As a kid, I was pretty shy and unsociable. As such, the only time I really interacted with other humans outside of school is when I logged onto RuneScape. Not only did I have a window to practice my people skills without fearing the pain of public social rejection, but spending hours at a time playing a medieval fantasy MMO turned out to be surprisingly educational. I learned a lot of totally relevant information while mindlessly wandering through kingdoms and fighting (and mostly dying to) dragons. Now I want to share those invaluable lessons with the world.
1. How to smelt bronze.
When I was in middle school, my western civ teacher asked the class how to make bronze. No one raised their hand because you know damn well no one in a seventh grade western civ class reads the textbook on the weekends just to answer a question that would never be revisited.
But I knew.
How did I know?
In RuneScape, the first metal you can make with the smithing skill is bronze. And what did you need to make bronze?
Copper ore.
And tin ore.
Boom.
Educated.
Just like that, I knew the answer to a question for a class that I practically forgot about until I started writing this article. Maybe I could even fulfill my lifelong dream of moving to Arizona and running a bronze smelting factory.
RuneScape. It teaches you things.
2. The art of trading.
In a medieval fantasy world, you gotta learn how to raise those stacks of gold if you want the right armor to survive fighting that obnoxious jungle demon you’ve already lost to five times.
That means knowing how to find your own resources and sell them at a price that doesn’t make you look like a greedy turd.
It also means figuring out how much you want to pay for your gear and realizing that just because there’s only one person selling a rune kiteshield near you doesn’t mean you should pay quadruple the price for it.
I’ll admit that the real world isn’t really a good-for-good trade kind of place anymore. But I can sleep soundly knowing that if I get caught in a wormhole and teleported back into some medieval period. I have the techniques to make passable living off of selling bowstrings and iron bars.
3. Some people are assholes.
Because the majority of my socializing took place online, RuneScape allowed to me to learn an invaluable lesson about the douche-baggery of humankind that I otherwise would have been entirely ignorant of until it was far, far too late.
Whether it’s the tool who tricked you into dropping the three earth runes you just earned claiming he could double them, the scumbag who started mining the same two coal rocks that you already were when you were clearly there first. Or the jerk that makes fun of you for using an adamant two-handed sword because it’s not the best weapon but it still looks cool and it’s none of his stupid business with his full rune plate armor and dragon scimitar (which you secretly really want but can’t afford because the trading lesson hasn’t really sunk in yet). There’s going to be someone who only seems to exist for the sole purpose of pissing you off.
I’m thankful that RuneScape has conditioned me to the slimy underbelly of humanity and I think it’s made me a lot less sensitive to annoying interpersonal displays of anger. That doesn’t fully remove the urge to punch obnoxious weenies in the face, but I guess I’ll have to deal with that.
4. Justice is an illusion.
So some people are assholes. I have accepted that as truth now. But what can I do about it? Apparently not a whole lot.
Yeah, I can mute them so they don’t bother me anymore, but that hardly classifies as vengeance. I can report them to a player moderator, but those guys probably care more about using their special titles to pick up digital gal pals than banning offensive meanie-heads.
As much as a wanted to magically crawl into any jerkbag’s computer and make his fake character do a fake dance in front of a fake demon and lose all his fake gold I couldn’t.
All I could do is carry on with my little digital life and pretend not to seethe with preteen angst for the next two hours. Life is rough sometimes.
5. Fake worlds are often better than real ones.
Fun fact: Reality kinda sucks. It’s full of all the things you wish you could avoid but you can’t because, well, they’re reality. Luckily, the Internet offers up a magic drug to help you forget about that.
Yeah, maybe in Real Life Land I have severe social anxiety and acne and live in an unwavering sense of fear for my future. In RuneScape, all I need to think about at any time is finishing the quest I just started or grinding my magic skill until I could shoot giant balls of fire out of my hands. Digital life is just simple like that.
And yeah, maybe I haven’t met the guy of my dreams yet and I’m a long ways away from starting a fulfilling career in reality, but I’ve already got 99 thieving and a moderately sized house in RuneScape to be proud of, so I’m not too hung up on those other things (at least not all the time).
Being an awkward, frightened kid was rough at times, but at least I had an escape in the form of one of the most magical expanses of fake land I’ve ever digitally walked upon. So I don’t regret spending several years of my childhood in front of a computer, because it helped me learn pretty much everything I needed to know, and then even more on top of that.
Clearly, RuneScape has made me a better person. Probably.
