As someone with more than a passing interest in game design, when I engage myself with a piece of media, I usually tend to attempt to figure out how aspects of that experience can be applied to games. Ever since a text adventure version of The Hobbit was released in 1982, Tolkien's world has been translated to games commercially an additional 25 times. On top of that, many unofficial games have been made based off of Middle Earth, usually in the form of Multi-User Dungeons and Roguelikes. I thought that it might be interesting to take a deeper look at The Hobbit and figure out what it is about the series that compels people to reconstruct the stories in a virtual space.
After some analysis, I came to the realization that games are often made of Tolkien's world because game designers and Tolkien have generally similar goals. Tolkien had a strong interest in creating deep cultural and linguistic systems. Many game designers like having a deep, consistent aesthetic system to build their interactive system off of. There are few better candidates for this than Tolkien's world. It not only has a rich history, but also geographical mappings of the world, a variety of interacting cultures, and fully formed languages for the different races that inhabit Middle Earth. The possibility space for exploration offered in his world is staggering, and will probably never fully be explored by game designers.
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