RuneScape saved her life. Fifteen years later, she’s still playing

When Allana turned fourteen, the limits of her world shrank to the four corners of her bed. A heart condition kept her between hospital and home. She could not attend school or make friends. She was lonely. She could not live like a normal fourteen-year-old.

At the same time, Allana played RuneScape, an irreverent, medieval MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role-playing game. She was Miss Misty, on an adventure through Gielinor.At first, she had bobbed about, chasing butterflies with an empty jar. Even for the time, RuneScape’s graphics were basic – the fields and roads of its pastoral world were flat single shades of green and brown. Its avatars resembled Playmobil, with smoothed faces, colourful capes and dinky swords. But, In Gielinor, Allana felt the world that had been closed off to her begin to unfurl again with possibility. She could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, chase cows in the evening, and slay monsters after dinner. She could make friends, typing her opinions into a chat box so they appeared over her head, like ideas in cartoons. Or, she says, she could run around doing nothing, just like real life. Allana could act her age again.

Allana spent several years mostly confined to her bed, but she would not feel it so intensely. “In those years, RuneScape gold gave me the sense that I could still achieve something,” she says. “I could still progress – somewhere – when I wasn’t able to do that in my real life.” She has been playing the game since 2006; last time she checked, the in-game time had registered passed a year. That’s 8,670 hours. RuneScape saved her life, she says. “I know that sounds corny, but I truly, truly mean it.”

That anyone could invest this much time in an online world doesn’t surprise us now, but back in 1993, in his book The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold experienced this fact as a revelation. In 1984, he had joined a computer conferencing system called The WELL, which let people around the world carry on public conversations and “exchange private electronic mail (e-mail).” He was shocked when he began to care about the people he met through his computer.

“The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first,” Rheingold wrote. “It was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door.”

Though video games are still in their adolescence, some games have been going decades, and some players have been there from the start. The first commercial MMORPG was Island Of Kesami, released in 1985 – it featured a chat room, servers of up to 100 players and graphics that resembled the interface one might launch nukes from in the eighties. World of Warcraft, the most famous MMORPG, is still running 17 years after release. RuneScape turned 20 this year. The Realm is one of the oldest MMOs still online, running since 1996, but according to Atlas Obscura, no one knows who hosts its servers.

Where modern life – particularly at present – can be unjust, chaotic and precarious, online worlds are reassuringly stable. Most people only stay in a job for four and a half years; these games have been a constant in some player’s lives for more than a decade. “There comes a point where you're not playing a character anymore – your avatar on the screen is a projection of yourself,” says Mark Ogilvie, design director of Jagex, the developer of RuneScape. “If you’re in a world that feels chaotic, where you’ve lost your sense of place, where you’re never quite sure what the government is going to tell you the following day, sometimes it’s nice to go to a place where there is a bit more structure, where, if you want to get to level 55, you need 100 more experience points.”

In many ways, this comparison is an indictment of real-life (Mckenzie Wark argues as such in her seminal book Gamer Theory.) But progression in these games can be a source of confidence to those who cannot find it in the real world.

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