I played a lot of games as a kid, sometimes caring more about the game than what was happening in real life (much to the chagrin of my mom), but no game hooked me quite as much as Runescape. When Kunwoo talked about Final Fantasy XIV during the Social Design and Game Design lectures, I was flooded with nostalgic memories of my own MMO experience. Runescape is barely an MMO (my friends who play WoW would laugh at that categorization), but in its glory days, it was bustling with activity and engagement. Some very simple choices of “Design[ing] for Human Connection” (Principle 7.1) and “A Little Anonymity Can Go a Long Way” (Principle 7.7) contributed to my favorite gaming experience in my childhood.
Fishing for lobsters in Catherby, cutting willows at Draynor Village, and fighting Hill Giants in the Edgevill Dungeon: these zones were flooded with players conversing. In the old days, it was a barter economy; when we gathered resources via skilling or got a big drop from a boss, we would gather at banks and advertise what we were selling. You had to interact with other players to sell goods. When new quests were released, players worked together to figure out cryptic clues, as many of the quests had obtuse objectives that required community effort to solve. Guides existed, but they were sparse compared to what is available today, and players coordinated frequently to discover new skilling / bossing metas and to complete quests.
Over the years, a series of changes slowly reduced the social elements of the game. A centralized marketplace (the “Grand Exchange”) was introduced where players could place orders for items to buy or sell and it would be automatically fulfilled based on the existing orders placed. This made buying and selling significantly easier (which skyrocketed the economy), but players no longer needed to interact with each other to trade, it was done entirely through an isolated interface. Clans were introduced, which allowed players to private groups with friends. This made group activities like bossing easier to coordinate but moved conversations away from a Public Chat (which all players could engage in) into a private Clan Chat. Finally, player-owned homes were added, which were private instances. Player-owned homes quickly become OP, allowing the player to do many things alone in their home that they would otherwise have to do in the game world around other players. All three of these changes shifted the game to be more like WoW (and thus a more “serious” MMO), but they went against Principle 7.13, “Design for Familiar Anonymity”, moving core game elements into more isolated experiences and negatively affecting the social aspect of the game.
Runescape still exists (it's now known as Runescape 3, which is a microtransaction nightmare), but the developers also maintain Old School Runescape (OSRS). Originally a copy of the game as it was in 2007, OSRS has since been extensively developed and added to, but with the “ethos” of the “old school” styles and aesthetics. OSRS is objectively better than the Runescape of my childhood: it has tons of new areas, new quests, new bosses, new ways to train skills, minigames, raids, soon-to-be new skills, and tons of rebalancing. I still come back every few years, but it’s just not the same. There are a lot of people still playing, but it’s quiet. Very few people speak in public chat or speak with people outside of their clans, and the game is less about having an adventure with fellow players and more about maximizing efficiency. Although it’s a “better game”, it will never quite achieve the magic it had when it was a bustling social community.