TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape's Community and Its Impact on Children

What You Won't Learn from Jagex's “Parents' Guide” (aka Marketing Brochure) Specific Dangers and Behavioral Concerns in the RuneScape Community

Whenever I or other critics of Jagex point out all the issues with children in the game, we usually get smug replies to the effect that it’s “the parents’ job” to make sure their kids don’t play too much and don’t get involved in unsavory activities, not Jagex’s. This is true, in general terms, but there are two problems with this overly simplistic position. First of all, most parents simply don’t know enough about the game to be able to tell what their kids are doing within it; and second, Jagex does not provide adequate tools to allow parents to monitor and supervise their children’s behavior within the game.

The main issue is control over how much time children spend in the game, and watching what activities they engage in while they are logged in. At the present time, Jagex does not limit how many hours a character can be online, nor does it provide many tools for parents to monitor what their kids are doing with respect to RuneScape. There are a few tips and tricks that parents can employ, but not many.

In this topic I’ll provide suggestions and tips for parents to help them take advantage of what tools do exist, and make some suggestions for improvements that Jagex could make to allow parents to better monitor and control their kids’ behavior.

One of the few tools that Jagex provides for parents to exploit is information that is shown when a character logs in about when it was last online, and which computer address or system was used at that time. This data is fairly crude, but can at least allow a parent to do some basic “checking up” on their kids, if they know the passwords of their children’s characters.

As soon as a player logs in, he or she sees a standardized introductory screen, as depicted in Figure 81. It has a beige banner at the top that says “Welcome to RuneScape” and also indicates when the character was last logged in and from which system. This information can tell you what the last day is that the character was logged in; if, for example, the child is not supposed to be on RuneScape on a particular day, you can verify this. You can also detect if, for example, your kids are playing RuneScape at school or some other place where they are not supposed to do so.

This really is very crude, however, and it has many problems. First, as soon as you check once, this means you have logged in, so any subsequent checks will just say “earlier today”. Second, you must know the character’s password, which could lead to some protestation on the part of your children—and perhaps justifiably so. Consider that just as this lets you see when your kids are on the character, it also lets an astute child know you’ve been checking up on them. Finally, RuneScape lets players make any number of characters, so they could just play on one you don’t know about.

Jagex offers a feature called Hiscores that allows anyone to look up the experience points and levels of other players, as long as they are above a certain level (which varies from one skill to the next.) Looking up your child’s character from time to time can give you some idea how much they are playing.

Again here, though, there are quite a few limitations. First, only those with fairly high scores in skills will show up. Second, the scores are only updated after the player logs out, so the information is not in real time. Finally, it can be difficult to actually tell a great deal about how much someone is playing just by looking at these numbers, so be careful not to read too much into them.

Since the RuneScape software itself provides virtually no parental control mechanisms, one option is to look at other software solutions. Fortunately, there are several excellent tools available for sale that will allow you to strictly control, limit and monitor your kids’ Internet usage. They are quite effective and generally inexpensive; one such package is KidsWatch; there are many others as well.

If you do purchase such a package, be sure you read and follow its instructions carefully. Also explain to your children what it is, how it works and why you are using it. This, in combination with active supervision and hands-on involvement, may be the best solution to managing how kids use RuneScape.

Of course there are drawbacks here too. You have to pay to buy the software; installing it may not be an option on some computers, depending on how they are being used; and it won’t help when your kids play RS away from home.

Jagex can show that it cares about the issues with children and its game by doing more than just saying “parents should supervise their kids”. While it is true that parents are primarily responsible, some software enhancements by Jagex would go a long way towards making this supervision practical.

My main suggestion is to implement code that allows a parent to have managerial control over the accounts of players, including both teens and pre-teens. The basic idea is a password that allows a parent to access a control panel, where they would be able to do some or all of the following:

• Limit the number of hours per day, week or month that the character was allowed online;
  
  
• Access time logs showing how long the player was online over a period of time, and from where the player was logged in.
  
  
• Restrict the locations from which the character could log in; and
  
  
• Review any reports of infractions due to misbehavior on the part of the player.

I realize that these might not all be practical, but frankly, at this point anything would help. Hopefully, over time, Jagex will give some consideration to at least some of these ideas.

What You Won't Learn from Jagex's “Parents' Guide” (aka Marketing Brochure) Specific Dangers and Behavioral Concerns in the RuneScape Community