Great post.

One of my friends at work, (an EVE player) who was considering LOTRO wanted to know how much it adhered to Tolkien Lore before he tried playing it. It was a question I couldn't really answer, as I had only read The Hobbit as a youngster and more recently, seen the films.

I can't imagine an MMO surviving as a business that required new players to haul in a lot of High Art intellectual baggage before they play. If the story was any good it on it's own merit, it would have been popular art to begin with, and it wouldn't be an issue for prospective players to just jump into the framework of the story and feel at home.

I regard my depth of exposure to Tolkien as being at a pop-art level, and I felt quite at home in the Shire, or the other starting areas in the game. This is one of the big successes of this approach.

One of the detriments comes later in the game, when it becomes harder to understand what is going on with the storyline. The forum of side-quests and gear-chasing has a tendency to pull you away from the main plot, which becomes muddled and rushed.

My lack of understanding the "advanced" game Lore vs. the Tolkien Lore was never really a problem in most game play. Maybe a few jokes went over my head in chat among some of the more well-read players. That's about it.

The issue of adherence to the original works is something that people who have not played the game have with it, dwelling on a set of Platonic sins that the producing company is potentially guilty of. I understand Turbine has to get the approval of the Tolkien estate on their additions. Is that good enough? Probably not.

For veteran players the in-game the correspondence doesn't matter as much, but the fact that some things match the books in some way, like the landmarks, characters, etc. - just enough to retain the identity of the whole thing.

It's a smart move to produce a media text (book, film, game, whatever) based on a popular work, particularly if there is a lot of attention to detail and to the quality of player experience to go along with it.

Too much Lore can kill off plots and characters that the game and players need to survive. Too little makes the game another senseless grind.

In Washington State there is a similar practice at Fry's, a similar chain of WalMart-sized computer stores. Their website advertises prices on various components, but the in-store price can randomly be marked-up anywhere from 0 to 50 percent over the advertised prices. Frys website doesn't state (in any obvious or prominent place) that prices only apply to "on-line" sales. They just want to take advantage of the fact that people price-compare online. If the prices the store's website offers are close to average, many people prefer just to drive down to the store and buy.

The State Attorney General ought to be pursuing this. It's systematic deception, pretty much only practiced by large corporate computer retailers. It would be in the interest of the state to protect the interests of people who make purchases locally. For everyone that is forced to purchase online due to advertising fraud, tax revenue is lost.