Runescape. For many of you the word won't mean much. But for the children in our family, their school friends, and most of their friends across the country Runescape is the obsession of the moment.
Runescape is a virtual world, accessed through your PC, where you can take on a character (an avatar) and wander around fighting people, undertaking quests, and talking to people. And it's the last feature, not the first, that appears to have got children hooked. Similar to MSN Instant Messenger Runescape notifies players whenever their friends come on-line, and then lets them chat to them, either face to virtual face, or across the whole imaginary world.
A typical day for the girls in the Burden household now consists of breakfast, a quick bit of goblin bashing and a chat with friends on Runescape before school, school (and chatting with the same friends), then a session on Runescape after school to chat with friends again. Needless to say parents struggle with trying to get them to shoe-horn homework and music practices into such a busy schedule – but at least it keeps them away from the TV.
A quick survey in Ruth's class (8 – 9 year olds) showed that of a class of 28, twenty-two had heard of Runescape (14 boys, 8 girls). The more interesting fact though is that of the 11 regular players, seven were girls and only four were boys. What sets Runescape apart appears to be the more peaceful quests (like collecting ingredients for a cake), and the ability to chat – but all carried out in a robust medieval world, rather than a Barbie-pink chat-room.
On-line games such as Runescape have had a bit of a bad press lately. Last year it was stories about players making a living by building up high power characters and then selling them to cash-rich, time-poor users. This year the trading has gone corporate, with cyber-workers in Asia playing the game all day, and their characters being sold to rich Americans. And then of course like chat-rooms there are the concerns about child-safety.
But there is perhaps a more positive side too. Last week I went to an excellent IEE/BCS lecture by Professor Bob Stone of Birmingham University. Entitled “Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality”, his main thesis was that whilst the large and clunky immersive VR headsets of ten to fifteen years ago have disappeared, virtual reality is alive and well in the first-person shooter games and on-line environments which kids are now experiencing on their computers.
The intriguing question is that if kids are growing up playing on these systems, and in many cases editing them to create their own worlds and characters, then how might they use the technology when they are grown up? To start answering this question the Professor has set up a competition with local games designers Blitz Games for 16 – 18 year olds to show just how good they are at taking “first person” games such as Doom and Half-Life and designing their own characters and environments. So if you know of any budding VR designers contact Bob Stone at r.j.stone@bham.ac.uk for the competition details.
Futurists were wrong 20 years ago when they said that by now we'd all be immersed in VR environments going about our daily lives. But for our children, a large part of their day is already being spent in virtual reality. And once they grow up, perhaps they'll bring their virtual worlds with them.
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