AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Runescape time sink1/4/2023 ![]() ![]() They encourage more of the same - clicking, watching a number rise, continuing. They don’t give the player pause to think about their experience, make a decision, and act. Like I pointed out earlier, MMOs only create more of themselves. Am I still enjoying this? Am I still getting something out of this experience? What would I like to see change? This may be an obvious point, but it holds a lot of significance in your experience as you’re given space to self reflect. Even video games that are less avant-garde than Pathologic 2, like Halo for instance, have an endpoint.Īt the end of twenty to forty hours, you stop. One of the other insidious features of MMOs is that they have virtually no endpoint. It wasn’t a time-sink just for the sake of wasting time. It was a real experience and as a result I came away from it changed (albeit in a small way). I frequently felt uncomfortable and fascinated by the world, and left it feeling challenged by my definition of what a video game could be. It grapples with themes of life and death, meta-narrative, and myth. It was relatively short, ~20 hours to complete, and it’s utterly original. I completed Pathologic 2 a few weeks ago. The experience of an MMO can only yield more of itself - more clicking, more “engagement” with the game.īut that’s not fair, OSRS is a video game not reality. That’s a real experience: It’s holistic, engaging and persists beyond itself. And yet, with lifting, I’ve learned multitudes about diet, nutrition, exercise science, and myself. Both involve doing repetitive actions over and over again, often in the same spot, for hundreds of cumulative hours. I tend to compare my experience in OSRS with one of my other hobbies: weight-lifting. In no way is clicking on the same ten to twenty tiles in a game for a hundred or more hours a rewarding experience. Yes, other games involve grinds and, yes, ultimately they are tricking reward centers in your brain, but they’re also experiences.Īs much as Old School players like to proclaim that the journey is the game, they’re also deluding themselves. If all video games abuse the same psychological mechanisms in your mind and are ultimately just clicking on a screen, isn’t it all the same? This was one of the points that brought me back to the game initially. Isn’t that literally every video game ever? ![]() Most are probably trying to make it to the end-game, big money-making content in some form, which, generalizing, requires maxed combat stats or ~700 hours of playtime. RUNESCAPE TIME SINK FULLWhereas Bejeweled or any mobile game will take maybe 20 to 40 hours to complete, OSRS is going to take you an entire year to max in if you played it like a full time job.īut that’s not fair, most players aren’t trying to max. This isn’t unique to OSRS, Bejeweled is no different at its core and they’re both thinly veiled skinner boxes. This is the so-called grind that the game is (im)famous for. Click, number goes up on a screen, click again, etc. Prepare to click the exact same spot, over and over again, for hours or even days. The biggest and most notable thing about MMOs (and this is by no means a novel point) is how much of a time sink they are. I’m just writing out the oddities of the experience and reflecting on my time with it. I have by no means experienced the entire game or anything near it, and I’m not claiming to. I’ve done a fair portion of the quests, have high 80s in the combat stats, and joined a social clan. I’ve reached 70 base stats in the game, either in my most recent account or the one I played as a kid. That might be limiting, but I feel like the mechanics that underly the genre are universal and I don’t have the time or energy to pick up a new MMO just to write this. Some ContextĪll of this post will be written based on my experience playing Old School. Old School RuneScape (also known as Old School or OSRS) is an MMORPG, a genre of video game I’ve been feeling more and more pessimistic about recently. After returning for a month during the Coronavirus pandemic, I decided to quit again for what I think will be the last time. I’ve been playing Old School Runescape on and off again for the past two years or so. Email 5 June 2020 On the Appeal of Virtual Worlds ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |