Everything I know about the internet I learned from playing Runescape

I was not allowed to play video games when I was a kid. My parents forbid consoles in our house, provided video games were violent and boyish distractions from my academic and social life, and as a direct result of that ban, I grew up wanting to play video games at all costs. My neighbors on the street had a Nintendo 64, so I became a regular guest in their living room every day after school. I traded lunch lunch snacks for twenty minutes with my classmates Gameboys in the recess. None of this was enough. When I was 12 in the fall of 2003, I wanted to play more and get better. That's when I found Runescape.

Runescape was and is a massive online multiplayer game that answered all of my pre-teen prayers. It was a fantasy game in which players created custom heroes that populated Gielinor's world and leveled through mining, forging, fighting, and casting magic spells among a host of other grindable skills. There were missions to complete, dragons to fight, medieval cities to explore and the social component of being able to play and communicate with other players logged into the game.

Also, and decisively, Runescape gold was browser-based and free. I could play it on our family computer without the need for a console or permission from my parents. Checkmate to the rules.

The version of Runescape that I first played is what is now called Runescape Classic, the original version of the game that was launched in 2001. It had laughable crunching graphics and overloaded servers, but during that it had the legs of the fantasy gaming experience I requested. My thirteen-year-old eyes looked past the boxy sprites and 2D animations and filled in subjects to imagine a deep magical world.

Although Runescape allowed me to play with other players, I was initially more interested in creating an experience for myself. I created a back story for my character - she was a blue-haired lighthouse from Al Kharid who was looking for glory in the kingdoms of Misthalin and Asgarnia - and marked myself up through levels to take on tougher assignments. When Runescape Classic was upgraded to Runescape 2 in early 2004 (that version is now called Old School Runescape, since its current incarnation is Runescape 3) with a transformative graphic upgrade that met my imagined expectations, I finally felt that I had played long enough to feel me comfortable interacting with my teammates.

It seems quaint now, but I was intrigued by the idea that I could simply log in to a game and find myself talking to strangers on the internet. In 2003, I used AIM to talk to my friends from school and participated in the aforementioned Eragon bulletin boards, but Runescape felt like a completely different league of online interaction. My character could happily mine iron or dead cables together with players from different states, but I was the one who kept conversations with them. I quickly learned the basic rules of being a girl who played an MMO, which includes avoiding players who hung around hot spots in the game to hunt for a girlfriend and not fall for scammers who claimed to cut armor for free and fell in with a group of fantasy fans who took the game's environment as seriously as I did.

Those friends and I formed a role-playing guild, addressed each other as "Sir" or "Lady" and planned our summer evenings around missions that would promote our intrigue. It was some improvisational acting, two parts story and three parts shy to get to know each other as a player outside the game. Some of them even had my AIM address, where we would continue to plan our Runescape life as away from the game engine.

Since my parents didn't know that I was playing Runescape with other people, there were no rules to control my behavior. Through trial and error, I taught myself the label on the internet: when to share or hold information to maintain my integrity, how to avoid fraud, when to use a meme for maximum comic effect, and to block players who made me uncomfortable . My first guild melted away when the school year began, and I found another, then another, each time to hamper the online skills that would come in handy when social media became the new norm for teenagers in the mid-00s.

The biggest irony of my parents rule about "no video games" is not that I write about video games for my job now (although wow, what a backfire), but that I played the only game I could get my hands on prepared for a world that my parents couldn't predict. Runescape was an early introduction to what the Internet was going to be, and although it drew me in with the promise of fun and imagination, it ultimately gave me an edge in learning the rules of engagement for an increasingly online social landscape.

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