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Lord of the Rings MMO Fears TEH GAY

by Erin on May 14th, 2007

So apparently World of Warcraft isn’t the only MMO that seems to have issues with gay and gay-friendly players. A recent write-up in Salon looks at the seemingly backwards attitude of Turbine in regards to its newly launched MMO, The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar. While in development, it seems, debate surfaced around the “marriage feature” that allows two characters in the game to get hitched. Turbine’s crew pondered the potential hotspots of inter-racial (okay seriously, is this still an issue in some corners of our western world?) and same-sex unions in the game environment.

The Salon piece makes an interesting point in saying that in the

“uniquely libertarian culture of game design, games are ahead of the real world in terms of acceptance of same-sex marriage — the first game reported to have allowed same-sex marriage debuted in 1998, two years before Vermont recognized civil unions and six years before Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage.”

Gay players are becoming more vocal, more noticeable, and rather than requesting gay oriented games, would like to have in-game options that reflect their real world lifestyles. With social interaction and strong emotional ties formed both between a player and his/her avatar, and that avatar and others in the game, it’s not hard to see the attractiveness of having more avenues of expression available.

Turbine though, rather than wade into the fire-breathing waters of the homosexual debate, decided to spoil the fun for all players by completely removing the marriage feature from Shadows of Angmar. Citing the decision as both an attempt to maintain Tolkien’s authenticity, and in deference to conservative attitudes. Said Turbine developer Nik Davidson in the Salon article:

The team had also originally planned to introduce a way for characters to marry other characters — within certain guidelines.

“The rule that we tried to follow across the board was: if there’s an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it,” Nik says. “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.”

More than that, Nik says, it seemed as if same-sex marriage would simply not have fit with Tolkien’s vision for the worlds he created.

“Tolkien was a conservative Catholic,” Nik says. “He went out drinking with C.S. Lewis every night, and the two of them had a worldview that was — well, let’s just say it clashes a little bit with the sensibilities of East Coast liberals who make up the largest population of Turbine.”

This confuses me. I don’t understand the hullabaloo, nor Turbine’s decision to pull the “marriage” option entirely, for fear that gay marriages would be popping up faster than you can say Sam & Frodo slashfic. With all the strange and wonderful things going on in virtual realms these days, and given the current attitude, outside of the industry, towards political correctness erring on the side of nauseating politeness…I don’t see how happy homosexual hobbits are this week’s sign of the apocalypse.

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POSTED IN: Culture, MMORPG, Things That Suck