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

3. If You Are Dominating Others, You Are Probably Bad

People who wish to dominate others are so often the bad guys in fiction, but the idea that it is evil to exert your power over the will of others is so central to Tolkien’s mythology. This creates an interesting challenge for anyone wanting to translate these works to video game form.

We can perhaps see why this is such a challenge by looking at how the ring itself is perceived in the source material versus a video game. The ring is a dominating force. It is the central symbol of evil in The Lord of the Rings and one of its main traits is trying to dominate the will of people who wear it.

However, if you are playing a game where your goal is to get more powerful and beat your foes, the ring would be the most coveted item in the game. Such is the case in Battle for Middle Earth 2. In The Lord of the Rings, taking and using the ring is almost universally a bad thing, especially if you’re using it to empower yourself and dominate others. In this strategy game, getting the ring in a skirmish match allows you to spawn an absurdly powerful hero to use battering your enemies. The ring in the novels and film allows you to dominate others and ultimately dominates you. In games where exerting power over others is how you win, it’s hard to get that message across when using the ring would be the quickest way to victory.

Gaining dominion over others is, of course, the central game dynamic of the Shadow of Mordor series, where you literally gain dominion over the minds of your foes. And while there may be story events that show how doing so is bad, the central gameplay loop contradicts that message.

Also, think of any strategy game, where the goal is almost always to wrest control of something from foes. That’s your goal in the amazing The Third Age: Total War mod for Medieval 2: Total War. You build armies and you conquer the lands of your enemies. Throughout all of this, you are accruing power, developing your territory (which might ignite some of the source material’s rage against industrialisation), and, if you’re doing a good job, bringing more and more people and lands under your control.

The mod is fantastic, but it’s essentially pushing you, through its gameplay, to conquer and exert your own control over as much territory as possible. The methods of winning most strategy games and most games in genres amenable to a Middle Earth game set gameplay against a central tenet of the original works.