Orcs Are People Too: Racial Identities in Lord of the Rings Online

By J.P.
"Agon Thalia" Sherman

Wired news’ correspondent Clive Thompson recently recalled his experience in the beta of Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar.  Rather than belt out a common review of the game, he took a completely different approach, one that I highly respect, and reported about the centrality of racial identities and abilities that dominate the rich lore of the fantasy genre.  In his article, Playing the Master Race, Clive dissects some of the common racial stereotypes of the fantasy genre.  As inhabitants of the first virtual Middle Earth, how do we identify with our avatars?  Does the subtlety of racial inequality inherent in MMORPG’s influence how we perceive the offline world?  Lastly, would it be more appropriate and potentially more fun to create a new system of how we define race in video games?  At the end of the article, as Clive is customizing his dwarven fighter, he wonders “Am I playing this character, or is it playing me?”  The answer is both. 

Racial Stereotypes and the Human as the Template:
Fantasy games strive to give players diverse gameplay to experience their worlds.  In games like Oblivion, the game experience changes if you play an intuitive Breton as opposed to a sly Argonian.  It is these differences in the races, both in appearance, reactions from others and stats that give the player a wide range of playable experience.  In Lord of the Rings Online, racial identities and stats are derived from the literal descriptions from Tolkien.  Each race has traits in which they excel and they have their weaknesses.  These traits have formed the foundation of almost all of the derivative works of fantasy.  Elves are physically weaker, yet good with arcane forces, dwarves are strong and hearty, yet weak in magic, orcs are strong, slow and dumb, goblins are faster, yet weaker than orcs.  The stand-outs in this panoply of races are the humans, they’re neutral in almost every sense of the word.  Humans rarely show any aptitude in ancient knowledge, nor do they posses a heightened natural strength.  Normally, to balance their lack of talents, they rarely have any weaknesses, although true to Tolkien’s lore, LotRO gives humans a weakness to power, they (we) have a remarkable talent to be tempted and corrupted by our baser instincts.  Humans also provide the template for all of the other races, if you tweak a human’s strength, lessen their magical potential, shorten them and give them a beard, suddenly you have a dwarf.  Reverse each of those characteristics, you find yourself looking at the classic elf.  As humans, we draw from our own characteristics and experiences, modify them and represent exaggerations of those characteristics in an “other”. 

Identifying With Your Avatar:
One of the more powerful aspects of MMO’s and RPG’s is that we feel that we should be connected to them in a very real sense.  This type of connection isn’t felt as much in simulations, FPS’s or strategy games.  In games where we have to create our character, we have to put some thought into it and we connect to our avatars in different ways.  Some of us create elaborate back-stories, some of us refer to their avatar in the first person and others spend vast amounts of time to outfit our avatar with the best and most appropriate gear available.  Each of these investments of time, creativity, thought and activity create that connection with our digital self.  Nick Yee shows us that there are trends and correlations that occur with age, type of person and choice of race in MMO’s.  If there were no trends, if the data were scattered across evenly, then that would be evidence that we really don’t invest much into our online persona.  The fact that we do identify and connect with our avatars causes me to wonder if it is what we bring to the game that influences our choices, does the game influence the choice or is the answer somewhere in between?

Character Creation and Racial Conceptualization:
Lord of the Rings Online has, at this phase, a fairly decent character creation process.  You can customize most of the aspects of your character in a very linear way.  One of the things that I noticed was that on a few of the geographic descriptions, the default color was dark-skinned and on others, there was more of a racial ambiguity.  This subtle switch on the default pale-skinned model was quite nice, not overt, but at the same time reinforced the idea of diversity of skills, diversity in appearance and a more individualized approach to creating your avatar.  In this case, it appears that Turbine is making a conscious effort to encourage people to see Middle Earth as more than what they’ve seen in the movies and to add to the story of Middle Earth.  This subtle approach to race-neutrality reminds me of the debate over the game Beyond Good and Evil, where the main character, Jade, is racially ambiguous as Chris Kohler describes on Wired’s Game Ι Life blog.  It’s encouraging to see the game industry take into account the wide range of people who play games.  However, Nick Yee shows us that from a study in 2005, in World of Warcraft, while there were nine races to play, around half of the total population played “white-looking” and “pretty” races.  While I doubt that this shows anything relevant about racial perceptions, I think that it reveals more about who and what gamers consider to be attractive.  

Do Our Perceptions Affect Our Gameplay?
Again, Nick Yee reveals that the avatar we choose ingame could reveal something about our personality.  People choose more intimidating avatars are typically less social and less likely to help newer players, conversely, people who choose a more attractive avatar are generally more open and social.  While this doesn’t hold true for all players, Nick Yee backs those claims up with excellent trends of collected data.  When we look at Lord of the Rings Online, there’s a forced separation between the “ugly” races: orcs, goblins, uruk-hai and others and the “pretty” races.  Only in the Ettenmoors do both the good and evil races exist as players.  In Middle Earth, there’s no justification in the lore for elves and hobbits to fight, but at the same time, there’s a need by the gamers to be able to bring out their darker side into the game.  Does this separation affect our gameplay in each area?  As a beta tester in both areas, logging several cumulative days in testing, I’ve noticed (in my wildly un-scientific test) that while there is some verbal griefing and smack-talking in Eriador, I haven’t noticed it as much compared to when I’ve played other games where the evil and good races were mixed together.  Could it be that Turbine’s decision to put all the “pretty” races together in the persistent world made us (subconsciously) a little nicer to each other?  I’d hypothesize that it has, although I’d want to actually wait and see the data confirm or falsify my gut feeling.  Is it be possible that in the Ettenmoors, where monster-play is active, players who want to be evil, are free to be as evil as they want, where ganking is a valuable and acceptable tactic and the verbal sparring is a part of the experience?  Again, I think the answer is yes.

Is Race Even the Right Term?  If Not, Does This Mean it’s all Moot?
Since the early 20th century, there’s been a vigorous and valid debate in the scientific community about the definition and value of the word “race”.  The amount of melanin in my skin and my cultural and historical background influence what I and others see as my race.  People like Stephen Colbert prefer not to even “see race”.  Or is race determined by the population genetics?  In a study of experts, biologists, developmental psychologists, physical anthropologists and cultural anthropologists, they couldn’t agree on a common definition of the word race.  Trying to define race is like talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi, it all depends on your point of view.  Are dwarves or elves different species, there are half-elves but are there half-dwarves?  And is the other “half” always human?  I was playing a D&D campaign a long time ago, where my gladiator was pitted against a half-ogre, “no problem” I thought.  Turns out the other half was a giant… “son of a bitch”.  We toss the term race around like it’s a defined term, but that one term is larger than any one of us can really define.  In gaming terms, it’s mainly used as a description of a character template.  Some games, like Star Wars Galaxies (pre-combat upgrade) gave users a sliding scale for their characters.  Humans could have high action pools, but low mind pools.  It was all based upon how they wanted to play their character.  The differentiations existed by positive traits and skills given to each race and by artificial caps to some of their stats.  Wookiees had a much higher health and strength upper limit in their pools than did Twi’ilek.  In Lord of the Rings Online, we see a similar approach, but not as customizable.  Each race has their benefits defined, their weaknesses defined and as a bonus, racial traits that further differentiate them from the other races. 

So, Who’s Playing What? or Who, or Something. 
Clive’s astute question, “Am I playing this character, or is it playing me?” sums it up.  They’re playing each other.  Gamers bring their personalities, desires, goals, prejudices into the game and these aspects affect the character creation.  The avatar however plays back, the avatar they choose presents an image to the virtual world that inspires trust or exudes fear.  Gamers in the world look at the avatar and judge them in their own personal definitions of beauty.  They respond to the virtual appearance and presence of the avatar combined with what’s said by the gamer.  Somewhere between those interactions, the gamer affects the experience of the other gamers.   Simultaneously, the avatars that meet in the virtual world also subtly affect the interactions of those gamers.  Our virtual lives, as the games themselves become more richly detailed and modeled in a fantastic reality begin to resemble the psychologists’ puppets. 

Do racial identities in games affect gameplay?  They probably do to some extent.   Does this mean that I need to simultaneously celebrate and ignore diversity in this virtual psychological, sociological and economic sandbox?  Sure, if you really want to, or you could make a character that you’ll be happy playing for hours and hours on end.  As long as the developers do their thinking, you’ll soon realize that you won’t even notice, you’ll just have fun.