this is an old story.

there was a princess, and the princess yearned. not for wealth: for gold she had, and treasures and heirlooms, trophies and antiques, and many palaces. what the princess yearned for was love. no, not the state of being loved, for she had many subjects who loved and adored her. no, what she yearned for was the chase: the pursuit and elusion, the subtle and delicate dance of flirtation. not being, but becoming.

the princess yearned for love, and on the twilit hills of her land, a wandering vagabond yearned for the princess. houseless and penniless, this wanderer came from a far-off land with one goal and one goal only: to win the heart of the princess. and the princess, beguiled, decided that she would test her suitor’s devotion.

she sent two of the lowest and weakest of her army’s footsoldiers out to greet the wanderer. they said, “to reach the princess you must go through us,” and they hefted their spears and advanced on the would-be suitor. but the suitor, without a word, leapt high over the soldiers’ heads and, as their eyes goggled, laid a hand upon each of the soldiers’ heads and slammed them roughly together. the soldiers fell in a heap at the wanderer’s feet, but already the suitor had begun striding toward the palace.

watching secretly from a high balcony, the princess let out a small gasp that creative minds, had they been eavesdropping, might have mistaken for a moan. the princess’s heart pounded, and something potent and dangerous burned in her chest and shook her legs. the princess beheld as the wanderer’s form crept across the twilit hills toward her castle, and she called for her servants.

and the wanderer had taken not ten steps more before the path was blocked by two bulky figures, each carrying an axe. these, retainers of the royal guard, addressed the wanderer and said “you’ll not have as easy a time with–” but then they crumpled to the ground, clutching their stomachs, and their axes landed in the dirt. the wanderer still was silent. ten paces later, the princess’s personal bodyguards stood across the path. these said nothing, but quickly raised their warhammers. as they fell, the princess’s suitor caught hold of the shafts and flung their wielders over the hill.

atop her palace, the princess burned with an unfamiliar heat. she watched, her tongue drawing a bead of sweat from her lip, as the wanderer stepped up to her castle gates. and she turned to her most loyal and trusted handmaidens, who knelt attentively at her feet, and gave to them these instructions: “when my suitor reaches this place, you will say, ‘we’re sorry, but our princess is in another castle.’ by then i shall be gone.”

and as she had foreseen, her pursuer would follow her to the next of her many palaces, and the next, and the next again. between herself and her suitor the princess placed all manner of obstacles: the wanderer swam moats, plotted caves, leapt mighty chasms and fought monsters great and small. the princess watched these things with a lust she had never known. at night, with the soft sheets of one opulent bed after another wound around her legs, she thought of the wanderer’s relentless chase with one hand between her thighs.

at last, the princess ran out of castles, and in her last, darkest dungeon she placed a great dragon, belching flame and shaking the palace with its mighty leaps, and this dragon guarded a bridge over a pit of fire. the wanderer looked up at the stomping beast, undaunted and silent as ever. and then, with a legendary quickness, the young suitor dove between the dragon’s legs and, as the monster heaved its body around to give chase, took hold of the axe of a fallen royal guard and cut the ropes which held the bridge. the dragon fell, with a roar that soon faded, into the fire pool, and then nothing stood between the suitor and the princess.

the princess stepped forward, out of the darkness, and her pursuer at last looked upon her face. the suitor said nothing. the princess, with a practiced grace, leaned forward and, gently, placed a kiss upon the wanderer’s cheek. and then they turned and departed from one another.

* * * * * *

it occured to me how pertinent and recurrent the theme of unrequited love is in videogames - of pursuing, but not being allowed to touch - while playing orbient, a downloadable wii game by skip for nintendo (itself based on a gameboy game, orbital). orbient is a strikingly lonely game: partly because of the haunting soundtrack, partly for the sight of your avatar, a tiny grey planet, drifting through the endless dusk of space.

you don’t control this sphere directly; rather, you use the basic forces that drive all bodies, planetary and otherwise: attraction and repulsion. hold one button, and gravity will pull you closer to other planets; hold the other, and the planets will repel you. in this way, you trace the orbits of planets, hunting a trajectory that will let you catch planets of your size, and by eating them become bigger.

your goal is to become the same size as one of the other planets, your “target” planet. when this happens, your target ignites into a beautiful, burning star. now, your objective is to orbit this new sun. not to touch - this is a ball of fire, and to touch it will destroy your cold planet. your goal is to glide your astral body as close alongside it as you can without contact.

she (literary tradition compels me, with surprising strength, to give the star a feminine pronoun) is the only source of warmth and light in a cold universe, and you wish to orbit her and spin together through space in her golden presence. but you must not touch her, for to touch is death. the suggestion of this abstract love story (and it is a love story) is that, often, what is compelling about the conjuctions of personalities is not as much their collision as the flirtation that crackles between them as they circle each other, now close, now far, never touching, for to touch would be to destroy the mysteriousness that makes the fantasy so enticing.

needless to say, this is the most daring game nintendo’s published in a long time. they were even so bold as to put the word “art” on the title screen.

it reminds me, thematically, of andrew plotkin’s so far (from “so near and yet so far”), where the distance between the protagonist and the object of the protagonist’s desire manifests in recurring symbols of objects that must be brought close but never allowed to touch, and whose climax gives the player the opportunity to resolve this distance, but to do so causes everything to be undone.

or, more recently, braid, which actually incorporates the line “the princess is in another castle.” the resolution of braid is the acceptance of the princess’s absence: tim must reject his fantasy of the princess as the object of a heroic quest. the denouement is the acknowledgement that the princess is just a person, and tim’s past is not a puzzle to be solved.

the theme of unrequited love suggests that to truly know the object of our desire is to desanctify the allure that gives our fantasy its power. to play past the ending of super mario bros. would be to realize that the princess is a single sprite, bereft of life or animation. there’s a reason the game ends when mario meets the princess: the game is the chase, not the consummation.