Lord of The Rings Online has decided not to allow players to get married. It's not because marrying someone in a videogame is way too dorky to even consider, either: The prohibition is for a more complicated, compelling reason.
Basically, Turbine, the company behind the game, wasn't able to reconcile the idea of gay marriage with Tolkien's fiction.
"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," Turbine designer Nik Davidson told Salon. "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."
Nevermind that that keeping anything close to authentic-Tolkien in a videogame is all but impossible--how Tolkien-y will you feel when SithLord443 calls you a "noob"?--more importantly, is the ideal of tolerance a more important thing in a game than realism?
It's the kind of debate that will keep coming up more and more in the future.
Turbine says they may revisit the issue at a later time.
Salon.com: Why can't gay dwarves get married in Middle-earth?
Comment(s)
Two hobbits and a dwarf getting together in a raucous amount of hard, impassioned gay three-way sex in the Shire, would be homosexual, and will be deemed as such, except for these 3 reasons:
1. The dwarf is on a gay drunken rampage.
2. Gandalf is watching.
3. Or if they're friends; because it's not gay if you're friends...
-Oops, wait, wrong fictional story..
Now back to the Henry Ford comment, I'm sure that Mr. Ford wasn't trying to find a way for white people to get around faster. He was trying to invents something, it's just a bunch of liberal whining assholes that go around and try to attach race to something just to try to prove thier weak morally corrupt ideas.
And I coulda swore Sam and Frodo hooked up...
Get ready for the gladd & alcu (no caps = no respect) lawsuits.
I'm the biggest respector of a person's honest position(s), but I didn't realise that there were sooo many bigots and believers in inequality on this site. So now, the NAACP and ACLU are just "smokescreen" organizations??? WTF???
But yeah, homosexuality is probably best left out of the game (it's not necessary anyway).
Conan and LOTR are based on someone else's works and the makers of those games are spending so much time being "true" to the books that they will alienate different groups of gamers and end up only appealing to the people who are interested in the books.
you are all mindless warped people.
Exactly what you'd expect from a Sony fanboy.
Delusion at its best.