I’ve waxed lyrical about Runescape several times on the blog. This is one such post.
This evening, while catching up with my high school friends, one of them mentioned that he had started up playing Old School RuneScape again. In an instant, I told him I had an active account, and we set up within 10 minutes to play together again. In an hour, we had convinced the other member of our little trio to set up his own account and join us in the same world.
For 2 hours, we did nothing but mercilessly combat goblins. As we each combated goblins, we traded information about our statistics, all got banned from trading items, and repeated a mindless cycle of, find goblin, attack goblin, take coins, take bones, bury bones. All the while, we explained things to our third friend – since he was new to the game, and planned out what adventures we’d go on, including Quests, the next time we all played together (in my mind, this is likely to be tomorrow).
This was an extremely, extremely, mindless activity. I did 0 application of brain, and my mouse pretty much did everything for me. I had an audiobook of Lord of the Rings going in the background, which I thought was perfect company for a game like RuneScape generally, since there are so many fan theories about how Middle Earth and RuneScape intersect – particularly in terms of their timeline. However, the activity itself used 0 brain cells or creativity of mine, especially since it wasn’t as dynamic as say, smithing, mining, or even woodcutting and fishing.
Speaking of, as a quick aside, it is worth mentioning how I sold my parents on the idea of the game aged 7. I informed my parents, while signing up to the website, and while playing, that I learned essential survival skills in the game. For the most part, this remains true. I incorporated words like “tinderbox” into my vocabulary the first time I played the game.
Turning back to playing RuneScape itself. When I played it through October and November, I played alone. None of my friends were playing at the time, so while there was a lot of nostalgia involved in the activity itself, and rediscovering all the information I had stored in the treasure trove that is my brain, none of it was shared. That absence left a void in me, and prevented the access of a very important, associated RuneScape memory.
You see, RuneScape is an MMORPG. A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. A large part of what attracts people to it, and makes it a success, is/was it’s ability to share the experience with friends. I spent hours playing with friends who I went to school with, who stayed in the same building in which I did – and that was a very important part of the game. In front of my friends, I consistently felt like a noob, because with my internet restrictions at the time, I hardly had the ability to devote myself to the game in the manner they did. Nonetheless, there were evenings where we logged on at the same time and I learned things about the game from them, and even once where I remember spending an entire evening watching two of them play and access Member-Only features, since they were Members.
Playing with these two today opened up all of that for me, and I’m looking forward to accessing the Multilplayer components of the game with my friends.
I’ve convinced a friend from primary school – my best friend, to get back to the game too. Hopefully he follows through.
My days will lose all structure then.
Tejas Rao 