Suite101 article for March 25, 2002

[Michael Martinez]

Mountains on the left, ruins on the right

The (mostly) gaming oriented journal Other Hands recently announced it would shut down its print publication and refrain from publishing new modules and articles based on Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role-Playing game. The capitulation of Other Hands before the Tolkien Enterprises juggernaut was the final gasp of pre-movie Tolkien-inspired fan-designed adventure gaming.

Now, there are still various MUDs, MUSHes, and underground modules and impromptu gaming systems floating around out there which owe something to Tolkien's Middle-earth. But Other Hands was different. It attempted to elevate the study of gaming innovation to a near-academic level of scrutiny. There wasn't quite peer review in the process, but generally speaking, if you had the audacity to publish an article in Other Hands, your peers were sure to have something to say about your work.

In today's world of trademark-centric business decision-making, Tolkien Enterprises was bound to clamp down with a Highlanderish "There can be only one game" attitude. Other Hands celebrated the beauty of the I.C.E. system, which was perhaps more well-known through its Rolemaster and Spacemaster product lines. Games Workshop and Decipher now hold gaming licenses derived from the Peter Jackson movies. And these companies are vying for the dollars of a shrinking marketplace. Regrettably, Other Hands was deemed a viable threat to the trademark.

Why? Was the growing subscriber base really shifting public opinion away from the licensed gaming companies? Most likely not. Except for occasional mentions in the Tolkien press, Other Hands -- like most gaming endeavors -- goes largely unnoticed by the larger community of Tolkien fans. The journal published some very good Tolkien research in its time, and I am one of the people who contributed content in the past. There are other Tolkien journals out there, but none which appeal to the American gaming community.

Adventure gaming is not what it used to be. In fact, I am not really sure of what it has become. Do people still sit around tables with pencil and paper, rolling dice and calculating statistics and averages? Do they enter into shouting matches when players invest themselves too emotionally in their characters, so that what happens to Gorik of Visborne also happens to Me?

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