LotR Online Bans Marriage, Fears Gay Dwarves

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.
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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."

Um, Yeah... Merry and Pippin left their wives and children to share a Studio Apartment in Gondor... because they were such good friends. Read the Epilogue.

The most frustrating part is trying to pass off this decision as "Keeping true to Toklien"

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."

This seems to be a HUGE disconnect with the actual target audience for this game. More on Alternative Lifestyle Gaming in the article