Why can't gay dwarves get married in Middle-earth?

Video games have been ahead of the real world in accepting same-sex marriage. Why doesn't a new online "Lord of the Rings" game allow it?

By Katherine Glover

Read more: Video Games, Politics, The Lord of the Rings, News, Same-Sex Marriage

April 28, 2007 | I can vouch for my stepbrother -- he's a big supporter of equal rights for the gay and lesbian community. But when the issue of gay marriage came up at work, he voted against it. Same-sex marriage for U.S. citizens is one thing, but same-sex marriage for gay dwarves in Middle-earth is quite another.

Nik Davidson is a game designer at Turbine, the Westwood, Mass., company producing "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar." The game has been in beta (a test version) since September, and during discussions of new features for the game, which was officially released Tuesday, the design team wound up in a heated discussion over what restrictions should be placed on marriage. They debated not only gay marriage but also marriage between members of different species. Finally, the game's executive producer settled the matter by pulling the entire marriage feature.

The controversy over whether hobbits should be able to marry dwarves may be unique to Turbine, but the issue of in-game relationships is not. Most American households have some form of single-player video or computer games; in addition, at least 12.5 million people subscribe to multiplayer online games, going online to interact with other game players in elaborate virtual worlds, many with sword and sorcery themes. Games like "The Lord of the Rings Online" -- often referred to as MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- don't just allow players to create life in the form of their characters; increasingly, they take over the lives of the players themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example is "EverQuest," launched in 1999, and so addictive it came to be known as "EverCrack." Once the most popular MMORPG, it has been displaced by "World of Warcraft," which boasts an estimated 8.5 million users. One study estimated that the average player was on "EverQuest" some 20 hours per week; of course, that number is skewed by casual users -- some hard-core gamers spend more like eight to 12 hours per day on the game.

Players devoting that much time and energy to their games will naturally want to live part of their life inside the game, and that includes developing committed relationships, sometimes with ceremonies. According to a study by Haverford College student Nick Yee, now a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, 23 percent of "EverQuest" players surveyed had role-played at falling in love within the game. Gay players, an increasingly visible demographic in a scene once known as the preserve of young and not necessarily enlightened males, often want the same thing. These players don't want to be shunted off to the side, either, or given "gay" games marketed to gay audiences; they just want to see themselves reflected in the games they play and to have safe spaces within the games, free of the homophobia that comes freely from the other players.

Largely due to 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. Today, the discussion of same-sex marriage in games redraws the battle lines over the issue, making it not a fight over marriage but an issue of the philosophy of video games themselves.

Last fall, with "The Lord of the Rings Online" in beta, Turbine did a survey to determine the major reasons people played MMORPGs. It turned out that what players ranked as most important weren't beautiful graphics or compelling storylines. They said they played because their friends were playing.

"The relationships that are being formed in-game are more important than anything we can provide to them," says Jeff Anderson, Turbine's CEO.

Erin Davison, a veteran game player from San Diego, says some of her oldest friends are people she met in a text-based online fantasy game in the 1990s. "I was a military child," she explains. The game was a way for her to stay in touch with the same people as she moved from place to place. One of the people she met in that game is now her husband; they've been married for six years.

Even that game -- "NannyMUD," a fantasy-based game that Davison describes as "basically like 'EverQuest,' but no pictures" -- had methods of coupling. "There are lockets that tell you when your other person is logged on, and wedding rings that glow when the other person is logged on," Davison says.

"Virtual worlds have always had marriage," Anderson says, "whether it's people staging an event in a town, or whether it's people meeting online and then getting married in real life."

But over the years since "NannyMUD" and other similarly primitive games premiered, gaming demographics have changed. It still skews male, for example, but not as male as it did even six years ago, when Yee's study showed that only 16 percent of "EverQuest's" players were female. Some of the games that are currently popular, like "The Sims," actually skew female.

"Gaming has become more socially acceptable. It's not just the bastion of geeks and nerds anymore," says Alexander Sliwinski, who writes about gay issues in video games for In Newsweekly and Joystiq.

There isn't a whole lot of information about the gay gaming demographic, but Flynn De Marco, aka Fruit Brute, the editor of GayGamer.net, says his site gets between 12,000 and 15,000 visitors a day.

De Marco and some friends started GayGamer.net last summer to provide a site where gay gamers could congregate and talk about their obsession. "Most game sites," De Marco says, "while they're great, they are definitely heavily slated towards the straight male: lots of pictures of scantily clad girls and lots of that kind of thing." And the atmosphere in a lot of these sites' forums, De Marco says, is "extremely homophobic."

Last year the first survey on sexual orientation and video games was launched at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, directed and independently funded by former student Jason Rockwood.

"My research suggests that gay gamers don't want games that are made for a 'gay audience,' Rockwood says. "They simply want to be able to play games that everyone else is playing, but they want to have inclusion; they want the option to have gay characters."

Rockwood says some gay players were upset about his survey because they were afraid it would lead to companies targeting the gay demographic by creating ridiculously stereotyped characters. "Gay gamers do not want 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Video Game,'" Rockwood says.

Next page: She wanted a space where people could play without hearing insults like "fag" tossed around