TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About Personal Health and Safety in RuneScape

Dealing with People in RuneScape Who Want to Meet in Real Life Avoiding Physical Injuries Due to Excessive Gameplay

Jagex (rightly) wants RuneScape to have a gaming environment that is open and accepting of all. For this reason, offensive, obscene and racist language is prohibited in the game. Also against the rules is sexual harassment and sex talk of any kind. That's true for both public and private chat.

Most people in the game are reasonably well-behaved, though a lot of players will engage in flaming, insulting and name-calling. Truly nasty obscenities, sexual harassment and racist comments are much less common, but can be a more serious issue because they can upset some players a great deal.

If you do see someone making sexual, racist or other bigoted or offensive comments towards you, keep your cool. Report them using the RuneScape abuse report feature, under Rule #1, “offensive language”.

Be sure you avoid the traps that many fall into:

• Do not just ignore the person and hope they'll stop. Do your bit to help improve the community by reporting them.
  
  
• Do not respond to the person or argue with them; this gives them attention, which is what they want!
  
  
• Do not reply with obscene comments of your own, or someone may report you!

Women and girls face a unique set of challenges on RuneScape, because the vast majority of the players are male teenagers. Female players will often get comments directed towards them like “you're hot”—hello, it's a bunch of pixels—and requests to be other players' “girlfriends”. More mild comments of this sort can be safely ignored, but while asking for a “girlfriend” was formerly allowed in the game, Jagex has now rightly defined this as solicitation, and made it a type of reportable offensive language. See the topic on relationships and sex issues in RuneScape for more information.

Dealing with People in RuneScape Who Want to Meet in Real Life Avoiding Physical Injuries Due to Excessive Gameplay