It was one part improvisational acting, two parts storytelling, and three parts shyly getting to know each other as players outside of the game. Those friends and I formed a roleplaying guild, addressing each other as “Sir” or “Lady,” and planned our summer evenings around quests that would further our plotlines. I quickly learned the base rules of being a girl playing an MMO, which include avoiding players who hung around in-game hotspots to hunt for a girlfriend and not falling for scammers who claimed to trim armor for free, and fell in with a group of fantasy fans who took the game’s environment as seriously as I did. My character could merrily mine iron or slay goblins alongside players from different states, but I was the one holding conversations with them. By 2003 I’d used AIM to talk to my friends from school and participated in the aforementioned Eragon message boards, but Runescape felt like an entirely different league of online interaction. It seems quaint now, but I was fascinated with the idea that I could simply log on to a game and find myself talking to strangers on the internet.
#Runescape classic mining upgrade
When Runescape Classic upgraded to Runescape 2 in early 2004 (that version is now called Old School Runescape, as its current incarnation is Runescape 3) with a transformative graphic upgrade that lived up to my imagined expectations, I finally felt I had been playing long enough to feel comfortable interacting with my fellow players. I crafted a backstory for my character – she was a blue-haired squire from Al Kharid searching for glory in the kingdoms of Misthalin and Asgarnia - and ground my way up through levels to take on tougher quests. My thirteen-year-old eyes looked past the boxy sprites and 2D animations and filled in the blanks to imagine an in-depth magical world.Įven though Runescape allowed me to play alongside other players, I was initially more interested in crafting an experience for myself. It had laughably crunchy graphics and overloaded servers, but underneath that it had the bones of the fantasy game experience I craved. The version of Runescape I first played is what is now called Runescape Classic, the original version of the game that launched in 2001.
#Runescape classic mining Pc
I could play it on our family PC without needing a console or permission from my parents. There were quests to complete, dragons to fight, medieval cities to explore, and the social component of being able to play and communicate with other players logged in to the game.Īlso and crucially, Runescape was browser-based and free. It was a fantasy game, where players created custom heroes who populated the world of Gielinor and leveled up by mining, smithing, fighting, and casting magic spells among a host of other grindable skills. Runescape was and is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that answered all of my pre-teen prayers. By the time I was 12 in the autumn of 2003, I wanted to play more and get better. I traded lunchbox snacks for twenty minutes with my classmates’ Gameboys at recess. My neighbors down the street had a Nintendo 64, so I became a regular in their living room every day after school. My parents forbid consoles in our house, assuming video games were violent and boyish distractions from my academic and social life, and as a direct result of that prohibition I grew up consumed with the desire to play video games at any cost. I wasn’t allowed to play video games when I was a kid.
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