Online Lord of the Rings game bans marriage over gay marriage issue

Last week Turbine, Inc. of Westwood, MA released a new online role-playing game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings called "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar". Salon.com just posted a very interesting article over the controversy that erupted at the company over the issue of whether the game would allow same-sex marriage (the article also examines gay gaming issues in general). Ultimately, Turbine decided to completely remove the game's marriage feature rather than allow same-sex marriage. While it seems a silly decision, I prefer that over discriminating against gay folks who want to swap those Middle Earth Rings with each other.

We've written about gay-gaming issues before including the recent controversy over Bully's same-sex kiss. The issue here doesn't seem to be out right homophobia on the part of the game-designers. The article points out that one of the designers, Nik Davidson, is pro-gay in real life, but voted against including same-sex marriage in The Lord of the Rings. His (and others) reasoning? That since same-sex marriage wasn't in Tolkien's original creation, it couldn't be here as their goal was to be as authentic to his vision as possible. (Does this mean online role playing games were part of his vision?) As an example of sticking to Tolkien's game plan, the article cites how during beta testing they discovered a gray squirrel, a creature which Tolkien apparently abhorred. The color was promptly changed.

Davidson explains that while designing the game, their guiding principle was that:

"...if there's an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it. Very rarely will you see an elf and a human hook up, but it does happen; the door is open. Dwarves don't intermarry with hobbits; that door is shut ... Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut."

So in order to be true to the books, the designers are removing something that did exist--marriage--to keep out something that didn't. Um, okay.

It's all poppycock, of course. In order to facilitate bonding amongst players (a survey of gamers found that relationships between players was more important than cool graphics) the game allows participants to "adopt" each other. This rationale here is that this mimics Tolkien's "Gimli son of Glóin" and "Aragorn son of Arathorn" way of describing familial relationships. Nice, but I don't recall characters in The Lord of the Rings willy-nilly adopting each other. The game is adding this feature in order to make the game more user friendly--another common Tolkien term no doubt.

The real issue here is that, as the article points out, Tolkien was a conservative Catholic and Davidson says they didn't think same-sex marriage would fit in his world vision. Fine, but one of the criticisms of The Lord of the Rings was that Tolkien's vision is also sexist and racist. Yet, I bet the game allows for black elves, hobbits, and men. In fact, I'd wager that every race is represented (and if not, it would be shocking). I'd also bet that women are allowed to do and be anything they'd like as well despite the fact that there are precious few women in Tolkien's "vision". (In Peter Jackson's film version, the role of Eowyn was beefed up so that female representation wasn't so pathetic.)

What also makes the "authenticity" argument so utterly lame is that the game allows players to chat and interact, and there seems little doubt players will be discussing all sorts of things that don't exist in Middle Earth. It seems the company was simply afraid of a backlash. Indeed, Jeffrey Steefel, the game's executive producer, says gay marriage might be a possibility at some future date and that "I think we're waiting to see how the players react."

So much for hewing strictly to Tolkien's vision.

And it's not like other folks haven't already noticed homoeroticism in Middle Earth.