Click any image in this article for a larger version.LOTRO is rated “T for Teen” on account of tobacco and alcohol use (also violence), but the purpose of having your character drink alcohol or smoke tobacco is questionable; they have no meaningful affect on the game. Their effects are purely cosmetic. Drinking affects your display of the game world, while smoking merely creates amusing smoke rings and shapes—yet both of these effects cost money that you earn through actual play.

These cosmetic amusements—optional, voluntary, and mostly harmless—aren’t really elements of the game. They’re elements of the game world, pastimes within the game. Toys.

Well. Most of the time.

A ball, by itself, is a toy. It can pass the time and facilitate idle amusement, but a ball alone is not a game, right? A game needs, traditionally, rules and goals. Ale, mead, and wine are toys in MMOGs like World of Warcraft (WoW) and Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), and most days they’re purchased just to add a degree of amusement to the experience of being in the game world.

If there’s a consequence for drinking too much—in LOTRO characters can eventually pass out, in WoW I’d swear you have better luck fishing—your use of the toy approaches game-hood. You have a goal you’re trying to reach and you’re expending resources (possibly even tactically) to get there by spending silver coins on boozy draughts, ergo you have a simple game. But not really. The course of “play” is utterly linear. Connect-the-dots isn’t a game, it’s a simple puzzle. This isn’t so different.

One reason for even including this stuff in the game is to create the illusion of a larger world by demonstrating that not everything for everyone is about killing boars and collecting XP. There’s also gettin’ drunk and smoking your pipe. A little bit of ancillary nonsense can go a long way to making a game world feel more “alive.”

But, of course, these toys are also pastimes, tools for creating a sense of downtime between adventures (which is, in itself, a means for creating something so faintly related to realism that I hesitate to use the word). It’s not uncommon for folks in my LOTRO guild to get their characters smashed on expensive liquor when they’ve grown board of slaying orcs and goblins.

At the same time, the forums are filled with folks wondering why any player would grow or use pipeweed since it has no real effect on play. (Note: Eventually this was changed, and pipeweed has become an ingredient for a Loremaster resurrection effect.) In practice, though, even this “useless” toy can impact actual play. My character grows pipeweed in huge quantities, and when I group up with other players—strangers and kin-folk alike—I make sure to offer up some of the stuff while we wait for people to show up. The group ends up standing around blowing smoke rings for five minutes; it builds goodwill and adds a small degree of immersion in the fiction. People are more likely to trade back things like healing foods and other minor goods when you demonstrate a bit of harmless generosity. Plus, the absurdity of it is just fun.

But the developers of LOTRO don’t let booze just sit there, idle. A few times a year, they pick up and the ball, declare a few simple rules, and start tossing it around. At the various yearly festivals—like the Spring Festival and the Harvest Festival—they offer a pub-crawl game which is a trivial quest chain with the goal of traveling to pubs around the Shire and consuming ridiculous amounts of alcohol. Of a half-dozen beers laid out on the table, only about half of them count towards your drinking total, and you’re drinking against the clock; the challenge becomes pixel-hunting against the constraint of a washed-out, wobbling screen, getting worse with each new pub. It’s stupid and surprisingly challenging and surprisingly fun.

Your reward for all that? The title, “Tavern League Member,” to show off after your character’s name. A tiny dollop of prestige.

Then, this spring, they took the toy to a new level. The game was a simple test of skill: Get your screen warped with drink, then walk along a farmer’s broken fence from end to the next. Before the quest was revised due to a technical glitch, the reward for this game was another, new toy: the Keg. Put the Keg in your character’s house, if you have one, and then tap it and your character immediately passes out drunk… and wakes up somewhere else. Seriously, your character is actually teleported to some far-off and unlikely place, so that he wakes up in a fountain in Bree… or atop a rock in a land of hostile (elite) Giants.

The moral of the story? Don’t be so serious. Toys are fun, and not every game needs to be nothing but the work of winning.