Catherine Smith, the director of marketing for Linden Lab, which produces "Second Life," says the decision to allow players the option of same-sex marriage came out of the game's generally libertarian philosophy.
"Environment and tools, that's what we provide," Smith says. "We're not legislating anything."
The question of same-sex marriage within "Second Life" wasn't completely separated from the political realities of the outside world, however. Smith noted that the Linden Lab press release announcing the feature that allows players to marry proudly proclaimed, "Can't be married in real life? Try Second Life."
Actually, other than that, the message from the makers of these games is nearly identical: They see their mission as providing space for users to create what is, in essence, their own reality. Within that mission, the question as a game is developed is not what users will be allowed to do but what they'll be stopped from doing.
"I think for us the general message is, as a creativity tool, we've never forced any kind of relationship or marriage on any of our players," Humble says. "We just allowed it, and people who aren't interested in it would never think to do it."
That philosophy is echoed by Rockstar Games, the controversial makers of such games as the "Grand Theft Auto" series and "Bully," which allows users to play the character of a teenage boy dropped into a boarding school gone wrong. Before it was even released, "Bully" was already the subject of much heated discussion; more fuel was added to that fire when users discovered last year that Rockstar had allowed gamers the option of same-sex kissing.
Rodney Walker, a spokesman for Rockstar, says the Rockstar team thinks of their games not like films, with static storylines, but as worlds that allow players to make their own choices, and Rockstar tries to shut down as few of those choices as possible. "If you're planning to take a vacation to California, you don't say to yourself, 'Where am I not going?'" Walker says. "When people talk about what's allowed in a video game, it's not about permission, it's about experience ... The thing that's so exciting about video games, which is why we think the medium is so popular right now, is because ... you can have an actual individual experience."
The difference for "The Lord of the Rings Online," according to Nik, is that for Turbine the idea was all about keeping Middle-earth, the world in which the story takes place, authentic.
The team at Turbine is serious about staying true to the source material. Several Turbine employees can speak Elvish, Tolkien scholars have been hired as consultants, and Nik was even asked to do research on Middle-earth plants and minerals so that clothing colors in the game could correspond to available dyes.
When fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake. Turbine had released a screen shot of a forest scene featuring a gray squirrel, but Tolkien once wrote in a letter that he hated gray squirrels.
Authenticity isn't Turbine's only concern, though, according to CEO Jeff Anderson.
"We don't want to just create something that's truly authentic and no fun," Anderson says. "Our main goal is making a great game."
In order to make something fun and build on the online relationship trend, Turbine's design team came up with a pedigree system whereby a player can offer to "adopt" another player. "Tom" can become "Tom son of Jonathan," in the spirit of Tolkien's original "Gimli son of Glóin" and "Aragorn son of Arathorn."
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."
Brenda Brathwaite, a game designer and a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design who wrote the book "Sex in Video Games," says she doesn't think a desire for authenticity gets Turbine completely off the hook for its decision. Brathwaite says a video game, by its nature, sacrifices some authenticity because of its interactivity.
"Players are still creating their own experience," Brathwaite says. "In a video game, it's about abdicating authorship and letting a player explore a world."
The concerns Brathwaite raises, not to mention the development philosophy of the other game developers, were raised internally at Turbine. When the "Lord of the Rings Online" design team released its patch notes to the entire development team, Nik says, the restrictions caused a shouting match in the office, and opposition to the decision to restrict in-game marriage came from some surprising quarters.
Nik says there were a couple of conservative Christian people on the team who oppose gay marriage in real life but argued in favor of allowing same-sex marriage within the game. Their opposition grew out of that libertarian streak in game design.
"They felt that we should be removing interaction barriers, just as a design philosophy," Nik says.
Jeffrey Steefel, the game's executive producer, says he hasn't ruled out introducing marriage into the game at some point in the future. "I just couldn't figure out how to get it all done with all the other things we had to get finished," he says. "I think we're waiting to see how the players react."
About the writer
Katherine Glover is a freelance writer from Minnesota.
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