This question means different things to all of us. Over time RuneScape has evolved and the reason why we play the game could have fluctuated, maybe it was to pass time, maybe your just a little kid with nothing better to do, or maybe it was the pure fun factor of the game that had you coming back for more like that girl you know in school. Its different for all of us, but ill tell you guys about me.

I started playing RuneScape in December of 2004, and i was around 12 years old. I had alot of time. I wish i had that much now. Anyway, you know, tech was still evolving, its always evolving. I was just simply hooked on the game. I started off with a level 70 that my friend told me to cut wood for him. Little did i know he was using me to make cash, so i made up around 300k gold and one day i tried to login and i couldn’t! Well turns out my friend took the account back. But there is one thing i realized after that, i was good at making money. I knew how to work hard and achieve, and since there were no macro bot armies or anything back then well, legal gold making was easy!

So i got my best friend into playing it with me and we both made brand new characters. From there forth we would spend every waking moment we had on RuneScape. We made money the hard way, and quite frankly to be honest, we made alot of money the easy way. We designed scams and tricks for people to fall into, we got tons of santas, masks, and even a few phats. As time passed, playing the game didn’t just revolve around making money, but it went into pking, where we spent hours training pures. It went into main skilling, which i spent hours and hours questing/and obtaining my skills. I wanted to be the best since there was nothing else important.

…Or so i thought.. i started to get older and my school work started to slack. But by playing RuneScape so much, i kinda didn’t care. I put RuneScape in front of my work, my grades started to slack, and my parents started to get infuriated, especially since they are so strict about grades. My life started to rot. But of course, instead of fixing it, i just found “refuge” by playing RuneScape. It was like a drinking addiction, i just had to have more.. to fix things that i thought weren’t fixable, or better yet, i was too lazy to fix them.

My life rolled by and i started to finally realize that Runescape is killing my life. I quit, or maybe, im not sure what happend. It’s like one of those relationships that have no trouble but eventually, they just simply fade with no hurt. So around my 15th birthday, i put the game away. My logins became less frequent, and soon, i rarely even thought of it. But RuneScape had already taken its toll on my life, i became a geek. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing. It taught me to be the young man i am today. I got into computer programming, learned alot of life lessons, and well, it made me grow as a person. Im not sure exactly how, but it did. I was one of the lucky ones i’d say. I was smart to begin with and RuneScape came out to be at least a bit beneficial to me.

….But this isn’t the case for everyone.

How do you know when your addicted?

I remember one of the funniest thing’s i still remember seeing in RuneScape was this quote by a couple of kids in Varrock East Bank. Excuse the profanity by the way.

“Omfg! My ****ing mom is telling me to go outside and play”, “I hate this *****”, “Ill be back later”

Still reminding myself of that moment just makes me crack up. It also tells you a lot about how young these kids actually are and what their saying. I mean honestly, you can see kindergarteners running around screaming “****”!!

Well, we all have our own idea of addiction to something but in my personal opinion, i would say, you devote most of your free time, and maybe even your work time into playing it. But as the above example shows, it could just generally be obvious.

How do i stop my addiction?

Ok your in for the lifetime classic, THROW AWAY YOUR ACCOUNT!

I’m serious about this one too. It does actually work, but it might just be a little hard. But heres a list of other ways i thought up on how to quit.

• Many of us have routers at home, and 95% of them provide website blocking. Ask your parents to block RuneScape.com and tell them seriously to never unlock it again. Unless at the rare chance that your parents play too, or you have another sibling, it will work.
• Go get your a$$ outside. Im not joking, don’t be lazy and end up like one of those fat kids you see stuck in their bed. Sure, it sounds harsh, but wouldn’t it be great if people stopped dying from heart attacks?
• Spend time with people. This can be very serious. Girlfriend, parents, friends, anyone! Go do things, goto the beach, hang out outside, skatepark, basketball, anything that doesn’t involve sitting around.
• Study! or.. attempt to! You learn something both ways and comes in more handy later in life. Trust me im not saying sit around and be a nerd. But devote at least an hour to your books, it’ll help you.
• Play MMORPG’s, ok, this may sound completely pointless, but once you do establish a fine line of control over your time, go ahead and play! Our new tech world wouldn’t be the same without geeks like us.
• Get a girlfriend! not a gf. ps: c’mon, you know the difference.
• Finally, be creative! I can’t obviously cover everything you can possibly do, but go out and do what your heart tells you to do.

So yeah guys, really. Life isn’t anything that should be given away to a company, but like my story. Something like this can compell you to learn cool things and do some awesome experiements. So thats really all i have to say, i hope you guys take this advice.

In a small unknown town a young computer nerd sat and waited for his teacher to arrive to class. What another kid in this young, future Runescape addict’s class said next, would be the birth of an addiction causing loss of time, life, money, and energy.

“Runescape is so cool. I reached level 15 yesterday.”

“Level 15? My mom could reach that in 5 minutes” K13, the nerd, was overhearing a conversation similar to the one above. He had no idea that the fact that he was eavesdropping on his classmates conversation, would have such a huge impact of his computer gaming life.

Him being the conversation joining person he was, asked, “What is Runescape?”

“A cool game where you fight and drink beer!”

“That game sounds…interesting, how and where do you play?” Asked young little K13.

“www.runescape.com, just sign up and start playing.”

So as most people would, he tried to play the game. He wasn’t really in to MMOs at the time, so he didn’t really get the point. At this point the game had no addicting effects on his life and later left the game at level 11.

About 6 months later it all came back to him. He was bored on a Saturday in the middle of summer and decided to revisit the game to pass the time. He started a brand new account and when he did, he was a full on addict. 10, 20, 30, then 40, he was leveling fast and working on the skills that could get his gear on a role. Getting tantrums when someone tried to make him leave the game. Questing and grinding for 10 hours, seemed like 10 minutes and he couldn’t get enough. His goal was to reach level 99 and to be able to pk in the wilderness. Unfortunately he never killed anyone in the wilderness and quit the game at level 47.

During his journey in the game, he had many hardships. At many times playing for 5,6,7 hours a day. Late into the night, and long into the day he kept on playing. He dealt with 2 Chinese black market dealers, -$40 bank accounts (that’s a lot of money for a 12 year old kid), and a lot of heartache (I will go into detailes about all of these things, all linked together in 1st person… I hope).

Chinese black market dealer 1- One day I decided to buy some Runescape gold because some person kept spamming me on Instant Messenger. I paid the money and was told to meet at the east bank in Varrock. All was well and I later sold half of the gold to my friend that also played the game.

Chinese black market dealer 2 (and the bank account thing) – This one was a little more intense. Chinese black market dealer number two was from a website called buybuy or something similar. I saw that they could off for a decent price, so as most buyers would I tried it out. I paid using PayPal, but for some reason it went through my bank account. I didn’t have enough money in my account so when it tried to make the payment my bank charged me 20 dollars (which I didn’t have). When PayPal charged my account again in an attempt to make the payment there were still (because of the negative balance). Now with an $(40.00) balance, he found out the payment didn’t go through. I demanded my gold either way and they didn’t know the payment hadn’t gone through. When they found out they were MAD. They demanded that I pay them asap or they would take action. After I did pay them, They still bugged me! so while telling them to leave me alone on IM one day and they made creepy comments (that my brother found, not me). Eventually I got the funds back from my bank and in the end, all was fine, but it was not worth all the troubles I had.

Runescape is an addicting game with dangerous qualities. As we know, Runescape can be played free of charge. Because of this it is a dwelling land for pedophiles and rapists alike. If you tell some one you are 10 (figuratively) they usually say they are 10 also. In fact, a good friend of mine got a ‘girlfriend’ on Runescape and was told he was talking to someone his own age. I talked to her on my account and she told me was divorced and had 4 kids. Although I am incredibly against these qualities of the game I will always play a little bit. I rid myself of all the addictions related to playing the game and have kept it that way for quite a while. My story might not be as intense as yours but I believe that 500+ hours I have spent on the game was time badly and well wasted. Sorry if I made a mistake in this post. It is my first one on TRB.

Now this brings up the controversial question, “Is RuneScape just a game… or is it a pure addiction?”. Well there are many different scenarios and life stages but i am pretty sure we can all agree that RuneScape is mainly focused on the younger teenage or pre-adolescent group. But could this be the problem? It most certainly can be, but it wouldn’t be fair to place the blame all on one factor. After all, Runescape is supposed to be a fun friendly environment right? I think not.

The reason why RuneScape has more problems with their prayers than other games do is because of the lack of focus on a certain group. Jagex publicly states that RuneScape is focused towards people ages 13+, but does this really stop kids from playing RuneScape? Of course not. From my own experience, RuneScape is widely introduced to kids as young as the age of 8. The wide availability of the internet and children being able to have access to computers more frequently now promotes this idea as well.

Now the controversial issue about this is, Who is RuneScape really focused upon? Society pushes RuneScape amongst youngsters and even though Jagex officially states that their game is for 13+, they do not make a very valiant effort to enforce their policy. After all, their making money right? Of course they are! Children, no matter how radical their parents are, will find a way to buy membership and fulfill their lust for RuneScape.

This is why i believe Jagex is a very controversial company, they tend to focus all their energy in stopping or fixing things that affect their profits. For example, black marketing, they sure did something about that didn’t they? Of course, they needed to stop people from stealing and making money off their product. But of course, children being taught that they should get “drunk” or that they should scam others for self profit, yeah thats definitely something their going to ignore until it somehow affects their capital.

Afterall, Jagex tries to make RuneScape out to be the harmless game that condones cursing/swearing and other acts of vulgarity, but yet many aspects of their game play involve drinking, fighting and scamming for self gain. All of these aspects eventually lead up to the final question, is runescape an addiction?

Well this type of question or comment can be answered in several different ways and im sure their is no definate answer, but i believe that RuneScape is indeed designed to be addictive. It is really no mistake that most of the RuneScape player population is under the age limit, its no mistake that over the years, RuneScape has evolved from what i used to love to a game filled with lust hungry players out for self gain. Of course, Jagex didn’t “intend” for this to happend, they didn’t want to make obnoxious players from kids who grew up playing RuneScape. Of course not, none of this was intentional. Its something that is bound to happend with such a thing.

These types of issues sure don’t affect Jagex as a company, but i hope they do realize that they are ruining lives. Not to say that everyone that ever was addicted to RuneScape or played RuneScape had a messed up life, but RuneScape can ruin lives. It can force kids to kill their education to play something that they think is more important, it also creates social outcasts. Some naive children will believe that playing games will always be better than real life and will grow up thinking life is a game. It will cause a lack of functionality and will help create a barrier between the real world and the MMORPG that they have committed themselves to. Although these effects are not common amongst most RuneScape players, the fact that such a game can have such effects is disturbing, and whats even more disturbing is that a company who claims that they care for their players wont do anything about it except put up a knowledge base article saying to take “breaks”. Yeah. Bull____.

Note: I know this article wasn’t very well arranged but it does express some of the key concepts. Feel free to comment and discuss.

-Soul