Run, E-scape

Runescape

4/13/2019

This is seriously not the place to be, I thought, so here’s some advice for you.  Whatever you do as a new Runescape player listen to the pro’s and avoid the wilderness, just outside the castle area is tough enough when you’re a new player!

So you think you’re gaining a little skill and XP, then the castle chef sends you off on a mini-quest to look for ingredients for bread.  All is well when it comes to crossing the bridge by the castle, wandering through the goblins down the path to the farms, milking the cow, and gathering an egg to bring back to the castle.  You can even beat up a few goblins on the way and they’ll give you some good stuff!  Once you head back to the castle to hand over your eggs and milk to the chef, and he sends you off to Draynor Village to find flour at the mill.  Well, to get there you either have to follow the road 100 miles around the outside of the, or you can cut through on a diagonal.  OK rookie here it is, just trust me on this one, the players out there are way better than you are and it’ll take just a second for them to take you out!  When your XP (experience level) in your life heart is depleted you lose most of the treasures you’ve collected.  If you were smart you would have taken time to put some valuable stuff in the bank.  But the bank isn’t always close.  When you forego the bank and you’re attacked there goes your money, your food, your cooking pots, your tinderbox, and most of your weapons.  Thankfully you can go back to the Melee, Ranged Combat, or Magic Tutor near the castle and they’ll give you another starter set with a bow & arrow, sword & shield, or magic stuff, but it’s pretty much like starting over.  So when you get in trouble don’t forget it’s not called Run-escape for nothing! 

Why the choice to test my patience and set myself up for this frustration?  I decided that since the social aspect has such power in games I’d launch myself into a PVP MMO (Player vs Player Massively Multiplayer Online) game this round and check out these online games that have the ability to communicate with others playing online.  So I contacted my gaming sons to ask them what they thought, and Runescape was the answer, it has an online chat box where you can get help from players with experience and there’s thousands of people playing, literally. 

Runescape, like The Legend of Zelda, has been around for quite a while.  The first version of the game was introduced in 1998, however I remember accompanying the boys to purchase Runescape 2 in 2004.  The game was initially brought to life by Andrew Gower under the name DeviousMUD (Devious Multi User Dungeon).  In 1999 Andrew released the first iteration, and immediately began a re-write again, this time with his two brothers.  The result was the first version under the name Runescape, this was followed by Runescape 2, then Runescape 3, and eventually Runescape 2 was re-released in 2013 as Old Runescape, an online MMORPG inviting players to revisit the nostalgia of the first version.

The free version of Old Runescape is where I can be found, but good luck as I’m writing this there are 94,123 playing across the globe in one of the 499 worlds.  Each world is the same, just different player levels and free (silver) vs paid (gold) sessions of the game.  A video posted by Mote Plox, detailing the game’s creation and history can be found here.

In this MMORPG they walk you through a short tutorial to teach you the basics before dumping you into the “real world”, however if you’re like me and you wait a few days to play it again you spend the first while trying to remember what you learned.  Tutorial completed, I found myself on a computer lumbering around Lumbridge castle with a guide (the wizard off to my left) nearby to point me in the right direction as needed.  My first thought was an ecstatic, no joystick!  Unlike my first adventures with Link, this game has paperback guides for purchase and plenty of online tutorials, to remind those of us with short-term memory issues that all you have to do is ‘click on the thing you want to attack’ to use your weapons.  Which, thankfully, will save you from the easier threats in the game like the goblins by the bridge and the sheep pen outside the castle.  Remembering the strong references to the social aspect of play in Families At Play, Resonant Games, and the articles we’ve annotated during class, I invited a friend to play both in-house and online throughout my adventure.  So armed with my sidekick, Bikehauler, we wandered about learning, gaining skills, collecting inventory, and figuring out how to switch to private chat to avoid the infinite stream of messages floating by in the chat box.  Some of them, I should say, were definitely x-rated which I was sad to see.  But you also had others calling them out with a quick “watch your language”.  I’m starting to believe more and more that maybe it is time to introduce Ami the AI game monitor.

I have yet to grab a full blown headset and immerse myself into the games where you talk, chat, and play all at once.  Quite frankly I believe more XP (experience points) where I’m at is in order, before I venture into yet another digital world of fun.  However I can say that some of the big take aways for me in this game were the realization of how quickly you can adapt and immerse yourself in a game, catch the bug, and before long find that hours have gone by before you feel like you’re starting to figure it all out.  Once engaged, the quest to explore, wander, solve, succeed, and learn, is indeed strong!  When designing in the future I’ll forever carry with me the idea of my best friends for use in game design.  The Lumbridge wizard, as the guide who offers suggestions and help, and the melee, range, and magic tutors, who set you up with what you need when you die and need a “do over”.   

So if you’re still looking for evidence of engagement within online and digital games, I think the legacy of the game greats that have withstood the test of time, like Super Smash Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, Runescape, and World of Warcraft, to name just a few, are the proof in the pudding that there’s more to these games than one might ever have expected.  Mote Plox, the creator of the history of Runescape video mentioned above, wraps it up by stating “… throughout this game I’ve made friends, I’ve lost friends, I’ve been a player moderator, I’ve been a rioter, I’ve been a skiller, I’ve never been a PK’er (Player Killer) and probably never will, but this game, when I started at 10 years old, taught me so much about forming bonds, maintaining resources, and typing, and how the internet really worked, and it bettered my vocabulary, and I owe a lot of who I am today based off of this game.”

I believe one of the best things we could recognize about games of all types is the impact and opportunity that they could lend to learning and education when the right game is added to, or created for, the right situation.  It’s time to stand behind innovative disruption in education and pull personalized learning, games, and storytelling into the mix.

Double click to see the Cook’s Quest

 

 

 

 

Are you ready to check out an iteration of the game the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes as the world’s largest and most updated free MMORPG?

Resources 

Klopfer, E., Haas, J., Osterweil, S., Rosenheck, L., & Macklin, C. (2018). Resonant games: Design principles for learning games that connect hearts, minds, and the everyday. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Siyahhan, S., & Gee, E. (2018). Families at play connecting and learning through video games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.