This week I’ll be diving into a game ever so dear to my heart; RuneScape. There’s a common joke amongst players of this 20-year old ongoing MMORPG – ‘you never quit RuneScape, you just take long breaks’.
Although my first foray into adventure and fantasy lies with Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings, my first exposure to this intense level of world immersion was Runescape. I believe I started playing this in 2004? I had overheard some kids in the year above me talking about this crazy game with wizards, rangers, and all sorts of epic quests. So, I inquired. And that changed me, an awkward 10-year old, now hanging out (online) with the year six kids!
I actually returned to this game after what I can estimate as a 10+ year-long break, thanks lockdown. Waiting for the game cache to download, the first thing that starts is the game soundtrack – each note as memorable to me now as it was in 2007.
An alluring aspect of the game lies in its balance of environmental storytelling and plot narrative (Jenkins 2002). The world is filled with lore and magical wonders, quests where you bake a cake with the poor, and others where you’re navigating the elven woods solving a royal regicide. You sympathize with the lower-class citizens of the game and feel like everyone is tied into the story just as much as you. The path you take is entirely up to you as well, you can choose to believe the king was wronged, or the king should have been killed. Or if you want no part in the royal world, and want to be a simple blacksmith; you can.
Seth Priebatsch (2010) talks about gamifying and its effect on real-world motivation. Runescape was a game I put multiple years of effort into, I set goals, and in the end, there were in-game rewards. To this day, I still think about goals in a rewarding process, and I think I learned that level of discipline from my days in-game. If I want to buy new camera gear, I will skip an event, and cut back on eating out. The same principle applies in MMORPGs where game economy is as volatile and evolving as the real world. If I wanted that shiny new sword to take down the next tier of boss, I’d probably have to show some discipline in-game towards saving up my gold.
Clans and social aspects are particularly important in MMORPG gameplay as well. They’re a huge part of why online games are successful. I’ve played that many games over the years, and once I’m bored of the gameplay, I’m done. But something about games with social or guild and clan elements, I’ll always hold on for an extra month because those social connections are important to a lot of people. That’s not to say all social interactions are healthy, some can be toxic in terms of cyberbullying, or even just video game addiction and promoting unhealthy gameplay.
References;
Jenkins, H 2002, ‘Game design as narrative architecture’, First Person, Cambridge:
MIT Press. viewed 12/03/2021, <http://www.web.-
mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html>.
Priebatsch, S 2010, ‘The Game Layer on Top of the World’, TedxBoston, <https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world>