canon and gameplay

[rivkat]

This Salon article on gay marriage (actually its extirpation, at the cost of all marriage) in the official Lord of the Rings game is fascinating because of the tropes of canonicity and freedom deployed: the antis say "only that which we saw examples of in canon is allowed; all else is precluded," while the pros say "gameplay is about experimenting with the boundaries of the world."  And then we get authorial intent: Tolkien was a conservative and would have opposed it.  (And how would he have felt about the movies, or the game?  Do we get to ask that?)

By the way, I will try to post more, but not five times a day; I just saw this story and liked the interaction with what I'm seeing at Media in Transition.

Comments

[dracunculus.livejournal.com]

My gaming group is all gay men except for me (I'm the token chick). That article was circulating in email this morning: my contribution to the discussion was "Dude, Middle Earth is the gayest place ever. There are like *four women* in the entire *world*. I don't even know where baby Rangers come from; I think they might bud, or else maybe there is one unnamed lady Ranger somewhere and they keep her in a breeding pit. But same sex relationships (for men) are basically the *only* available relationships, so I don't really see the canonical problem."

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting the link - I've found the topic interesting ever since it came up on an MMORPG I used to play (http://meteordust.livejournal.com/21230.html). There weren't the same issues about canon because it was an invented world, but because it had clearly derived inspiration from Norse mythology, some people did raise the question of whether the game should follow the social conventions of ancient Norse culture.