The Great Lord of The Rings Online Gay Marriage Debacle
I got a chance to sit down with Midway's Lord of the Rings Online at E3 and of course, the first thing I asked them about was the recent gay marriage issue. You may remember a while back a story was circulating that the entire marriage option was yanked from LOTRO because of a debate over whether or not to allow gay marriage. Well, as it turns out, this wasn't the entire story.
Apparently, the creation of the game was bound by more than just simple agreements of the staff over what to include, they are also expected to keep inline with the books due to licensing issues. The problem actually went much deeper than just the gay issue but at it's core was a problem with inter-species marriage. Within the books, the only inter-species romance was elf to human and when programing the game it became an issue of "Ok, how do we allow some and not allow others?" As I suspected, the gay dilemma was really more of a side note although the topic was one under discussion. The point is, to let people think that gay marriage was the sole reason for the yanking of the whole marriage mechanic is a bit misleading. It had much more to do with sticking to the rules of the world that Tolkien had laid out in his stories. And in the end, how important is a marriage mechanic to the game anyway?
As far as the game itself goes, I unfortunately didn't get a chance to get a real feel for it in the short amount of time I got to see it. It certainly looked great. The graphics are beautiful and the backgrounds are particularly impressive. I look forward to exploring the game a bit once I get back home after my month long California excursion next week. I could talk about what little I experienced here now, but I think it would be more fair to talk about it once I've really immersed myself in it, which I'm certainly looking forward to.
Fruit Brute
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 23 July 2007
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: gay marriage, lord of the rings online
This makes much more sense, and is what many Tolkienites believed to be the case in any event: making the world of LotR into an MMORPG is a pretty big stretch already - a marriage mechanic would have been totally off-canon except for a few circumstances.
Since they couldn't introduce any new story elements that didn't appear in the books (such as dwarf-elf marriage, and can you even imagine?), it makes perfect sense to scrap what is ultimately a secondary feature at best: if WoW told me they'd considered inter-species marriage I'd hardly ask if gay marriage was on the table: I'd be much more interested in how the gnome/night elf reproductive dynamics worked...to say nothing of an undead/tauren romance.
That there was an extant canon of well-protected literature in the first place makes the case even less of a big deal: this is not a license under which much thinking-outside-boxes is permitted - or, thanks to Tolkien's exquisite lore, necessary.
I'm sure this was already mentioned somewhere (maybe even here) way back when.
I believe the counterargument was that if you remove everything that wasn't in the books, you would be left with a rather poor game.
Oh and in games where you're trying to RP or at least keep a hint of the original universe around, marriage mechanics can be quite important.
I think it's also worth bearing in mind that the game is set in a fantasy equivalent of the dark ages, ala not 2005 in San Fransisco.
As such, it stands to reason that, as a parrallel to our own society, homophobia would be the norm in this period, and probably for many centuries to come. As such while it would stand to reason that there were homosexual relationships, if we assume tolkiens world were real, as the race of men, after all, is based ultimately on the real world, then these relationshiops would have obviously been clandestine and not achieved social status.
So, on that note I totally agree with them for pulling gay marriage from the game - it would be a good few thousands years out of usual social evolotionary context.
Let us not forget the times that Tolkien lived in. The man wrote a great deal of his works during a war. And I think that if you're going to work on one of the greatest author's works you need to keep things as close as you can. The world is huge and expandsive so there is no reason to add something that has no real relevance... anyway in most cases marriage was a signally of the end of a persons adventuring days and that stays true for the most part in many fantsy books...
I agree with Cueil. Tolkien wrote a masterpeace and it's not allowed to anyone to add something, to change this perfect story.