances in which Planescape: Torment twists and flips tropes on their heads such as rats being powerful creatures, angels lying, devils telling the truth, and not having a name until the end of the game. Thus, the world of Planescape: Torment has a deconstructionist approach built within every facet of its being, since it was made with other works outside of the Planescape universe in mind during development. This self awareness of cliché is important enough to the world of Planescape, that it is made clear within the narrative itself. Planescape’s Rule of Three and Unity of Rings can be seen as a tongue-and-cheek nods to the often used hero’s journey three act structure often associated with these kinds of narratives, usually ending in the same place they began.
37On the surface, the most similar game in terms of genre in both mechanics and theme is most likely the Baldur’s Gate series, a game series which includes 1998’s Baldur’s Gate, 2000’s Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn and the expansion pack Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal (for the purposes of this essay, I am excluding 2001’s Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and 2004’s Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, because they fall much more accurately under the hack ‘n’ slash and action RPG genres, and were not developed by Black Isle). For many reasons, the Baldur’s Gate series can be seen as the central example of what Planescape: Torment actively tries to critique and deconstruct. Baldur’s Gate is an isometric RPG based directly off of the Dungeons & Dragons 2.5 ruleset, made in the Infinity Engine, and was published by Black Isle. However, Baldur’s Gate indulges in many of the tropes associated with high fantasy and video games in general. Its focus is significantly more interested in recreating a fairly standard, but extremely well done single player Dungeons & Dragons campaign, even more so than Planescape: Torment. It places much greater emphasis on combat, has an abundance of Tolkien imagery and narrative elements, uses a variation of the “chosen one” trope, contains hundreds of unique swords, and has plenty of dragons, elves, dwarves and goblins. There’s a plot which goes from a small town character slowly building into godlike status through adventuring through hero’s journey narrative structure, and there’s a major antagonist at the end of all three parts. The closest Baldur’s Gate comes to a critique of cliché is the inclusion of a few tongue-in-cheek party members who act as over the top caricatures of a specific character archetypes. (Edwin is an obviously evil mage who will betray you at the most convenient moment and Minsc is a warrior for good at any cost to a degree suggesting some level of insanity.) 
38This means that Baldur’s Gate is the perfect game to describe how Planescape: Torment utilizes it’s deconstructionist elements. It was a game released within the same time period, in the same genres, published in by the same studio, but has creative differences that are much closer to a fairly standard approach to the genre rather than an approach trying to make specific commentary on said genre. For example, Planescape: Torment’s story scope is one that remains fairly personal--at the heart of it, Planescape: Torment is a story about The Nameless One’s self-realization and regrets. There are universal implications described at the end of the game, but even this is framed in a way which comes off more as a consequence for lack of his own self-realization and ability to face consequences rather than a universal implication being used to widen the scope of the narrative. Baldur’s Gate meanwhile has a scope which widens more and more as the narrative progresses, starting with the player character being forced out of their hometown for purposely vague reasons, culminating in a plane-wide conflict to decide who will replace Bhaal as the next Lord of Murder. While it does follow a singular player character through their entire adventure, the story is about the adventure itself, not the player character specifically. The player character in Baldur’s Gate is written to be flexible and have enough dialogue options that anyone can identify with them with nearly any playstyle, especially with the character creation screen working as an easy way to self-insert. The story of The Nameless One can only have him at the center of the conflict, there is too much backstory to The Nameless One’s existence to make it about anyone else.
39The clearest and most wide reaching deconstruction that Planescape: Torment makes is the critique of the life/death binary. In an interview with IGN when asked where the premise of Planescape: Torment came from, Avellone said “...we decided to have the game begin where most RPGs end: on the death screen. In other RPGs, you die, you see the death screen, you reload. In Torment, every death screen is an opportunity to advance the story” (Jonric, 1998). While this binary is obviously not exclusive to high fantasy or RPGs, the ways in which the binary is taken apart is by looking at its interaction with RPGs and high fantasy. In Baldur’s Gate, death is a major inconvenience, the main punishment and deterrent for not playing well enough. It sends you back to your last save, and is the biggest obstacle in between the player character and the completion of the game. The purpose of buying expensive and powerful gear is so that you may avoid death, and survive in the harsh world of the Sword Coast or Amn. The reward for completing the game is even immortality, as you achieve godlike status through your adventures. Life/death informs all of the players decisions, and the reward for overcoming all of the obstacles is to transcend that binary completely. Planescape: Torment is the opposite, it asks how can life be defined without death? How can one self-realize without the time restraint of death placed upon them? What if one of the ways in which life develops meaning, is through the fact that it ends? What if life was regarded as underprivileged within the its binary?  Mechanically, this comes up when The Nameless One’s death is initially treated as a minor inconvenience at worst, and a tool for progress at best. His death teleports him to a respawn location--even in death, life goes on. Many quests even require that The Nameless One dies in order to continue the story, five times in the case of The Nameless One’s tomb. It’s also the end goal of the game, in losing his mortality The Nameless One has lost an important part of his being, and the fact that The Nameless One is not allowed to die is the major conflict in the first place. Instead of being rewarded at the end of the game by transcending the life/death binary through eternal life, it is reinforced and its due is paid long after it should have been. The main goal and reward of Planescape: Torment is to achieve death.
40The philosophy behind the construction of Planescape’s is one with a clear awareness of cliché and trope present in high fantasy and western RPGs. The specific decision to avoid anything Tolkienesque is a clear example of this, JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy are far and away the most important works within the genre of high fantasy in terms of influence. A Locus Magazine user poll named them the #1 and #2 best fantasy novels before 1990 (Locus, 1998), and they are regularly cited as important works to fantasy writers. Nearly all of the established norms, tropes and clichés of high fantasy can be found in Tolkien’s works (and if they don’t then they probably stem back to Dungeons & Dragons). This means that Planescape: Torment is making commentary on the genre by making a specific effort to avoid the influence of Tolkien. It is bringing in other works, and showing how ubiquitous and saturated high fantasy has been when it comes to utilizing Tolkien for basic structure, themes and setting. Even the linguistics of the game completely abandon the faux-olde english that is most often associated with high fantasy. Many of the characters speak in a way that sounds like loud, aggressive slang in a dialect known as “the chant.” The language is built to match the gross, rotting, corpse filled city of Sigil, and it takes a more realistic approach to the dialogue.
41The emphasis Planescape: Torment has towards gameplay mechanics can be seen as fairly critical of how video games are constructed in the first place. The presence of cutscenes within video games shows a split between the gameplay elements and the narrative elements of video games. This was especially the case before 2004’s Half Life 2, which was one of the first games that attempted to make cutscenes interactive in a way where they were more naturally blended with gameplay sections. Gameplay takes the more privileged side of this binary, as story is often seen as being window dressing for the mechanics that a game has to offer the player, a way to contextualize the gameplay in terms that are less abstract. Planescape: Torment’s approach to this is to implement as many cutscenes and dialogue sections as gameplay sections. Isometric RPGs tend to be a wordy genre as it is, but Planescape: Torment takes it to an extreme. It has combat and gameplay, but the most tested ability the player has when playing Planescape: Torment is reading comprehension. The story clocks in at about 800,000 words, making story almost everything with traditional definitions of gameplay taking the backseat. 
42One optional section of the game, the Modron Maze, is even a direct criticism of the opposite philosophy which says that gameplay should be everything with absolutely no narrative whatsoever. The Modron are a race of machines that live on the plane of Mechanus, a lawful neutral plane which results in the Modron not having any real moral compass that cares about good or evil actions, but ethical compass based around pure logic. Because they work on pure logic, the Modron do not understand why adventurers enjoy exploring dungeons in the first place, so they create an experiment which aims to solve this mystery. It is a dungeon which can be randomly constructed into an infinite number of new dungeons. However, the dungeon comes off as extremely tedious and empty--but intentionally so. The dungeon has monsters, it has magic items and clues, an evil wizard at the end, what more could you want? The obvious answer here is narrative substance, something that the rest of the game works its hardest to provide to the player. By having this inclusion into the game, it avoids criticism that the game is too wordy before the game can even be finished. It is arguing that narrative within video games matters more than just context, and by describing an alternate reality version of Planescape: Torment where narrative doesn’t matter, it shows that the game would come off as tedious, shallow, and insubstantial.
43Another bold choice that can be seen as avoiding norms is the almost complete removal of character creation at the beginning of the game. While the game asks you to pick your stats at the beginning, that’s the entirety of the character creation before the game starts. Baldur’s Gate has the player go through a multi-step process of choosing stats, race, class, name, voice, and hair color before the game even starts, an idea that comes from Dungeons & Dragons. However, The Nameless One’s background is a blank slate, his lack of memories means that he doesn’t know his own backstory, and he hasn’t been convinced of a class or alignment yet. The entire game acts a character creation screen, as the experiences that The Nameless One goes through develop him as a character. He is taught a class by having someone teach him skills in that class, his alignment shifts through his actions during quests, and each of your actions make a significant effect on who The Nameless One is. The game itself, through gameplay, is asking the central question of the game “what can change the nature of a man,” and proving that the nature of a man can be changed through some sort of action. Like numerous scars all over The Nameless One’s body, the player makes a mark on who The Nameless One through each gameplay action. Their playstyle is going to be different from the playstyle of everyone else, which means their own personal changes are what sets The Nameless One’s nature as something different. Again, this is done by disregarding as much of the standard character creation screen as possible, and stretching out the implications that a character creation screen has through an entire game.
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45V - Recombining With Your Own Mortality: A Conclusion
46    Planescape: Torment is one of the most foundational games when it comes to implementing narrative within video games. While it is still regarded more as a cult classic rather than a household name, its influence on narrative in video games has proven to be crucial to where we are today. The game is able to explore these avenues of narrative and setting through a knowledge of the tropes other video games within the western RPG and high fantasy genres had been utilizing, and actively deconstructed those tropes in order to create a wholly unique world, setting, and story. 
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49Works Cited
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59Baldur’s Gate, Black Isle, Bioware, 1998
60Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Black Isle, Bioware, 2000
61Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, Black Isle, Bioware, 2001
62Deus Ex, Ion Storm, Eidos Interactive, 2000
63Half Life 2, Valve, 2004
64Mother 2. Nintendo, Ape, 1994
65Mother 3. Nintendo, HAL Laboratories, 2006
66Planescape: Torment. Black Isle, Interplay Entertainment 1999.
67Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition. Black Isle, Interplay Entertainment, Beamdog, 2017
68System Shock 2, Looking Glass Studios, Irrational Games, 1999