The Lord of the Rings Online: Issues in the Adaptation of MMORPGs
Our chapter takes as its focus the adaptation of the novels and created world of J. R. R. Tolkien, particularly The Lord of the Rings (1954–6), for the medium of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs) in the form of Turbine, Inc.’s The Lord of the Rings Online (hereafter LOTRO). In the process we draw to a limited degree on the popular Peter Jackson film adaptations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings released each year from 2001 to 2003, both for the purposes of comparison of adaptation technique but also because LOTRO clearly draws on the Jackson films as well as the Tolkien novels. Our discussion draws upon the literature of adaptation studies, which traditionally treats the move from book to film or stage to film, but which has expanded in recent years to include other forms of media transference of existing stories or artifacts, and thereby attempts to demonstrate at least part the role adaptation studies might play in the growing field of game studies. The two particular foci of our paper are (a) fidelity to the source works and (b) the taxonomies of adaptation types. For the first focus, we argue that the issue of fidelity assumes greater importance when considering the adaptation of highly popular source material. For the second, we argue that role-playing game adaptations function through the creative strategy of expansion, in contrast to films drawn from novels, which typically use compression (both terms from Thomas Leitch and discussed below). Film-makers must tell the story in roughly two hours, but designers/developers of games not aimed at the casual games market must ensure, because of the prices they must charge consumers, that the game lasts for many hours, weeks, or, in the case of MMORPGs, months.
One issue we need to establish immediately is that of the original text. In the case of LOTRO and all other future games based on The Lord of the Rings, the issues takes on added significance because of the way in which Tolkien’s novel and the Jackson films have become in many ways conjoined. For those reading Tolkien’s novel for the first time only after seeing the films, for example, the mental image of the characters, items, and landscape will almost certainly draw from the film, but even for those with strong knowledge of the novels before entering the theater, recalling earlier conceptions of the visual elements is likely to be difficult, if not impossible. As a result, our chapter treats the novel and film together as the original text, with primacy given to the novels because of the much larger range of cultural, geographical, and narrative details or intersections in the printed works. Identifying a single text for The Lord of the Rings is further complicated by its direct connections with the remainder of Tolkien’s work: The Hobbit (1937), The Silmarillion (1977), the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, and the many volumes edited and published after Tolkien’s death by Christopher Tolkien – material which many Tolkien fans, and the LOTRO designers, know very well. To see the degree to which satisfying the huge Tolkien fan base was a major issue for both the film and the game, one only need watch the commentaries in the special features section of the extended edition DVDs of the Jackson films and the numerous developer blogs on Turbine’s LOTRO site. For Jackson’s team, Tolkien’s writings, including those beyond The Lord of the Rings itself, continually impacted the decisions; for the LOTRO team, both Tolkien’s and Jackson’s work did so.
The topic of fidelity has permeated adaptation studies since George Bluestone’s 1957 study Novels into Film, widely regarded as the major starting point for the field, and has been adopted, embraced, denounced, ridiculed, reconsidered, and theorized about endlessly ever since – with Brian MacFarlane’s similarly titled 1996 book-length study providing another touchstone in the debate, arguing strongly against the continual comparison of source to adaptation. To judge even from the recent literature in the field, fidelity seems a topic that everybody has problems with but nobody can circumvent (see Cartmell and Whelehan 2007 and Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins 2010 as two of many discussions of this topic), in part because of the recurring appearance of the issue in the press and on fan websites. A recent study, however, suggests that the fidelity relationship needs further examination precisely as a means of defining adaptions. Thomas Leitch, who has championed the downplaying of fidelity studies, demonstrates in his exploration of ‘post-literary’ adaptations that there is a difficulty in some instances in determining if a derivative work is an adaptation at all. Of particular interest is his 2009 look at the Pirates of the Caribbean series of films (Kindle 3894f.), based on the theme park ride of the same name. The film borrows the title, certainly, and also the overarching subject matter of not-very-serious pirates and some of the visual images. Other than that, the film differs enormously from the ride, to the degree that calling it an adaptation strains the definition of ‘adaptation’ to the breaking point; Hollywood’s popularly used phrase ‘loosely adapted’ (also seen in film reviews and credits) would seem to apply here, but it is far too imprecise for useful scholarly purposes.
The question of fidelity is tied directly to the field’s various taxonomies of adaptation types, of what an adaptation consists of. One such discussion is the oft-cited article by Geoffrey Wagner, who offers a distinction among three different kinds of film adaptation: transposition, as direct a translation to screen as possible; commentary, an altering of the original for the purpose of expressing the same work of art differently; and analogy, an altering for the purpose of creating a different work of art (1975, 222f.). Dudley Andrew (1976) offers his own trio of types. His transforming is similar to Wagner’s transposition, while his intersecting is a treatment that retains the original work’s uniqueness and qualities, if not always its details, and his borrowing represents a much looser association with the source text (98f.). Both of these taxonomies take fidelity as their touchstone, with the categories (as we list them here) showing a decreasing movement away from the bounds of the source text. For anyone conducting adaptation research, however, a problem arises here: if all of these categories can be seen as adaptations, and if we add the viewpoint frequently seen in adaptation research that an adaptation must be seen as its own work of art, not in terms of its fidelity, then practically anything can be called an adaptation, as long as it bears some relationship, however slight, to a previous text. This is especially true of Wagner’s analogy and Andrew’s borrowing, and indeed Andrew states clearly that the success of borrowings ‘rests on the issue of fertility not their fidelity’ (Andrew 1976, 28). Judith Kerman comments on this idea by suggesting that, under this guideline, ‘while not adapted from any prior literary text, films like Star Wars and E.T. might be thought of as adaptations insofar as they both borrow heavily from myths codified within and without SF tradition’ (Kerman 1991, 97). If this is so, however, then surely an enormous number of artistic works – literary, cinematic, dramatic, material, ludic, and otherwise – may be considered adaptations; indeed, it starts to get difficult finding any that cannot. In a critical world where intertextuality has primacy, after all, all works are seen as borrowings to one degree or another. Kyle Bishop argues similarly to this point in his discussion of what he calls ‘assemblage’ filmmaking (Bishop 2010, 264), citing (270) Naremore’s comment about the need to associate adaptation with ‘recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication’ (Naremore 2006, 15), in fact using this as the basis to his discussion of the shortcomings of Andrew’s theory of adaptation types.
Reflecting on the problems of these and other taxonomies, Leitch suggests a new grammar for understanding adaptation types in order to avoid the evaluative basis of adaptation categorization, and because, as he claims, previous taxonomies do not ‘adequately demarcate the frontiers of adaptation, the places where it shades into allusion’ (Leitch 2009, Kindle 1371). Leitch begins his ten-part taxonomy (Kindle 1389f.) with celebrations, the adaptations providing the most direct translation from source medium to the medium of adaptation, sub-dividing the category into curatorial adaptations, in which the resources of the new medium strive to reflect the corresponding resource of the original; replications, an absolutely slavish translation of all possible elements from the original; and homages, which ‘pays tribute to an earlier film adaptation as definitive’. Leitch’s second category, adjustment, is the most common type, a remediation of the source that makes it more suitable for film. Types of adjustment include compression, the commonly cited method that allows a novel’s story to be told in a two-hour film; expansion, the opposite, which Leitch relates specifically to the adaptation of short stories; correction, where elements of the source are changed to suit a new audience (including changed endings to make them happier); updating, achieving relevance for a new audience by using today’s setting; and superimposition, in which the adaptation is created for a star (or a star’s demands) rather than for its own sake. Third on Leitch’s list are revisions, attempts ‘to rewrite the original, not simply improve its ending or point out its contemporary relevance’ (Kindle 1539–42), sporting major changes but still demonstrating clear links to the original. Fourth is colonization, in which adaptations ‘use progenitor texts as vessels to be filled with new meaning’, and where ‘any new content is fair game’. Here Leitch cites a number of pornographic movies that transform settings and characters in ways that barely refer to the source text, and which are clearly far removed from any nod to fidelity and, as Leitch notes, demonstrate a shift away from adaptation and towards allusion. He then goes on to discuss the even more allusive categories of deconstruction and analogue, noting that, in the case of analogues, they need not be recognized as adaptations until ‘years after the fact’ (Kindle 1663–6). Leitch ends with other allusive categories and finally discusses allusion itself, recognizing that all films are allusive and that allusions are so easily noted that they can quickly make the discussion of adaptation meaningless.
The most immediately useful of these categories for discussing LOTRO as an adaptation of Tolkien’s novels is adjustment, specifically the sub-category of expansion. This is in contrast to the most useful way of looking at Jackson’s film adaptation, which, like many fidelity-driven film adaptations, relies on compression of the original in order to fit the requirement of viewing time and various other needs of the medium (including shorter pieces of dialogue than found in Tolkien’s novels). We examine LOTRO as expansion below, but in both cases – expansion in the games and compression in the films – the desire for a high degree of fidelity to the Tolkien works has clearly guided the creation of these adaptations. The simple fact is that millions of people venturing into the theater in 2001 to see The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring already knew the Tolkien books intimately and wanted fidelity to one degree or another. Of course, millions of the films viewers had never read the book – and so probably did not care about its fidelity to the novels – but the many millions of fans flocking to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (to use the US title) later that year, or Twilight seven years later, are even more likely to have read the books, to judge from the book-buying frenzies for those two series that preceded the launch of the first film. As Leitch notes, fidelity in adapting bestsellers or cult classics, as opposed to much lesser-known novels, is a goal pursued by filmmakers ‘because only bestsellers or cult classics are likely to bring out cinema audiences both large enough and devoted enough to the source text to threaten serious economic damage in the form of boycotts or badmouthing’ (Leitch 2010, 64). So however strongly scholars might argue against the abandonment of fidelity analysis, it is practically unavoidable when dealing with extremely popular sources. And that brings us to LOTRO.
LOTRO, released in April 2007 and supplemented regularly since then, follows the fantasy MMORPG formula closely. This formula was established in early role-playing games and made most popular by Blizzard Entertainment’s 2004 release, World of Warcraft. Players take the role of a character with a race found in Tolkien’s works – hobbit, dwarf, elf, or man – and solve quests through combat, exploration, and discovery in an effort to reach the maximum character level of 65. A wide variety of sub-systems ranging from economics through reputation and kinships reward continual play, in whatever desired combination for each player of solo or fellowship (group) questing – again, according to MMORPG standards. But LOTRO differs from other MMORPGs, of course, in its use of Tolkien’s environment and plot-lines, and while most quests are unrelated to the quest of the Fellowship of the Ring in the novels, the game features a series of epic quests that do, in fact, follow certain elements of Tolkien’s story. These quests give players limited interaction with the main characters in the novels – Gandalf, Aragorn, the hobbits, Elrond, and many more – and with numerous characters, locations, and plot developments only lightly treated in the books.
One example illuminates the working of the epic quests. Upon reaching maximum level, the character is summoned to Elrond in Rivendell. From here, a set of three major quest chains (called Volumes, Books, and Chapters in the epic quests, a clear attempt to appeal to those who have read the novels) makes the player an active protagonist into the briefly mentioned incident in the novels called ‘The Ride of the Grey Company’. The chapter in The Return of the King called ‘The Passing of the Grey Company’ covers the ending of this sequence, where Aragorn’s fellow Dúnedain (descendants of an ancient culture) meet Aragorn in the land of Rohan and present him with the standard that will announce him as the long-lost heir to the throne. But the novels do not cover the journey of the Dúnedain (who dress in unadorned grey, hence the ‘Grey Company’ name) from the north to the south at all; nor is this covered anywhere else in detail in Tolkien’s writings. What the game does, however, is to flesh out this ride in considerable detail, introducing members of the company and having the player perform actions that help to guide it along its path towards Rohan. This episode provides a clear example of the use of expansion in adapting games from other media, and we use it here as one of the foci of discussion. The episode also provides a useful introduction to the issue of fidelity to the original text, specifically to the relationship between fidelity to the original and additions to it.
The question of correspondence between a game adaptation and its source text come into play here. For film adaptation, at least for several of Leitch’s categories, correspondence is quite clear: main characters, primary plot lines, settings and descriptions, and sometimes even literary themes are reflected directly, sometimes with few changes (even if extensive compression) in the cinematic treatment. Certainly this was Jackson’s adaptive strategy, with his minor changes and additions actually highlighting, rather than altering, the degree of correspondence to the Tolkien texts. But for games, even basic elements of the correspondence are different. As one simple example, while story-driven games such as RPGs have beginnings, not all of them have endings; indeed the subscription model that drives World of Warcraft, LOTRO, and other MMORPGs depends entirely on the players never reaching the end (LOTRO’s developers are unfolding Middle-earth one major area at a time). Furthermore, unlike most books and films, it is common when playing an RPG to jump back and forth in a thoroughly non-linear fashion, returning to finish quest sequences or see if new ones have appeared, then returning to the spot where the story was left off, and so forth. Players can even cancel quests and return to them, re-starting the chain at that point. And non-player characters in RPGs that are drawn from novels have either far less to say and do than in the books or films (in the case of major characters) or far more (in the case of minor characters). So, whereas the question of correspondence between book and film can – and usually does – take clear forms, such as the effectiveness of character portrayal, whether or not romantic or power relationships had the right intensity, etc., for games the correspondence is in many ways more tangential, and the classic adaptation question of which is better almost nonsensical. Linda Hutcheon gives us a more fruitful line of questioning, discussing videogame adaptations and, with them, theme park rides as remediations of the source text. ‘What happens here’, she states, ‘is a heterocosm, literally an “other world” or cosmos, complete […] with the stuff of story – settings, characters, events, and situations’ (Hutcheon 2006, Kindle 452). This heterocosm, further, ‘has a particular kind of “truth-of-correspondence” […] to the universe of a particular adapted text’ (Kindle 455). This truth-of-correspondence occurs, largely, because the player is forced to interact with that world. It is not just viewed or read, it is manipulated.
But this truth-of-correspondence can be achieved in numerous ways. To return to Leitch’s adjustment category, compression and expansion offer heterocosmic attributes, both capable of presenting a correspondence that is far from 1:1 but that nevertheless reflects or captures elements of the source work long deemed important by followers of the source material. In LOTRO’s case, the ‘other world’ is incorporated in the expansion of Tolkien’s setting, character interactions, and even plot lines. To show how this works, we describe the means by which Tolkien’s details are fleshed out in LOTRO, grounding the details in the text’s descriptions or evocations but adapting these details to suit the demands of an MMORPG. MMORPGs in particular require expansion, since the financial and ludological basis for such games means that players must return to it again and again over months and even years, and no novel or film can provide anywhere near that much detail. Players need to be able to step into the world of the adapted story and spend a significant amount of time in that world, exploring its many locations and engaging with the characters and objects drawn from, or even simply suggested by, the source text. In addition, to meet the same requirement of long-term immersive player involvement, videogame adaptations must expand the scope of the original story, allowing players to meet added characters performing added tasks and fitting into added plots and subplots. They must allow players to explore what is happening in that world beyond the scope of the storyline presented in the source.
A category of a larger taxonomy rarely satisfies full analysis, however, and expansion is no exception. We suggest that Leitch’s expansion sub-category be further divided into selective expansion and comprehensive expansion. While there is no space here to explore fully the actual requirements for each type, a few examples from the videogame world will demonstrate the difference. LOTRO operates, we argue, through comprehensive expansion: the majority – if not all – of the locations, environments, characters, and cultures mentioned in the Tolkien novels are depicted in much greater detail in the game than Tolkien himself offers. So too are many of the sub-plots, although the main plot itself is assumed more than shown (yet it operates constantly in the background). By comparison, a game such as Electronic Arts’ The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II (2006) operates as a selective expansion: it focuses exclusively on a war little-covered in The Lord of the Rings, the war in the north, and it expands the roles of numerous minor characters (such as Glorindel the elf and Glóin the dwarf) in order to do so. Similarly, Sierra Entertainment’s The War of the Ring (2003) expands the details of (among other battles) the defense of Osgiliath by Boromir and Faramir, again barely covered in the novels. Both of these games take specific elements of Tolkien’s works and expand greatly upon them, as opposed to LOTRO, which uses the MMORPG genre and its expectation of non-ending gameplay to expand the details of Middle-earth and Tolkien’s story greatly but always anchoring those details in material from the source.
One technique the designers have used in LOTRO is to retain Tolkien’s maps of Middle-earth but expand on the detail of terrain and places of population. The maps themselves, printed with the first edition of The Lord of the Rings and replicated in numerous works over the years since publication, including the Jackson films, two boardgames entitled War of the Ring (SPI 1977 and Fantasy Flight Games 2004), and with especial detail in Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-earth, offer glimpses into the geography and built spaces of Middle-earth and combine with Tolkien’s writings to enhance those glimpses, but only rarely showing what might be in them. LOTRO takes these glimpses and expands them dramatically, and interestingly, in doing so, reflects what appears to have been one of Tolkien’s narrative strategies. Kevin Schut argues that in Tolkien’s stories, ‘[l]arge chunks of the story do not forward the plot and often have little to do with building a character drama; they read, instead, like sections from an almanac or encyclopedia’ (Schut 2011, 10). LOTRO’s wealth of details suggests that its own narrative – or at least immersive – strategy is precisely that of the encyclopedia: its attempt to incorporate as much of Tolkien’s setting as possible renders it much closer to the experience of reading Robert Forster’s A Complete Guide to Middle-earth or J. E. A. Tyler’s The New Tolkien Companion than the experience of reading the novels themselves, and certainly more than watching the Jackson films. The strategy of comprehensive expansion produces the encyclopedic effect.
In doing so, it allows players to interact with characters who make only brief appearances in the books, providing information to the major characters; LOTRO expands the role of these characters, making them conveyors of considerably more information than in the books and – more importantly for the MMORPG genre – appointers of quests. One example is Gildor Inglorien, whom the hobbits encounter as they make their way through the Shire early in the novel, and who disappears thereafter, but in LOTRO becomes a leading figure in a particular area of Middle-earth, where both his role and the area itself are treated to major expansion. Another is Radagast the Brown, a Wizard who appears but briefly in the text, fulfilling Gandalf’s request that he communicates with various creatures (Radagast’s special power) to send information to Saruman’s tower, an important element in Gandalf’s tale at the Council of Elrond. LOTRO expands Radagast’s role, bringing him much more significantly into the conflict, and indeed making him a leader in an important region of the game’s geography (and where he did not reside in the novels). Still another is Tom Bombadil, the strange earth-deity figure who helps the Fellowship out of two difficult situations in the novels but who does not appear at all in the Jackson films (except for a minor allusion in the Extended Edition). In LOTRO, Bombadil is placed within the same area as in the novels, but his role is expanded to guide the player through one of the epic quests. Other characters from the novels given much expanded roles are Halbarad the Ranger, Glorfindel the Elf, and Dwalin the Dwarf. Indeed, Dwalin has charge of a greatly expanded Thorin’s Hall, a location that showcases the architectural design skills of LOTRO’s artists and, from all the clues Tolkien gives us about dwarves (and Jackson briefly shows), looks faithfully dwarven in all its details. These expansions provide the primary means by which players experience the geography of Middle-earth and interact with the novels’ lesser characters and undeveloped locations, and accept quests and gain prestige in order to achieve character growth.
As in The Lord of the Rings, and adhering to the (more or less) standard set in RPGs from their inception, characters in LOTRO start by assigning them a race and a class. The four races are Man, Dwarf, Hobbit, and Elf (as one might expect), and classes range from Burglar and Champion through Lore-Master and Rune-Keeper. Here we examine the cultural cues provided by Tolkien for two of these races, hobbits and dwarves, that a player seeking deep fidelity would want to see, then comparing these cues briefly with what the game actually offers in two of the four races.
In a game adaptation that allows players to become hobbits, the role of the hobbit, as well as how hobbits experience Middle-earth, should reflect the cultural cues Tolkien provides. Most obvious is their ability to go largely unnoticed; not only does Tolkien mention that the history books of the elves have overlooked any and all involvement of hobbits in the past, but he also frequently finds opportunity to suggest that hobbits are all but forgotten during the Third Age of Men. Significantly, the set of writings we know from his published letters that Tolkien cared most about, The Silmarillion, mentions this race only once, right near the end, and he does not call them hobbits but rather halflings. Part of the make-up of a hobbit character in a game (characteristics clearly stated in the early pages of The Lord of the Rings) should be that they are rarely considered a threat, are met more frequently with humor as opposed to suspicion, and are able to remain unnoticed as they see fit. The battle abilities of hobbits are strongest in archery and throwing stones. They also seem to possess a degree of fortitude lacking among the other races. They do not study magic and tend to avoid those who do. The challenge then becomes offering a level playing field for all character options, but still limiting or dispensing with the magical (or magic-like) abilities of hobbits. Importantly, in offering the option to become a hobbit warrior LOTRO is already stretching the limitations of the adaptation. Frodo is obligated to leave the Shire, and his friends follow him out of loyalty. While hobbits are considered to be brave and will protect their territory when necessary, as a people they are not likely to strike out on warrior adventures of their own. Simple travel is not only uncommon, but strongly discouraged among the members of this race.
LOTRO limits hobbits to five of the nine possible classes: Burglar, Hunter, Minstrel, Guardian, and Warden. The first one is an obvious choice, drawing as it does from Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit, in which the dwarves took Bilbo on the adventure largely for his skills and stealth, and the second fits well enough given their stated proficiency with the bow, but the rest are clearly a cultural stretch. Tolkien tells us that hobbits love rustic song and dance, but a minstrel in LOTRO uses songs and tales to provide support for combat and raise their companions’ morale. Guardians and wardens, important in combat and thus extremely un-hobbit-like, are further out of line. But adherence to the RPG genre dictates that any race from any culture needs to be able to do a great many things, hence the classes available. In play, their ability to use stealth does indeed predominate; this skill is available in LOTRO to the burglar class, not the hobbit race per se. As in the novels, they are not magicians in LOTRO, although they can be healers (again depending on class). The actual hobbit traits LOTRO provides from the instance of character creation are Small Size (reducing the Might attribute), Hobbit-toughness (increasing Vitality), Rapid Recovery (speedier regeneration of Morale), Hobbit-courage (resistance to the lingering effects of Fear), and Resist Corruption (more able to resist temptation from Evil). These traits cohere well with Tolkien’s hobbits, and as with Tolkien they are not obvious in the game until seen in the context of other races during battles. Of course, there is no way an MMORPG could restrict adventurousness, since adventures and quests are at the core of the system and the experience, so what we end up with is a world in which many hobbits are engaged in many adventures in places far away from the Shire. LOTRO greatly expands the role of hobbits, and take significant care to present them according to many of Tolkien’s dictates, but for no other racial depiction does LOTRO deviate so significantly from the source material. The whole point of the participation of Bilbo, Frodo, and the other three hobbits in LOTRO was that the participation was extremely unusual and their very existence little known.
Tolkien’s dwarves are powerful, warlike miners, in love with cave and stone. Dwarves make strong armor and superior weapons, a trait that should be reflected in the strengths of player options. They are not magic-users, and they venture little outside their own domains. Tolkien expands very little on the characteristics of dwarves as a race, although much on their history; most of what has been depicted of dwarves in Jackson’s films is based on reasonable assumptions drawn from material in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, supplemented by creative license (the latter resulting in Jackson using Gimli as a comic figure). Dwarves in LOTRO can be Champions, Guardians, Hunters, Minstrels, or Rune-Keepers. The first two of these are entirely reasonable from an adaptation standpoint and the next two less so (one attempts to picture Gimli breaking out his lute instead of his axe during a battle and leading the fighters in a rousing anthem). The final choice, Rune-Keeper, contravenes Tolkien because of the magic-like capabilities of this class, but coheres because of the existence and power of dwarf-runes in Tolkien’s work. Dwarves’ traits in LOTRO include Sturdiness (increased Might and Vitality), Stocky (reduced Agility), Lost Dwarf-kingdoms (reduced Fate – owing to the fading existence of dwarves in this age of Middle-earth), Unwearying in Battle (better regeneration of Morale), and One-handed Axes (special striking and damage abilities with these weapons). All of these are entirely in keeping with Tolkien’s depiction. So, too, is the other interesting fact about dwarves in LOTRO: they can be male but not female; Tolkien notes in his appendices to the novels the paucity of women among dwarves, and Jackson picks up on this in a scene in which Gimli talks with Eowyn of Rohan. But since male and female characters in LOTRO don’t actually differ from one another in anything but appearance, this nod to Tolkien is purely cosmetic. Still, the way in which dwarves differ primarily between Tolkien/Jackson and LOTRO is in the game’s sheer number of them – dwarf NPCs abound throughout LOTRO, with colonies of them frequently encountered. In Moria itself, dwarves are everywhere, as they were most definitely not in the novels.
Here, too, we see the effects of expansion: Moria itself is extremely large (the dimensions in Tolkien’s work is unclear), but the number of settlements, outposts, and even small towns populated by dwarves – the Twenty-First Hall being the prime example – entirely contravenes the novel’s assertion that Moria had been abandoned. The effect, again, is the possibility of extended gameplay for the purpose of player engagement and player return, and indeed ‘The Mines of Moria’ module for LOTRO makes returning even more compelling by using the location as the basis for a game feature introduced with the release of the module. Before they reach Moria, players begin to accumulate items called legendary weapons, that typically outperform those previously acquired by the player and can be rendered even more powerful using an entire system of leveling and enhancements. Once inside Moria, players can begin the process of bringing the potential of these weapons to fulfillment. With this system, not only is Moria a game location for expansion in the adaptation, it is also a mechanic for expansion of the game system.
In a Lord of the Rings adaptation, a player who knows the Tolkien or Jackson texts expects to encounter, at the very least, the common enemy known as orcs and the rarely seen but extremely dangerous Ringwraiths (aka Black Riders and Nazgul). These evil creates are a staple of fearful conversations and scenes throughout the novel and they become an omnipresent in Jackson’s films – indeed, Jackson arguably overpopulates his films with orcs, as demonstrated during the siege of Helm’s Deep and as the characters flee from the Mines of Moria. In LOTRO, players discover these and many other types of enemies, and they do so constantly and in unrelenting quantity. What provides opportunity for further development and more interesting creative license is Tolkien’s mention of less-defined horrors in the world of Middle-earth. In various conversations and tales in the writings there is mention of dragons, long unseen but not necessarily extinct; forests of trees, such as the Old Forest, that are capable of hemming in and attacking wanderers; barrow-wights, the ghostly half-dead from ages past; white wolves; and giants. Possibly even more interesting is the mention of ‘other portents on the borders of the Shire’ (Tolkien 1954, 66), which Tolkien never clarifies. A videogame adaptation has every reason – and thus implicit permission – to extend these brief mentions to their logical conclusion, not only by making these horrors active antagonists of the players’ characters in the game, but also by using their very lack of description in the novels (Schut 2007, 6) to create depictions that demonstrate the capabilities of the game’s graphic artists and animators. LOTRO capitalizes on this opportunity repeatedly. Barrow-wights heavily populate the numerous barrows that players enter on the Barrow-downs and provide foes for several other locations as well. White wolves and other wolf-like creatures abound, and characters of advanced levels get to meet, battle, and in one case even protect, giants. A battle sequence conducted with Legolas the Elf pits the player against huge attacking ancient trees (and they appear elsewhere in addition), and dragons are encountered in several locations. The Ringwraiths provide a basis for an epic quest chain, in which the player tracks one of the Ringwraiths after their dispersal at the Fords of Bruinen; this chain is an expansion of the mention in the novels that the Ringwraiths had to be accounted for before Frodo and the company could leave Rivendell with the Ring.
The overarching question for us throughout this study has been: what does it mean to adapt a novel or film for a game? What is supposed to happen and how do we talk usefully of the resulting product? Videogames, after all, despite their clear similarities with film and television (moving pictures, or at least moving animations, and full sound) – similarities that have most certainly propelled their success – are a very different medium from either, even though, as Mark Wallin explains in detail in his essay on Tolkien adaptations (2007), they achieve part of their adaptive appeal through the rhetorical strategy of identification. The question Hutcheon, Leitch, and others have asked – What is being adapted? – comes very much to the fore here. What elements of the source text must emerge in the game for the adaptation to be considered an adaptation rather than an allusion in Leitch’s terms or an evocation in our own terms? The question is complicated greatly by two other types of fidelity already raised by scholars concerned with processes of adaptation (Bishop 2010, for example) and with adaptation as intertextuality (the predominant recent trend), and in need of much further study in games and other non-traditional adaptation types: fidelity has many sources, and many demands, among them medium and genre. The videogame medium has specific requirements, ranging from systems of interaction through systems of presentation and systems of progress and reward, and each videogame genre has its own versions of these requirements: in RPGs, the main ones are character traits, experience points, and combat, with a strong nod towards storyline. Players buying computer RPGs expect their characters, their actions, and the world they are discovering to be represented on screen in ways for that medium and for that genre, and they expect to interact with these elements in equally typical ways – with innovation taking the form of tweaks (of varying degrees) rather than true novelty. MMORPGs extend the computer RPG genre by adding the features of continual change to the gameworld and constantly available multiplayer adventuring with constantly shifting choices in player collaboration, and designs require fidelity to these elements as well.
We conclude with a return to the taxonomies of adaptation types proposed by Wagner, Andrew, and Leitch. LOTRO seems to fit best into the following three categories: Wagner’s analogy, Andrew’s borrowing, and Leitch’s adjustment (especially the sub-category expansion). But these are not equivalent categories (which is of course why new ones get proposed), and, while useful to see what LOTRO is not, we suggest that the game actually fits only the expansion category clearly. But even then, expansion describes only part of LOTRO as adaptation – an important part, to be sure, given the game’s constant theme of taking Tolkien’s world and fleshing it out in far greater detail than he ever did, but still only a part. There is more to the game adaptation, including a strong similarity in graphical appearance between portions of Jackson’s films and certain elements of LOTRO, and yet a sharp difference in others (Moria and Hobbiton are very similar in appearance to the films, Bree and Lothlorien quite different) and an enormous difference in the perceived sense of the time (it is hard to believe, after spending weeks or even months of play reaching Moria in LOTRO, that the Fellowship has only recently been there). The quest of the Fellowship seems to be taking forever, partly because players have such an enormous range of quests to achieve as they follow the path. Indeed, the sheer level of activity is entirely at odds with both Tolkien and Jackson; the characters in Tolkien and Jackson encountered few enemies except during military battle scenes, but the player encounters and battles hostile creatures and characters at practically all points along all paths and roads, and throughout all wilderness areas. But all of these details, in fact, reinforce the predominance of expansion as adaptive strategy.
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