Yet, I bet the game allows for black elves, hobbits, and men. Fine, but one of the criticisms of The Lord of the Rings was that Tolkien's vision is also sexist and racist. 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. The game is adding this feature in order to make the game more user friendly–another common Tolkien term no doubt.

Nice, but I don't recall characters in The Lord of the Rings willy-nilly adopting 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. 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. 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. 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. Very rarely will you see an elf and a human hook up, but it does happen the door is open. '…if there's an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it. The color was promptly changed.ĭavidson explains that while designing the game, their guiding principle was that: (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. 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. 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. The issue here doesn't seem to be out right homophobia on the part of the game-designers.

We've written about gay-gaming issues before including the recent controversy over Bully's same-sex kiss.

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. Ultimately, Turbine decided to completely remove the game's marriage feature rather than allow same-sex marriage.

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). Tolkien's Lord of the Rings called 'The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar'. of Westwood, MA released a new online role-playing game based on J.R.R.

Lord of rings online server gay