You might have heard the New York Times purchased Wordle, the viral word-guessing game that has kicked off the year. In the meantime, a handful of free-to-play Wordle fan projects — not ones that aim to copycat the original game in the name of profit — have sprung up. One of these is called ​“Lordle of the Rings,” a punny title for a Lord of the Rings-themed version of Wordle, where the winning words are all from the iconic series. ​“Use only five-letter words (including names) in the main text of Lord of the Rings,” say the rules at the bottom of the word puzzle game’s webpage.…

I was 12 in 2003, when The Return of the King was in theaters, and Frodo kissing Sam goodbye as he left Middle-earth made me sob like my heart was being ripped out, without understanding why. Outside of the safe darkness of the theater, in the Mordor-like wasteland of middle school, the movies were synonymous with the favored insult of the time — ​“gay.”

Brokeback Mountain wouldn’t come out for two more years, and none of us had seen a movie on the big screen where men hold each other, comfort each other, kiss each other’s foreheads. Early-2000s preteen America was a time of gay jokes, of ​“no homo,” of mocking voices and slurs, and secret, punitive violence enacted in the locker room against anyone who had a whiff of otherness. In that world, the Lord of the Rings trilogy stood out as deeply earnest, and therefore vulnerable.…

…It’s hard as hell to adapt an existing property into a video game. Developers are handed a pre-baked set of ideas and told to cram them into the framework of a video game. It’s hard enough to make a video game with relative freedom, let alone within a limited set of concepts that someone else gave you. Where The Two Towers succeeded where so many others failed, though, is in how it crammed.… The Two Towers leaned into The Lord of the Rings films, not pretending that they were somehow ​“something else,” but instead putting footage of the film right in the game so that you knew exactly where you were picking up with your favorite characters.…