Jagex Dev Diary: Creative Gameplay in RuneScape, by Community Manager Paul Mayer

By Paul Mayer | April 5, 2010 | | Filed under: Features

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In their first dev diary for The MMO Gamer, Jagex’s Paul Mayer, with a little help from Kelvin Plomer, takes us through how players use RuneScape for more than just gaming…

When I was growing up, a sandbox was what your cat buried its business in.

However, in recent times the term has become synonymous with enormous games that offer non-linear gameplay and allow for gamers to play games at their own pace and style.

Many big titles now offer gamers a broader and deeper experience that reaches far beyond traditional gaming.

And, in today’s economic climate, getting more bang for your buck is often a major deciding factor when choosing which gameplayers are going to put their time and money into.

Most genres of games have tapped into that school of thought, but when it comes to creating opportunities to play your game by your rules, the MMO stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Not only can you play the existing content how and when you want, if you don’t want to play the pre-prepared content, there’s flexibility that allows players to create their own community driven style of play.

Community = Content

Since joining Jagex, I’ve seen an incredible amount of community-driven content in our biggest title RuneScape in its (nearly) tenth year of game evolution. This content includes a surprising range of activities that are a testament to the demand for platforms that enable creative gameplay.

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s book, especially so for an MMO.

Sure, the development teams are largely responsible for the longevity of the game by updating content every couple of weeks. However, community-driven content, responding to feedback and supporting creative gameplay both in and out of the game helps keep players coming back to see what’s new.

There are  several different levels of creative gamplay that we tend to see in RuneScape: ranging from using the game as a social networking tool and a place to chat, to engaging in massive battle tournaments. To the uninitiated, mini-game “activities” are a good place to get stuck in as the base content is already there.

Completing quests, participating in the markets and killing slack-jawed noobs will bag you gold pieces in ways the developers intended. But, with a little ingenuity and planning, players create their own ways of earning a fewextra coins.

In-game businesses are common in MMOs, and in RuneScape we’ve seen all manner of acumen on display over the years.

Looking to drown your virtual sorrows after alching that party hat in a failed bid to impress a lady? You need a drink! And fortunately, there’s a veritable brewery of players with high cooking skills looking to turn a buck by running bars and restaurants from their houses.

Are you the owner of a tavern and want to advertise your establishment and get a seal of approval? Bring down the restaurant inspectors!

And, if after spending too much on Dwarven Stout, you find yourself too ‘constitutionally impaired’ to find your own way home, for a few gold pieces you can take one of the many RuneScape taxi services (by simply clicking “follow player” on your cab driver) to make a quick getaway before you embarrass yourself by soiling your armor.

Transcending the Game

Players who take content and use it to role-play, make money or compete show that with a few decent props and some ingenuity, communities can add hours and hours of additional gameplay.

Some props are added intentionally, like adding a dice for role play communities, while others come along by accident, as RuneScape’s trusted cabbies will testify. On occasion though, props transcend the game itself, as we’ve found with machinima.

Machinima could be considered the epitome of creative gameplay, as it takes the game and turns it into a film set.

There are hundreds of machinima films out there made by budding Peter Jacksons who dismantle the game completely, give it a new environment, new characters, a new story and a completely new purpose.

At Jagex, we love the creativity of RuneScape’s machinima makers and actively encourage it through competitions, an ever growing YouTube community and in a recent game update, a tool called the Orb of Oculus that helps players be more creative with their camera work.

Whether we’re talking RuneScape or any other popular MMO, emergent gameplay is seeing hundreds of thousands of players get even more out of what are already massive games. RuneScape’s developers will keep on giving players new and non-traditional ways to enjoy the game, and we fully expect to see our community using upcoming content in ways the developers never imagined.

Meanwhile, we in community management will keep on talking to our players, playing alongside our players and wherever we can, help them in their creative revolution.