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?