5 Reasons It’s Impossible To Make A Great Tolkien Video Game

4. In Middle Earth, Mastery Is Bad (Or Is At Least Highly Suspect)

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom,” Says Gandalf to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring. Trying to pull something apart to completely understand it and therefore better exert your power is the domain of the baddies in The Lord of the Rings. And yet, this is normally how we play video games, isn’t it?

Video games are often about understanding and exploiting systems. Think of nearly every fantasy RPG: you want to understand how the game works so you can get just the right skills, attain just the right weapons, pick just the right enchantments, and therefore maximize your power. In essence, from a gameplay perspective, it’s best for you to figure out exactly how the game works, (mentally) pull it apart to see how you can optimize your choices going forward, and exploit these systems to get your desired result.

The thing is, this kind of mastery turns people evil in Tolkien’s world. It’s the Sarumans and the Saurons and the Morgoths who want to pull apart the world, to understand it in a masterful way, to see how they can best use its workings to exert their power on the world and accomplish their objectives.

Something nearly every hero in the Lord of the Rings has to come to terms with is that there are things they cannot understand and certain forces that they should not exploit. The particular way we usually get good at video games, mastering the game’s systems and achieving a complete understanding of the rules of the world to multiply our power, just isn’t all that compatible with what actually happens in The Lord of the Rings.