My Strange Addiction of RuneScape

RuneScape can't be considered a game you can play into the early hours, yet I still find myself enjoying the game more than I first thought I would. Here's my story of how I got into the game and why I think it's so addicting. 

This is all just my story, so those who want a full review of the game should wait for a while because with how much I play RuneScape I won't be able to hold back from making a review on it.

Years ago, when I was still very young (way too young to fully understand English), I saw my brother and his friends play RuneScape. This is in the true Old School times, the game had not even barely gotten as far as the 07 version that people consider "Old School" now. It just seemed so cool to me that they were all interacting with eachother on this game even though they weren't talking to eachother like they would on the playing grounds, for example. They all had a smile on their face as they were trading their items in front of the Lumbridge Castle.

The Lumbridge Castle as of 2007

I imeadiately wanted to know more about it. When we arrived at home, I asked my brother to make an account for me. The one think I remember in particular is me not liking the need to choose yet another password I'd have to remember, so I used "nietleuk" as a password (Dutch for "not fun"). All of a sudden, I found myself in this alternate reality. It wasn't like the real world, but it didn't have to be: it was a place where I was able to interact with people from all around the globe without the need of spending countless hours in your car (air plane tickets were too expensive for our family). It was almost even divine.

My story, further on, was kind of like that of all other long-time gamers: I got hooked on the stuff, I loved the people I interacted with most as much as I loved my friends in real life. My life at school was great, I was not any different from the other kids and I truly had the time of my life.

That was until I skipped a year of school because of my "extraordinary" intelligence. The other kids were so jealous of me that they all picked on me. I was the outsider, the one that was given an unfair advantage and they wanted to take that advantage away from me no matter what. Thus I was bullied for years and years.

Unlike most other "nerds" that shared this fate, I was able to interact with girls just fine. Honestly, I had more female friends than male friends and by the time I left high school, I had already had three pretty long relationships. They were all ended just as quickly as they had began: the first one had to move for her parents' jobs, the second one went to a school so far away from my village that it was impossible to stay in contact with her and the third one turned out to like me only for the fact that I was the one that stood up for her when she was bullied (and getting myself in an even worse position in the process) so she left me once the bullies lost interest in her. I still hate her for using me like that, but I guess everyone gets a major slap in the face every once in a while.

Why are they relevant? Because they gave me bragging rights on RuneScape and they made me look cool. Unlike some other scumbags I no longer needed to lie to my clanmates when talking about love and relationships as we often did (very awkward to do over the internet without knowing who you're talking to, I know). That made me proud.

Others got some ingame cash as a gift for their so-called "marriage" but were forced to admit their lies only a week later. Those guys tried to go after me a couple of times, trying to make me "snap" and tell them that I had been lying too. But I hadn't been lying, so I was safe and they decided to admit that only a year later and ended up handing in all of the gifts I had given them for their lies over the course of that year. I was rich, all of a sudden.

That gained me respect in the game. That made me from just a clanmate into the cool guy. the one everyone wanted to be. Yet all I really was was a nerd behind his desk, telling his online friends the worst jokes you could find on the internet and having a good time. And the guys at school noticed that I had to be doing something in my free time and that it sure wasn't sports or hanging out with my friends and causing some fuss over the most stupid of things, so I was an outsider in yet another aspect and they trived upon that.

Their increased bullying caused me to not do homework, made me hide in a shell where all that really mattered was me and RuneScape. And eventually also MineCraft, Tribal Wars and such. It made me grab for whatever made me feel good, and that was mostly fast food and candy. So I got pretty fat all because they pushed me into a state where the only reliable entertainment I had was my PC.

I'm currently still trying to get rid of that weight. I have so much to look forward to in the future, and a terrible physical condition would ruin most of that. So at the moment I'm doing my best to grab for some actual strawberries instead of strawberry icecream, for an apple instead of a cookie and so on. It's actually easier than I had first imagined: you don't have to completely give up everything you like in life just to become healthier. All you need to do is force yourself to actually do it. The rest just comes with that.

And this is where all of that brought me, writing about my life online. My friends, that I now actually have, would probably think that it's incredibly weird of me to talk about my life so openly online as compared to in real life. In person I hate talking about myself. I hate talking in general. I can type my thoughts faster than I can express them using my mouth. This is what I'm used to. This is my life, and I welcome you to it. Please ignore the mess that is my past, and the cloud that hides my future from me. I've gotten used to those by now.

Please don't see this as me trying to get compassion, I honestly don't care about wether or not people are actually reading this. It's just a way for me to feel like I've actually expressed myself for once, and I must say it feels very good.

That's it for today's post, it's a little bit of a long one but in order to tell you guys about how I got into RuneScape I had to tell you about a very large part of my life story. I'm sorry for those of you that want straight up information, this was just the way I felt most comfortable with sharing this.