Yes

by Sam C.

Created on: January 04, 2010

Children should be allowed to play Runescape, but some monitoring must be taken with the social aspect, potentially more so than any other MMORPG.

The single-player aspects of the game foster critical thinking skills, especially the higher-level "quests" that a character can do after completing one or more previous quests and/or having achieved a certain rank in the skills in the game. These skills frequently take the form of puzzles, such as the classic puzzle where you have to take the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain across a bridge. The in-game economy teaches care with money without the risk of wasting real money.

The multiplayer aspects of the game are generally either fighting, chatting with, or trading with other players. The social environment is overly competitive at times and frequently derisive towards less skilled players, and as a 11-year old playing it, almost made me start crying at times. The multiplayer aspect of the economy is trading goods with other players, which they can either use for the intended purpose, turn into a pile of coins using magic, or resell at a higher price to other players. The multiplayer aspect of fighting is either working together to bring down an enemy that couldn't be brought down easily by the individuals or fighting against other players. Player-versus-player (PVP) combat can take the guise of team battles, one-on-one combat, or battles where the winner is the last standing out of three or more. These battles are generally suicide for weaker characters, with the players who have been able to acquire (usually by purchasing) the best weapons and armor being the ones who come out on top, which can be discouraging. The lower-level characters frequently take precedence in who's targeted because the game usually tracks how many kills scored in the match of whatever multiplayer minigame is played even though it almost never matters beyond experience points gained through dealing damage.

Overall, Jagex does a good job at filtering out inappropriate content for younger individuals, but as usual, they're thought of as inferior and treated badly as a result.

As a point of comparison, I'd like to talk about another popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. WoW allows parental controls on what hours can be played, has a friendlier playerbase, is equally complex in the player-versus-environment aspects and player-versus-player aspects, is more likely to discourage alcoholism (in WoW, getting too drunk can cause you to not realize you're being attacked by something that can kill you due to blurred vision or accidentally walk off a tall cliff due to being unable to control the direction of your movements, but in RS, getting drunk simply decreases skills temporarily, depending on what drink is consumed), but RuneScape has a more extensive system of censorship of profanity and less revealing attire on women (the Warcraft series is designed to appeal to males aged 18-35, like most other games, most of the armor available to female elves that isn't a spellcaster's robe is essentially a leather or metal bikini, while Runescape's most revealing attire is a metal armguard without a shirt, but for women, includes what appears to be a leather bra). World of Warcraft is also more focused on combat, and corpses can be found lying around for several minutes or until a player who has the skinning profession decides to skin the corpse, adding a few pieces of leather to the game's economy, while Runescape's corpses disappear at the end of the death animation.

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