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

Understanding How Seriously Kids Take RuneScape Tips for the Parents of RuneScape Players, and a Call for More Supervision Tools

Due to the significant numbers of children who play RuneScape, Jagex created a short Parents' Guide to the game. In its introduction, Jagex says: “We feel that, as a parent, you should have a solid understanding of what our game entails and an awareness of how we keep it safe.”

Well, the Parents' Guide does contain useful information for parents who are new to the game and have kids who want to play RuneScape; for this reason I do recommend reading it. Unfortunately, the Parents' Guide is incomplete and misleading in many ways; in particular, Jagex has omitted mention of many of the negative aspects of the game.

Whether this is deliberate or not I cannot say, but the end result is the same regardless: the Parents' Guide reads much more like a marketing brochure for RuneScape than a truly honest, unbiased detailing of risks and benefits to let parents make wise choices. In fact, it was seeing all the problems in this guide that led me, in part, to create TruthScape.

Here is a brief listing of ten of the problems with the Parents' Guide that you should know about. Note that some of these issues are discussed in more detail elsewhere on TruthScape, with links as appropriate:

1. Abuse Reporting: Jagex plays up their abuse reporting function, even though in many cases it is effectively useless. It's also frustrating to many players to report rule-breakers and see that often nothing is done about it.
   
   
2. Chat Filter: The chat filter is described as being a “sophisticated chat-filter system that detects and blocks any profanities that are typed into the chat window”, and Jagex says they are “continually making it much more difficult for players to bypass the system.” In reality, it is very easy to bypass the filter, which is done all the time, and updates are not that frequent in my experience.
   
   
3. Online Presence of Jagex Staff: The Parents' Guide says that Jagex feels “that it is extremely important to also make our presence known in the game” and that “staff moderators work in much the same way as player moderators”. The mention of staff moderators implies active supervision in the game by Jagex employees, which is in fact close to non-existent. I've logged hundreds of hours in RuneScape and been playing for over a year, and have never seen a Jagex moderator—not even once! Player moderators are much more frequently seen, but have basically no power to do anything in the game.
   
   
4. The Wilderness: The Wilderness is a player-versus-player area where anyone can be attacked without provocation by another player, often through tricks and deception. It is probably the most dangerous area in the game for new players. Despite that, it is not mentioned anywhere in the Parents' Guide—it's as if it didn't exist.
   
   
5. No Details on Scams or How to Avoid Them: Jagex includes only rudimentary anti-scamming and hijacking information. They deliberately leave out the details of scams—with one exception—which makes it nearly impossible for new players to avoid falling prey to them.
   
   
6. No Warnings about Luring: Jagex has recently taken steps to address luring, but it’s still a problem in RuneScape, yet is not mentioned at all in the Parents' Guide.
   
   
7. Misleading Comments about Appropriate Player Ages: As mentioned earlier in this section, there are three references to the game being for “all ages”. Even the page saying that the game is targeted at those over 13 was added only in 2007.
   
   
8. Speedy Customer Support? Jagex says in the Parents' Guide that the “greatest benefit of having an online support system is the speed with which we can receive, process and reply to our player's queries and password requests.” This is in fact a bit of a crap shoot—many player become exceedingly frustrated waiting for days at a time for replies from customer support, and often all they get for the wait is a form letter.
   
   
9. Claims about Educational Benefits: The Parents' Guide has only 8 pages, and one of them is dedicated to the supposed educational benefits of the game. This page reads entirely like marketing material. As described earlier in this section, the positive educational benefits are overstated, and the negative “educational aspects” are completely left out.

For these reasons and more, you owe it to yourself to do your own homework before deciding to let your kids play RuneScape.

Understanding How Seriously Kids Take RuneScape Tips for the Parents of RuneScape Players, and a Call for More Supervision Tools