Conceptualising the Transitional Object: Interplay’s Lord of the Rings as a Case Study

This paper proposes the concept of the transitional object as a useful category in game history studies, using Interplay’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I (1990) as an example. This concept is an extension of the term “incunabula” or “swaddling clothes”, introduced into game studies by Janet Murray (1997). In literature history, this term was applied to early printed books, which used a new technology without yet understanding its affordances; Murray argued many early games were in this sense incunabular, as designers had to learn new design paradigms. Incunabularity often translates into design flaws: until the new design paradigm is mastered, designers will naturally misuse new affordances. However, there is a flip side, which the concept of incunabularity fails to observe, hence requiring an extension into the proposed concept of the transitional object. Such an object doesn’t only reveal flaws due to misapplied novelties, but also the often-masterful use of techniques and design concepts derived from earlier design paradigms, using these sometimes seemingly obsolescent techniques to work around the challenges of the new design paradigm. Thus, a close examination of a transitional game can be illustrative in understanding challenges faced by developers in the context of a given transition.
The 1990s was perhaps the most transformative decade in game history (c.f. Williams, 2017), with numerous examples of transitional objects as defined above. A famous case is Doom (1993), an early 3D game reliant on 2D bitmap sprites at a point when 3D models were feasible but challenging to implement at a reasonable quality (Pinchbeck, 2013). Likewise, Majewski & Knight (forthcoming) argue the games of the 1990s that employed live-action video, a seeming evolutionary dead end, did so as a workaround to the storytelling limitations in games of that period While Doom has a crucial place in game history (Rehak, 2014), many transitional games failed to attract either public or scholarly attention, being considered unremarkable or flawed. The present paper examines Interplay’s top-down Lord of the Rings RPG from this perspective. Apart from Barton & Stacks’ (2019) high regard for the game, it was not as critically lauded at its release (c.f. Maher, 2017; Mils, 2022) and has attracted marginal mention in scholarly works (e.g. Konzack, 2017). However, when considered a transitional object, the game is illustrative of the computer RPG field circa 1990: an over-reliance on textual descriptions over visualisation, leftover from the text-based games of the 1980s, an attempt to incorporate pen & paper RPG-like freedom of exploration into a medium (and narrative) incapable of sustaining this freedom, and finally – when re-released in 1993, the integration of FMV clips from Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings film (1978), used here to leverage the new CD-ROM technologies.
From this perspective, an obscure early computer RPG becomes an important element in the study of the numerous technological and media transitions of the early 1990s. This is the core of the transitional object: they are snapshots of design in flux between old and new paradigms.
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