***

No matter where I was, as a kid I’d always pretend to be somewhere else. While that’s not unusual, my dream destinations sometimes differed from those of my elementary school friends. During recess, they’d want to take trips to Hogwarts or Tatooine. Don’t get me wrong; I loved these places as well, but after my dad and I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy together for the first time, I decided that I absolutely HAD to inhabit Middle-Earth. But none of my friends had seen the movies or read the books! It was little wonder they weren’t interested in helping me transform our corner of the schoolyard into the Shire or Lothlorien. Desperate for a way into Middle-Earth, I took to the internet. My search led me to The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO).

When I tried to download LOTRO onto my mom’s computer, I saw that the file size was big—too big for our shoddy internet to handle. I had to let it finish overnight. The next evening, in the time between when my mom finished her work and my bedtime, I had a couple hours to jump into Middle-Earth. I couldn’t wait, but first I had to create my character. The game asked me to choose their…

I clicked “Enter Middle-Earth” and became Fletwerd of Rohan.

LOTRO kicked my ass in short order. Keeping track of buffs and debuffs, DPS rates, and five different skill bars sounds difficult to me even now, let alone for me when I was ten. Fletwerd tried to persevere, but after getting killed by the same level-five bear for the fifteenth time, the great captain accepted he was lost. So I found a high-level player who looked like he knew what he was doing and asked for help. Within a few minutes, our virtual packs were stuffed with bear meat. He gave me some of his old gear too, even though he could have easily sold it to an anonymous player over the in-game auction system. However, this player’s greatest gift to me wasn’t his equipment or his help with the bear. Instead, it was his invitation to join Massive Dynamics.

Back when I played LOTRO, Massive Dynamics was among the biggest kinships [guilds] on the Dwarrowdelf server. If my memory serves me right, we had somewhere between 100 to 200 members. The group is long gone now, as is Dwarrowdelf. Yet I managed to find an old recruitment post on the LOTRO forums from the brilliantly named Hobbit “Ellatoestabber,” a player I can still remember well.

Massive Dynamics is a social kinship at its core … mostly dedicated to interaction between our members, let it be by events or simply talking nonsense in kinchat! Doing an instance with us you may not be successful but rest assured that our craziness will make you laugh really hard!

Here Ella described Massive Dynamics to a tee. As soon as I became part of the kinchat, messages began to fill the bottom lefthand corner of my screen.

I don’t recall my reaction to briefly becoming the centre of attention for some internet randos, but as days with Massive Dynamics turned into weeks, then months, these group greetings became a highlight of each day. It seemed that every time I logged on a new person would join, and everyone would contribute a message to what we called the “welcome wall.”

Reminiscing about Massive Dynamics, it’s hard for me not to cringe at what a nuisance I must’ve been. In addition to an endless barrage of questions about the most basic and obvious of game mechanics, I’d regularly and loudly express my excitement at being part of the gameworld. I distinctly remember walking into the Prancing Pony Inn and seeing my first Dwarven player. Just some dude on a screen. Yet to me, it was as if Gimli had waltzed right into my bedroom.

I’m pretty sure it was Ella who gave me that warning, patient as always. I won’t pretend that everyone in the kinship was good to me; there were a few rough moments. Someone might tell me to F off, or that nobody cared about what I had to say. That sort of thing. But just as Ella kept me in line, people like her would also intervene if there was any kind of bullying within the kinship. If you were vulnerable in Middle-Earth, Massive Dynamics would keep you safe. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than during our ride to Isengard.

One day, our leader Fulksayyan announced that we would travel from one end of the gameworld to the other, from the sanctuary of Rivendell to the dark fortress of Isengard. Behind Isengard’s sheer walls and sharp turrets were the most formidable enemies LOTRO had to offer: Saruman’s legions of Uruk-hai. The kinship was abuzz following Fulk’s announcement. Waiting excitedly, it seemed to me like the day would never come. But come it did. After the final bell at school, I raced home to jump through the portal to Middle-Earth (also known as my laptop). There I took my place in a fellowship of several dozen kinsmen, and we set out from Rivendell.

We made good time in the beginning. As with all MMORPGs, the world of LOTRO was full of hazards, but the weight of our numbers meant that we could move through an encampment of goblins or a pack of wargs without breaking a sweat. The only hard part of my journey was convincing my parents to let me skip dinner so I could participate. It was totally worth it; I wouldn’t have been able to catch up with the group had I started late.

Then things changed. There was a tipping point, maybe an hour or two in, and suddenly our group didn’t have the skill or power level needed to overwhelm the opposition. As players were struck down, they had trouble catching up with us through the tough territory. The closer we got to Isengard the more people we lost. When we finally neared the gates, dozens had become a dozen.

Everyone who remained was around level eighty—everyone except me. Though I’d been playing for some time, the heavy demands of elementary education (and gaming incompetence) meant I was still around level 20. While I was as surprised as the rest of them at my continued survival, I knew the end was nigh. My journey wouldn’t continue for much longer.

It was Fulk. He claimed that if I reached Isengard, then I would be the lowest-level player to ever set foot in that zone. We didn’t know how he knew that, but he founded the kin and led it as if it were his life’s work. If anyone had that knowledge on hand, it would have been him. Our objective changed; suddenly, all that mattered to any of these people was that I get through the gates.

The surviving riders put me at the centre of a loose circle—a wheel of sorts—where the different spokes could attract foes without bringing them toward me. Each time the wheel turned, we inched closer to Isengard. I stayed in the middle, though I made sure to send captain-ly words of encouragement to my guardians, like

or

The quantity of our opposition meant that an Uruk would get through every now and again. Each time that happened, someone would be by my side in an instant. I felt a lot like Frodo must have when he was with the fellowship, only I think I enjoyed the attention much more than he did. And much like Frodo and his friends, we succeeded. Through the gates, Fulk was the last to remain with me. We got close to the centre spire of Isengard before a creature larger than any Uruk came and smashed us into the stratosphere.

***

When I log into LOTRO today, ten years after the ride to Isengard and about nine years since I last played, I see the decay of time everywhere on my screen. It’s not that the game looks and feels dated; that’s to be expected. No, time’s mark is betrayed by what I don’t see: people. The players have left Middle-Earth, much as I left when Massive Dynamics started to decline. I took a month’s break or so back when I entered junior high. When I returned, I learned that Fulk was no longer our leader. He’d temporarily given Ella leadership permissions while he took his own break, and upon his return, the two had an ugly and public falling out. I tried to learn the details, but nobody would talk about it. Nobody talked much about anything anymore. The welcome walls became less frequent as fewer people joined. Eventually, they stopped altogether.

Gandalf says, “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” Maybe it’s just the jaded perspective of a child grown older, but I feel that experiences like the ones I had with Massive Dynamics have only gotten rarer with the passage of time. Each week the internet looks less like this and a lot more like this. Last year, segments of the LOTR fandom gave a spectacular display of this deterioration with their hateful responses to cast diversity in The Rings of Power TV series. Witnessing that makes me feel lucky I found a community that kept me safe as I wandered Middle-Earth. But there’s sadness there too. I feel sad that Massive Dynamics is gone, and that new arrivals to the fandom don’t seem to be getting the kind of support that I did during our ride to Isengard. So, I take Gandalf’s advice and weep for my friends from the last age, but I also take as much of that part of my life into the present as possible. I re-watch the extended edition of the trilogy each year with my dad. I try to treat people with basic dignity both online and offline. And I carry a little piece of Massive Dynamics with me each time I begin a new game: my name. Ugly as it is, Fletwerd is the name of every custom character I’ve created in the last ten years. That’s what they knew me as, so in the lands between here and Middle-Earth, I remain Fletwerd of Rohan.