A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Games and Gaming: Quantasy

Péter Kristóf Makai

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In short, the Tolkien phenomenon paved the way for a new type of game, one that would allow fans to go beyond reading and actually enter exciting worlds of fantasy to play a role in their own adventures. (Barton 2008, 19)

It’s worth noting that Tolkien’s project . . . is so vast, so unbounded in its aspirations, that we cannot even imagine its long-run consequences. . . . today, all we see is the fact that almost every synthetic world that’s been created has been modeled on Middle-Earth. (Castronova 2005, 298 n. 21)

The story of how Tolkien’s creations have made their way into material and virtual games is the story of regulating and calculating fantasy. What began as words on the printed page, set in type, designed for linear consumption, had to be transported into a realm where story gives way to rules allowing strategic decisions and numbers representing likelihood of success. To understand the changing meanings of fantasy and fun from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, we have to take a journey from the ars mythopoetica of Tolkien through tabletops and underground caverns of ones and zeros to the vast online universes of Norrath and Azeroth, aided by boards, dice, rulebooks, and video cards, meeting sub-creators, miniature-makers, and programmers along the way. These virtual worlds or the numerous, growing lands and planes of RPGs, are spaces for collaborative storytelling and they are the closest equivalent of Tolkien’s idea of “Faërian drama” that we have today.

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The Roots of Enchantment: “On Fairy-stories”

What is this elusive, nigh-mythical enchantment that captivated Tolkien so? In “On Fairy-stories” he describes the enchantment of fairies that “produces a Secondary World into which both the designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside” (OFS 64). According to Tolkien’s interpretation of fairy-magic, “If you are present at a Faërian Drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World” (OFS 63). That secondary world is pro-duced, in Tolkien’s terms, through the use of Art, and the product of Art is “Sub-creation,” but he uses fantasy to denote “both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression” (OFS 59–60). He claims Faërian Drama instills Fantasy in its beholders “with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism” (OFS 63). This is a satisfactory description of the ideal of a total medium which has permeated Western culture, one that is able to generate the materiality of an artificial scene and involves its audience not as passive spectators, but as active co-creators of the work of art, also known as total theatre, total cinema, or the Gesamtkunstwerk.

What Tolkien calls Fantasy, Primary and Secondary Belief, new media theorists call immersion, the psychological phenomenon of immediately experiencing another world in the aesthetic mode. In his theory and history of the concept of sub-creation, Mark J. P. Wolf differentiates between physical, sensual, and conceptual immersion:

On one end, there is the physical immersion of user [when she] is physically surrounded by the constructed experience [like in theme parks], thus the analogy with immersion in water. . . . there is the sensual immersion of the user, [where] the user’s entire body is not immersed, [but] everything the user sees and hears is part of the controlled experi-ence; [in the case of a darkened theatre or a video game], the audience vicariously enters a world through a first-person point of view or an onscreen avatar. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum is conceptual immersion, which relies on the user’s imagination . . . (Wolf 2012, 48)

The concepts of physical, sensual, and conceptual imagination neatly line up with the categories Tolkien devised to talk about the different degrees of attunement to the fictional world. But the “elvish craft” of Tolkien is capable of more than the immer-sion of the human sensorium in another world of “arresting strangeness” (OFS 60): it does so within the frame of a narrative thread that takes the interactor through the sub-created world. It is not called Faërian Drama for nothing.

Tolkien suggests that among the available media of his day, the verbal art of written narrative came closest to the magic of the Elves (OFS 61), so it is no surprise that when fantasy games migrate to the medium of the computer, it is first in textual adventure games that the enchantment of another world is woven. That is why these pieces came to be called Interactive Fiction amongst their most ardent practitioners and players. Tolkien never divulged just what the subject matter of a Faërian Drama

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is, and what the Elves who play with their human victims really do, but Verlyn Flieger suggests that they “are [not] the chief actors in fairy-stories; they are there simply to interact with . . . the human being who . . . wanders into the enchanted world” (2002, 23). If so, this means that they are both the designers and, to a lesser extent, bit players in a story enacted by the chief human agent, an idea that dovetails nicely with the ludic framework of interactive games. These fairy-plays go beyond the attempted illusion of material theatre, which Tolkien deemed unsuitable for their presentation. Owing to the rapid technological development of entertainment media, this vision has since then been made reality to a large extent, and our current virtual worlds in video games and online role-playing games are massively dependent on fantasy con-ventions as brought alive by Tolkien.

All Aboard: Wargaming and Board Games

One cannot convincingly tell the tale of gamifying the imagination without recourse to the history of military simulation in general, and wargames in particular. In fact, it could be argued that, with its intent to run several different scenarios of various campaigns and its elaborate rules utilizing statistics and the element of luck, military simulation is the stern, disciplinarian grandfather of modern fantasy gaming.

The first miniature wargame with ties to Tolkien was Tactical Studies Rules’ (TSR) Chainmail, created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Published in 1971, it was origi-nally a rule-set for medieval warfare. It had a fairly well-developed system for simulat-ing battles that took into account such aspects as movement rates on different terrains, morale, fatigue, range of fire, the effect of cover, weather, and so on. But it was the 15-page fantasy supplement which made it stand out from other wargaming compen-diums. Gygax and Perren wrote that they included the supplement because:

Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat. [The supplement allows the wargamer to] either refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own “world,” and conduct fantastic cam-paigns and conflicts based on it. (Gygax and Perren, 1976)

The appeal of recreating not just real historical battles, but the meeting of hosts from literature was immense and the supplement became an immediate success. It featured mythical creatures and races from Tolkien’s legendarium, such as Elves, Hobbits, Ents, and Balrogs, 16 magic spells ranked by complexity, and an alignment system that placed forces of good and evil along the axis of law and chaos, but included troops of neutral alignment too. Gygax later went on to create a game of fantasy with Dave Arneson, a fellow wargaming enthusiast he met at the second Lake Geneva Convention, Dungeons and Dragons, that would be the first of its kind: a role-playing game (RPG).

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Chainmail’s evident success created a need for other game systems representing fantasy battles, and the South Essex League of Wargamers’ (SELWG) Middle Earth [sic] rule-set was the first of its kind to “cover specifically the mythical world, Middle Earth, created by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in his books The Hobbit, and trilogy, Lord of the Rings” (Johnson et al. 1976, 1). The SELWG positioned its creation as a custom-built system, since, in their eyes, other fantasy rule-sets were heavily depend-ent upon medieval/ancient era rules whose strong simulationist tendencies did not chime in well with players’ conception of epic fantasy battles fought on a massive scale. Curiously, the Middle Earth wargame left some iconic foes out, such as Balrogs, Saruman, and Dragons, for the designers felt that in battles between the forces of the West and Mordor, these characters would be “superfluous . . . and would only lengthen the rules” (1976, 1). An interesting design decision was to restrict neutral troop types to fight only if the forces of law were losing, hinting at a strategic design imbalance to steer conflict towards a eucatastrophic end. According to the designers, “it makes for more interesting wargames if the sides are ‘unfair’ ” (5). The SELWG’s product was also more charitable with charts and tables, which created nuanced differences in unit morale, so the effect of a hero killed in battle or a disorganized unit to such events as friendly units falling back or routing within specified distances, energy level depletion charts for spellcasters, success of siege weaponry or weather, were all control-led by a 20-sided die. The 1976 Middle Earth rule-set included eleven spells for Gandalf and nine for the Witch-King of Angmar, with common spells, such as talking to animals and casting bolts of defense, and spells exclusive to the two sides, like a “beam of good” or “rout” (19), respectively.

Though in retrospect they seem an integral part of the history of how Tolkien’s writings have entered the realm of gaming, wargames were not at all obvious candi-dates for this process to start at. With its strong emphasis on recreating accuracy in probabilities of success, or natural/physical simulation in short, wargaming has intro-duced numbers for determining the outcome of just about any aspect of the fictional events and circumstances that can be calculated. They were instrumental not just in recreating but in replaying and thereby modifying Arda’s history on the miniature table as well. As generals, players were required to make important strategic decisions, inviting an element of role-play, but one that is crude by later RPG standards. Still, the conventions at Lake Geneva (Gen Cons) were also the birthplace for the conven-tions of modern fantasy gaming, where elements from The Lord of the Rings and other works of imaginative world-making were quantified for entertainment.

Significantly, the Gen Cons featured another entertainment staple that would come to borrow from the ethos and tropes of the fantasy genre, namely board games (for an exhaustive list of Tolkien board games, see Watry and Kuo 2003–). During the early days, the International Federation of Wargaming mostly played with military board games from Avalon Hill and Simulation Publications, Inc. (Laws 2007, 9), but it did not take long for board gaming to embrace the world of The Lord of the Rings. One early herald was Conquest of the Ring by Hobbit Toy and Games (1970), a very sche-matic Ludo-alike that is poorly themed and only interesting for its primacy. A more

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noteworthy treatment of Tolkien’s world in board game form is Land of Legend’s Quest of the Magic Ring (QotMR, Hill 1975), the first fleshed-out tabletop game that does not intend to simulate battle realistically. Two to seven players can participate, who take the roles of The Lord of the Rings’ characters whose names were changed because of copyright issues, and in case of a shortage of players, the available ones control multiple positions. The gameplay progresses as the good characters try to destroy the Ring by taking it to the Crack of Fire, whereas the Dark Lord and the White Wizard seek to acquire the Ring for themselves and take it to their own towers. The game-board is remarkable because it is comprised of interlocking roads and loops, so players can choose their path on the gameboard to victory. As in other capture-the-flag style games, there are separate rules for encounters, which determine what events take place and who gets the Ring when two game pieces meet. Its relatively simple rules and engaging gameplay made QotMR stand out as a ludic landmark in making Tolkien’s work playable.

Chronologically speaking, in this early period of fantasy gaming, throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the dividing line between military simulation and classic board games is more porous than later on, largely due to the small circle of gaming enthusiasts. A case in point is The Hobbit-inspired Battle of the Five Armies (published by Lore; Smith 1975)/The Battle of Five Armies (published by ICE; Smith 1984), a game originally designed by Larry Smith where players can enact the iconic Third Age battle. The board is the wargaming industry standard hexagonal map, but the game is much more streamlined, beginner-friendly, and omits a host of specialized rules that characterize simulationist wargames. At the same time, the original design embraced the theme of uneven conflict now familiar to us: the Free Peoples’ lack of troops are made up by improved statistics, encouraging conservative play, whereas the Dark forces’ superior numbers allow the player controlling them to attack more recklessly. In a similar vein, but with vastly greater complexity, we find ICE’s Fellow-ship of the Ring (Charlton and Neidlinger 1983), whose greatest innovation was to create a game of imperfect information, as players have no knowledge of distribution of the enemy combatants’ pieces. Furthermore, the inclusion of rumors about troop movements brings another element of uncertainty into play, so reconnaissance becomes the key to success. Finally, Simulation Publications, Inc.’s War of the Ring (Barasch and Berg 1977) is remarkable for making a hybrid game with several sce-narios and two rule-sets, with one that plays as one would expect from a wargame, whereas the other enhances the play with spellcasting and mission objectives, and includes more of Middle-earth lore, making the game more flexible, suited to differ-ent styles of play.

The next significant board game that moved away from wargaming was Riddle of the Ring by Fellowship Games Inc. (Califf and Walker 1982). Compared to QotMR, Riddle of the Ring is a fully licensed game, using the original names of Tolkien’s legendarium, in which two to eight players struggle in teams to take control of the Ring, one half of them playing Hobbits, the other the Black Riders. The game-board representing Middle-earth is still hexagonal in a nod to the genre’s roots. On the other hand, players’

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moves are decided by the throw of a die, and additional actions are taken using specific cards. Since players are grouped in two opposing camps, there is a degree of cooperation which was not present in previous games, fostered by “Friendly Exchanges” of cards and several types of “Power Play” moves. Battle is regulated by such Power Play cards, and so is taking a card from another player; players may use Clairvoyance to gain knowledge of other players’ hands and Riddles to acquire cards from another player by guessing its name, in a homage to Bilbo’s fondness for riddles.

The pinnacle of Tolkienian board games is Reiner Knizia’s (2000) award-winning Lord of the Rings (Kosmos/Fantasy Flight Games). The game is renowned for Knizia’s thematic approach to game design: the themes of fellowship and corruption infuse the rules and the subsequent gameplay. During a session, two to five players become Hobbits, who must complete the well-known journey, but this time, the figure repre-senting Sauron descends upon the master game-board, and travels towards them according to the rules to thwart the Hobbits’ quest. The master game-board is the stage where the corruption of the Hobbits and Sauron’s progress is represented; players must collect tokens during the scenarios in order to avoid corruption. The cooperative element comes to the fore in these scenarios, as players try to pass the Ring on to the least corrupted Hobbit by collecting Ring tokens. Even if a later expansion to the game adds Sauron as a playable role, thereby sowing the seeds of secrecy and intrigue among the players, the orchestration of moves as players devise the optimal strategy for com-pleting the scenario gives the game a unique flavor among Middle-earth board games.

In the wake of Richard Garfield’s (1993) wildly successful Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast), the market was well prepared for the eventual emergence of a Tolkien-inspired trading card game (TCG). The Middle-Earth Collectible Card Game (ICE 1995) and Decipher Inc.’s The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game (Kallenbach, Lishke, and Reynolds 2001) were efforts to capitalize on this gaming phenomenon. In TCGs, players purchase decks of cards with different monsters, spells, and artefacts, building their unique deck that reinforces the effects and abilities of the other cards. However, not all cards are printed in equal numbers, as more powerful cards are uncommon or rare, and are sold randomized in packets, creating an artificial scarcity of certain cards. When there is scarcity and more-or-less random distribution, of course, a market economy immediately arises, and the greatest allure of playing these games is the trading of cards for strengthening one’s deck, their acquisition and loss through play. This mechanic would later play an integral part in the creation of game economies in MMOs.

Following the release of Peter Jackson’s movies, dozens of rethemed games were published with The Lord of the Rings artwork, including strategos, Monopolies, check-ers, backgammons, parcheesis, but by that time most ludic adaptations of Arda had migrated to the computer. Compared to video games, the media that profited most from the movies, original board and other table-top games have come few and far between in the new millennium. It appears that despite their diversity, most board games have satisfied themselves with the Third Age, as there are several concepts which travel well from the epic novels to board games. The journey story is easily

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mapped on the game-board, where navigating the terrain and managing its geography becomes paramount to victory. Even though The Lord of the Rings is a story of oppos-ing forces, the wealth of characters allows for a fair few players to partake in a round, and the mechanics foster the forming of alliances forged by a common purpose, which is the heart of Tolkien boardgaming.

Rolls, Skills, and Action: Role-playing Games

After fantasy wargaming started in earnest, it did not take long for a momentous offshoot to grow on the trunk of Chainmail and similar games. 1974 saw the appear-ance of Dungeons and Dragons, the first role-playing game (RPG), where the uniforms of field marshals are cast away in favor of the bodice and the doublet. Epic though the battles fought on the miniature layout table might have been, they nonetheless lacked a fundamental part of what makes us involved in fiction: human interaction on an individual level, motivations, personalities, and passions, in other words, the building blocks of stories. Role-playing games have set the camera of the fictional world at a lower angle, moved players away from the battlefield and into the cities and wildernesses where true adventure takes place.

That being said, the history of RPGs is not discontinuous with that of wargames. Both Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were avid wargamers and designers, and it is while getting bored of Chainmail that they conceived of a more character-oriented approach to fantasy. In this new genre, players would inhabit individual denizens of an imaginary, mostly pseudo-medieval world, roaming the face of the earth, encoun-tering strange creatures, slaying monsters, and questing on behalf of powerful lords of the realm. Descending into the depths and besting beasts, the game was quite appropriately titled Dungeons and Dragons (D&D: Gygax and Arneson 1974).

The most salient mechanic that made its way into RPGs from wargaming is that numbers represent skills, determining the success of actions in adventuring. Where wargamers were restricted to troop size, movement, morale, hit points, damage, and their modifying factors, RPGs have numbers representing everything. In D&D, the first order of the day was to determine the basic statistics for the player characters (PCs) in the six main skills: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma, which in turn modified other attributes ranging from the amount of weight one can carry to the number of hirelings they can take under their wings. Since these PCs were more likely to survive entire campaigns (another military term that was carried over) of adventuring, they needed more personalization and a greater development curve, which led to the mechanic of accumulating experience points (XP). Upon reaching a certain predetermined amount, players would “level up,” gaining a new title and new abilities, such as more powerful spells or more hit points. Looking at the level-up tables, it appears that one of the main draws of D&D must have been the added detail to the magic system, as the Wizard title required the most XP (Gygax and Arneson 1974, 16). The six-tiered magic spell system allowed

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Magic-Users to cast 54 new spells, and even Clerics could indulge themselves in 26 supporting spells, mostly unique to the class. The inspiration of The Lord of the Rings is clear in letting players role-play members of another race (Elves, Dwarves, or Halflings) and the rules state that “[t]here is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top” (Gygax and Arneson 1974, 8). Progressive development is therefore one of the core ideologies of the genre. The initial rules of the original Dungeons and Dragons were thin, but would prove to be foundational, improved upon by later rulebooks and other role-playing systems following its footsteps, most notably the even more successful Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1977–1979).

ICE’s Rolemaster (Charlton et al. 1980–1982) is a later, more mature system that is significant because it was the basis of a dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienian RPG, Coleman Charlton’s Middle-earth Role Playing (1984). The RM/MERP system expanded upon the original six character attributes, giving their players 11: Strength, Agility, Con-stitution, Intelligence, Intuition, Presence, Appearance, Quickness, Reasoning, Memory, and Empathy. Additionally, players could become proficient at primary and hobby skills, including aptitude at different weapons classes, languages, skills of subterfuge, and activities like foraging, leather-working, public-speaking, caving, or sailing. They could play any of the Middle-earth races we know, including Dwarves, Noldor and Sindar Elves, Hobbits, Uruk-hai, Trolls, but also as different cultures of men, like Haradrim, Dûnedain, or Beornings. Characters could belong to one of the six available professions: scouts, warriors, rangers, bards, mages, or animists. Contrary to D&D, RM/MERP featured a percentage-based probability system, which meant that most stats would go up to 100. This and the evolution of game systems resulted in the mushrooming of tables and charts for everything from the effect of adolescence on stats, specific outcomes for fumbles and failures, differentiating between more than 70 ways of an action going wrong, through critical hits, resistance spells or pages of price charts for any piece of equipment that an adventurer might need.

None of the fancy statistics and dice rolls above would mean anything, though, if it were not for the meaning behind the actions. The role of the impartial referee of the wargame, who adjudicated battles based on his own strategic experience before there was any mathematical simulation, turned into that of the game or dungeon master (GM/DM), the storyteller who described the fantastic world through rich sensory detail, play-acting the dozens of Non-Playing Characters and generally keeping track of everything relevant to the role-playing experience (Tresca 2011, 74–75). Fantasy RPGs tend to follow the tripartite carving up of the gameworld as inaugurated by D&D: the civilized world of humanoid races’ settlements, the wilder-ness beyond the city walls, and the underworld, the dungeons that players explore in search of treasure. Besides regulating the process of combat and reconnaissance, game masters make the world tick, they design every aspect of the fictional world. Before the game can commence, however, players must create characters, roll up the stats, sort out gear, and weave a back story which transform a Quickness 25 value into a childhood with an abusive parent who would cripple and scar the player, or a

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Reasoning 89 into a scholastic upbringing of a young player educated by monks via debating the more arcane aspects of theology. During the play session, players describe their actions in sufficient detail for the GM to make sense of it, and the GM responds by describing the effect of their actions on the environment. It is these interactions between players and the GM that constitute the unique charm of table-top role-playing, allowing a greater degree of socializing and immersion into fantasy worlds than in any other media of ludic engagement.

Fantasy Envisioned and Enworlded: Sub-creation in Computer Games

Computers offered a technological solution to the demand that designing dungeons, plot, and bearing all the rules and regulations in mind placed on a DM. Due to the participatory, procedural, spatial, and encyclopedic properties of the digital medium (Murray 1997, 71–89), computers could offer situations to which players could respond, where the flow of action was not interrupted by human calculation. Also, geographical features, architecture, and spatial relations could be represented more accurately in virtual space, and the sheer enormity of the fictional world could be displayed as naturalistic stimuli. In exchange, everything that is possible in a com-puter game has to be programmed and implemented in it first, to the loss of the vast freedom DMs and players had on their hands.

We can count several Tolkien- and fantasy-based games among the earliest com-puter games. The most famous of them is ADVENT, or Adventure, created by Will Crowther and Don Woods (1975–1976), the first of its kind. Also called interactive fiction, these textual adventure games are designed like mazes the players have to find their way out of by combining the available commands, as there is only one “proper” method of progressing through the game (Juul 2005, 67–69). In Adventure, players explore a cavern system eerily reminiscent of the Bedquilt region of the Flint Mammoth Cave System in Kentucky, which Crowther himself has helped map (Jerz 2007). Navigation is made possible by typing short commands (such as “go north” or “get lamp”), which the game parser digests and provides a response to. The spelunking theme of the game takes a turn for the fantastic as players find magic beans, rogues, Dwarves, kill dragons, and collect treasure in the caverns. Because of the arresting strangeness the players experienced while interacting with the program, early game designers were yearning to recapture the effect their fantasy reading and playtime had on them.

Adventure’s influence then ushered in more complex works that, like D&D sheets, stored characters, either a single one or an adventuring party, whose skills were devel-oped by interacting with the game world. Drawing on Matt Barton’s history of computer-based RPGs (CRPGs; 2008, 32–36), we can see that there were legions of programs which pledged intellectual fealty to Tolkien from the earliest mainframe games onwards: Moria (1978), Orthanc (1978) for the PLATO, through Moria (1983)

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and Angband (1990) for UNIX, all the way to Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979) in BASIC, and by the middle of the 1980s, the budding genre of com-puter adventure and role-playing games were established as the foremost vehicle for telling a story on the new medium.

A classic text adventure game that epitomized the mid-1980s efforts to bring Tolkien’s world to video games was Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler’s (1982) award-winning The Hobbit (Melbourne House). It is already surprising that the design-ers chose Bilbo’s tale over Frodo’s, as the common practice was to work with the trilogy’s material rather than any other bits of the legendarium. This game is also the first clear adaptation of a Tolkien book to the computer in the sense that the story the player has to actuate is recognizable as the plot of the book it is based on. It is renowned for featuring more and better drawn illustrations than other works of the era, but the greatest innovations consisted of a real-time environment, characters that acted autonomously without player input, and a capable text parser. These were enough to make a lasting impact on the text adventure community (Montfort 2005, 171). The developers have followed this game up with other adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, for example Lord of the Rings: Game One (Mitchell and Megler 1985) which relied on the widespread success of The Hobbit, but failed to replicate it.

Some developers in the 1990s ventured further from the textual roots of adventure and traced their steps back to the tactical side of fantasy. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) was a breakthrough among real-time strategies (RTS). Hearkening back to the wargaming era, instead of an individual adventurer, players became generals once more, but this time, leaders who were thinking on their feet. With no turns and no time to think, the conflict between the two races gave players an added sense of thrill as they had to shape the virtual world’s history at a far more frantic pace than before. Because Warcraft segmented the gameplay via the campaigns’ strategic maps, its mission briefings recounted a coherent backstory, objectives were varied, and dialogue was added in later installments, the Warcraft universe came alive. Through the missions of the game, and its sequels, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002), the epic narrative of Azeroth and Lordaeron became more articulated, acquired a dense history, a spatial narrative of conquest, insurgence, heroes, and corrupted leaders that resonate well with the power struggle at the heart of Arda’s grand narrative. Its world-building was rich enough that it allowed the world of Azeroth to be properly represented in the World of Warcraft later on, in 2004. RTSs were also capable of remediating the wars of the Third Age under Electronic Arts’ wings, who produced The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth (Browder and EA Los Angeles 2004) which tied in to the nar-rative and visual realm of the films, while still managing to be an enjoyable and balanced game of its own right.

The Elder Scrolls saga is the example of a series of video games that defined what Western CRPGs were capable of, and it is illustrative of the aspirations of the genre. Though not a clear adaptation of Tolkien’s work, it nonetheless carried on the tradi-tion of exploration, adventure, and character development. The huge traversable maps

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Bethesda Softworks designed for TES: Arena (1994), TES II: Daggerfall (1996), and later additions to the series, the open-ended gameplay, the many factions the players could associate themselves with, and the multitude of skills player characters could learn ensured that gamers who were dedicated to the table-top RPG ideals of freedom and simulation would find plenty of lore and spatial, numeric, and narrative progress for their liking. In CRPGs like The Elder Scrolls, players begin with the creation of their characters, choosing the character’s name, sex, race, class, abilities, skills, and outward appearance, its reputation, alignment, and relationship to morals, all of which affect non-player character reactions. Later games in the TES series often resort to the device of captivity as a transformative environment where freed prisoners are able to redefine themselves as agents in the gameworld, which is frequently jeopardized or outright doomed to destruction by malevolent forces the player ends up opposing.

In escaping from wrongful imprisonment, and saving the world from the corrup-tion of power, the spirit of Tolkien lives on in computer games, but so do the myths of acquiring ever greater numbers of aptitude, bartering with merchants, amassing game gold, and defeating heaps upon heaps of monsters of increasing difficulty. By the use of randomly generated terrains, sublime quests, monsters lurking behind every tree, and clunky game economies that were easier broken than fine china, CRPGs have brought in an era where players accepted long hours of adventuring in rich pseudo-medieval environments that nonetheless generated a more modern feeling of continu-ous development and exploration without a DM. Many solitary players have found these game mechanics engaging, but while graphics grew splendid and world-building immense, the old feeling of companionship that table-top RPGs encouraged was sorely lacking in single-player CRPGs, even when the player controlled a whole adventuring party. Solutions were just around the corner.

The Apotheosis of the Sub-created World: Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs

The latest step in the evolution of Tolkien’s ideas and worlds into games took place when the Internet spread wide enough that a whole generation of players sought to reinstate this camaraderie that the RPG experience lost in migrating to the computer. The answer of game designers was to make the worlds of virtual fantasy persistent, so when one particular person stopped playing the game, the game-world would not go away. 24/7 adventuring gave us Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, which were by and large the Internet version of text adventure games, but with a more collaborative aesthetic. Their graphical versions, vast in scale, populated by more players than some countries, came to be called Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, or MMOs.

MMOs and other synthetic playspaces are worlds in progress. New game content is added on a regular basis, giving players previously undiscovered continents, dun-geons, and cities to explore. Some of the MMOs allowed players to take a more creative part in shaping the geography and content of the game world (Dibbell 1998, 39–68),

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but most virtual worlds are more designer-dominant, where players mostly affect the game-worlds’ parameters via feedback (Bartle 2004, 653). Designers working on worldmaking in MMOs are like DMs in that they are responsible for the atmosphere of the world, they create the landscapes and the distinctive regions, conveying a sense of lived-inness to the players. But, being the massively populated environments they are, they also control people flow via imbuing the world with quests and infra-structure, such as travel systems, banks, and commercial hubs, they distribute resources and shape the ergonomics of the world.

MMOs are unlike other forms of fantasy gaming in that people who partake in their adventures and explore their synthetic realms form a large community. Ethical norms and cultural assumptions arise from the interactions between fun-seeking individuals, although the most tangible way players have an effect upon one another is through the in-game economy. Because worlds like The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LotRO; Turbine Inc. 2007–) feature vocations and professions similar to the hobby skills of table-top RPGs (in LotRO, these would include, among others, being an Armorer, an Explorer, a Farmer, a Scholar, a Jeweler, or a Cook) that imply gathering raw materials, processing them, and selling them or using them up as aids in adventuring, lively game economies have sprung up. Since not all people like to spend their whole time in-game gathering wool or mining ores when they could be battling dragons, commercial areas and systems became important venues for player interaction. Trading posts also allow some players to earn their game gold solely from the buying and selling of goods. The game economies in MMOs mimic properties of real-world economies enough that journalists and economists have started investigating them as venues for research, a kind of “natural experiment” (Dibbell 2007, Castronova 2006).

At their best, MMOs like RuneScape (Gower and Gower 2001) or Everquest (MqQuaid, Clover, and Trost 1999), both coming from the same fantasy stock as most synthetic worlds, are able to draw players into their fictional worlds by presenting their char-acters’ avatar in three-dimensional space and letting them wander around cities and the countryside, challenging their problem-solving skills in quests and combat, and establishing devoted gamer communities in clans, on official forums and fansites. Even if at this point in history, players are not projected physically into the fictional world, nor do they give Tolkien’s Primary Belief to the game’s universe, they nonetheless feel emotionally engaged by the opportunity to literally “build character” in these spaces. They are enchanting in the sense that the cybernetic feedback loop immediately dis-plays how every action affects the game world, including other players, and the quest lines that prod characters to traverse the virtual space, as well as the emergent drama of defeating larger-than-life adversaries, the bosses, give players a sense of meaning for their actions. All this makes MMOs true to the ethos of the fairy-story and Faërian Drama that Tolkien envisaged.

There are certain facets of the culture surrounding MMOs that go against this idealized image of the magical fairyland of escapist adventuring. For one thing, the player base of virtual worlds communicates anonymously through avatars, and ano-nymity in online environments is conducive to disruptive behavior, also known as

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grief play, which shatters the experience of immersion (Lin and Sun 2005; Chen, Duh, and Ng 2009). Griefers abuse other players verbally, steal their kills and loot, or in player vs. player situations, gang up on and kill other, usually lower-level players. One could say that, just like the One Ring, online invisibility corrupts by instilling a sense of social distance. Another issue that plagues MMOs, or their economies to be precise, is the large number of playing accounts created solely to collect game gold, which are later sold online to wealthy players looking for in-game advantages (Heeks 2008). These efforts are often aided by programs that control characters even when there is no actual human player clicking on the screen. So-called “bots” or macros undermine the game economy by devaluing tasks that legitimate players would do to earn money, and they sour player experience because bots are non-communicative and trained to perform repetitive behaviors, at which they toil away day and night (Consalvo 2007, 107–148; Hoglund and McGraw 2007). Seen from this angle, MMOs are less like a picturesque, medieval universe of dragon slaying and more like an early modern battleground for real people with commercial interests, where one’s fun is another’s livelihood, and play and production are inextricably linked. Yet, this image is also part of what makes online games and virtual worlds such vibrant spaces, inhab-itable universes in miniature to which players flock to experience the strange and heady mixture of fantasy, technology, entrepreneurship, and social bonds.

Conclusion

Having seen how analogue and digital entertainment have drawn on Tolkien’s world and his ethos of world-building, we can see a few general trends that are worth noting. First of all, Tolkien’s source material, the detailed, multi-layered representation of Middle-earth, was in and of itself inspirational: the encyclopedic quality of his work gave a texture to his imagined world previously unparalleled in the history of fiction, as Castronova astutely observes in the epigraph to the present chapter. The prolifera-tion of games that grew out of this fictional soil owed much to the American reception of his novels, which reached cultural creatives and hobbyists who saw potential in reenacting and quantifying aspects of the fictional world. The game systems devised and adopted during the wargaming era were influential insofar as they made events in the books replayable, extending the life and altering the outcome of battles fought on Middle-earth. The idea of counterfactual martial narratives played out on Ardan soil, represented on the model layout table, paved the way to board games based on Tolkien’s novels, where a fertile process of cross-pollination began as age-old games were rethemed with Tolkienian motifs that eventually gave rise to games specifically designed to suit the central themes of the novels. Role-playing games were instru-mental in exchanging a bird’s eye view of the strategist for the more personal, but also more intriguing heroics of individual adventurers, and they were a bona fide experimental laboratory for game mechanics that were complex but fun. As Dungeon Masters became sub-creators in conjuring up rich fantasy playgrounds for derring-do,

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intrigue, and simulated battles, college students and other misfits were faced with the magical, but onerous task of making a world work. The evolution of computing at the very same venues where Tolkien’s books and RPGs first lodged themselves into the public consciousness ensured that young off-duty programmers would yearn to recreate their days of adventuring in the digital realm. When the home computers and the Internet both penetrated average middle-class households in both the United States and the United Kingdom, the time was ripe to connect these players in larger communities that commercialized the genre and infused it with a work ethic that was unheard of prior to the advent of MMOs. Today, we are in a situation where these playful instances are actively intermingling with one another, creating hybrid forms, and knowing the rapid pace of media evolution we can look forward to ever new ways of employing the imagination to playful ends.

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Further Reading

Gygax, Gary. 1977. Monster Manual. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.

Gygax, Gary. 1978. Players Handbook. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.

Gygax, Gary. 1979. Dungeon Masters Guide. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.