Adulthood, Gaming, and Self-Improvement
When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to have access to public education. Despite the American education system’s numerous shortcomings, my classmates and I benefited from public school as a dedicated space to spend our days growing into fully realized people. It was expected and encouraged for us to be ignorant of the wider world and how to exist within it, and we were afforded seemingly infinite time to figure things out. We spent our days learning the basics of our society, interspersed with the occasional extra-curricular to enrich our young lives with more diverse opportunities. I was also a voracious reader as a child, and that appetite for stories filled out my vocabulary and understanding of the world in still-different ways from my public education and my peers. Formalized education exists to develop a child’s perception and skills in a safe environment, one designed to facilitate that growth (to varying degrees of success). Now, as an adult, I spend eight hours a day sitting at my desk shackled to a computer screen. For all intents and purposes, I am expected to be “done” with that phase of my life, and to exist in the world as a fully-developed, well-rounded human being.
But here’s my problem: I don’t have all the skills I’d want, I haven’t done many things I’d like to do, and I especially don’t know everything I’d like to know. As a kid, I was pretty good at school. Because of my strengths in the classroom, I was able to coast through my education without needing to put in much effort beyond the bare minimum. This means that I never really dedicated myself to anything hard. I was able to learn preliminary math, language arts, science, etc. without too much difficulty. I studied Latin for three years, but my knowledge of the subject has almost completely atrophied from disuse (who could have guessed I wouldn’t use a dead language in my day-to-day!). I played an instrument at a mediocre level, and dropped it as soon as I graduated.
As an adult, I no longer have access to a space dedicated to this sort of thing. Time in adulthood becomes a kind of zero-sum game. Every hour I plan to spend reading, or working out, or learning a language, is an hour that fiercely competes against my myriad responsibilities of partner, pet, job, home, and the ever-present allure of my smartphone’s distractions. This is even further multiplied when I look at the length of a book and do the mental math on how long it’ll take to reach the ending, or thinking about the thousands of hours a new language would take to fully internalize now that my brain has lost so much plasticity. It’s so much easier to scroll on Twitter, or watch a silly YouTube video, or play a round of Balatro. It’s hard for me to even think about starting games I know I’ll love like Disco Elysium when I see that it’ll take dozens of hours to reach its ending.
Why, then, do I play so much Old School RuneScape? Often referred to by its players as a “medieval clicking simulator”, OSRS (which I’ll occasionally refer to as RuneScape from here on, despite the existence of another game with that title) is just about the grindiest game I’ve ever played. It’s my first MMORPG, aside from the few weeks I played Guild Wars 2 in high school, and is the game I’ve spent the most time in by far, even having only started it just a few years ago. RuneScape is a game where progress is often measured in double-digit hours. The core of progression in the game is training 23 different “skills” that expand a character’s abilities to wield stronger weapons or smith sturdier armor. To max out a skill to level 99 in RuneScape, one needs to amass 13,034,431 experience in any given skill. For the fastest skills like Cooking and Firemaking, experience can be earned as quickly as a couple hundred thousand per hour. Max level in these skills can be achieved in a couple dozen hours each. But for the slowest skills like Mining or Agility, the highest intensity methods that require full attention and interaction multiple times a second clock in at around 100,000 experience per hour, requiring over 100 hours of high-effort, extremely repetitive gameplay to reach level 99.
RuneScape doesn’t provide any real explicit direction to its players past the tutorial stages. As a result, the game becomes entirely about the goals a player sets for themselves. My long term goal is to max my account, to achieve level 99 in all 23 skills. This is a long term goal. The world record speedrun for achieving max level in all skills is held by streamer “he box jonge” with a completion time of 771 hours of high intensity, fully focused gameplay, sometimes on multiple accounts at once. This can be expected to take at least four times as long for a mortal like me, depending on the methods used. Due to the sheer enormity of the task, I was unsure if this was an achievable goal for me even after multiple years of chipping away at it. So I decided to try something.
Last December, I decided that I would spend all of my playtime training Runecraft, one of RuneScape’s least popular skills, until reaching level 99. I had a few reasons for this. I was a little burnt out from the game, and wanted to find joy and novelty in it again. The training method I chose is also extremely low-intensity, and could be done on my phone or on a second monitor while playing other games, hanging out with my partner, or watching TV. I also stood to earn a lot of in-game currency over the several hundred hours I’d spend grinding. I have never really done much of the highest-profit activities in the game, because I generally prefer lower-intensity content. I could use this money to pay for gear upgrades or to finance other skills on my journey to max level. And finally, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Could I restrict myself to exclusively doing one repetitive activity for hundreds of hours? If I could do it for Runecraft, I could do it for the others. If I could do it now, I could max.
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On April 9 of this year, I achieved 99 Runecraft. After four months stuck in an extremely small part of the map, doing the same thing over and over and over again, I completed my goal. And it felt amazing. I have found so much love for this game again now that I’m free to do whatever I want. In the days since, I reached another quick 99, putting my total at 4/23. I’m closer than I’ve ever been to my goal, and I’m now confident that I will achieve it given enough time.
Most importantly, though, this experience has reminded me that I can do things that suck. That whole process was a complete slog. In so many ways: the repetitiveness, the boredom, the lack of freedom to do what I wanted. At the end of the day, I was still playing a game in my leisure time and my restrictions were entirely self-imposed, but it was certainly not the most fun I’ve ever had.
I’ve realized in the weeks since that in real life, things that suck can be pretty important. Most household chores kinda suck, don’t they? So does walking my dog on a rainy day. Or doing physical therapy exercises after an injury. Public education is about 13 years chock-full of stuff that sucks. Homework sucks, the cafeterias suck, other kids suck, accidentally touching the layer of gum on the bottom of every desk sucks real bad. Marching band practice in the 95° 80% humidity Florida heat really really sucks. But I was able to handle stuff that sucked then, and I’ve proven to myself that I can still do it now.
Another thing that sucks is failure. Even when I was a kid, I tended to shy away from anything and everything I found difficult if I could get away with it. I was never athletic (shocker, I know) and I was never really creative or artistic. I quit every sport I was signed up for within a few weeks, and I never went outside of my comfort zone if I could avoid it. I was good at school, so I prioritized continuing to succeed at school, without branching out into other interests that may have become more rewarding in the long term. It was so easy for me to make the excuse that other people were just more talented, or that I would never catch up, or that I just couldn’t do it.
A few months into my Runecraft grind I discovered drawabox.com, an amazing free resource for anyone interested in learning the basics of drawing. Ever since marathoning all of Ink Master (a tattoo competition reality show) a year or so ago, I’ve envied the competitors’ abilities and artistry. Watching them work and hearing their passion for creativity was incredibly inspiring, and since that time I’ve become a fan and close follower of several artists online. I would love nothing more than to be able to create like these people I look up to some day. But I never really had that impulse to draw growing up, and had no foundation to start building upon. I bounced off of numerous YouTube tutorials and couldn’t feel myself making any progress. After I found drawabox, though, everything changed. This page in Lesson 0 really got to me: the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Learning a new skill, especially one with an infinite skill ceiling, one that people dedicate their entire lives to, is an extremely daunting task. To achieve my goal here, to be able to create like those whose work I admire, will take thousands of hours of dedication, persistence, and (most importantly!) failure.
RuneScape is a completely safe environment by comparison — progress is permanent and linear, represented objectively with numbers as opposed to the inherent subjectivity of artistic disciplines. School was a pretty safe environment too, compared to the ever-presence of other responsibilities, distractions, and deadlines in the adult world. But even in that safe environment, the persistence I demonstrated in completing a mind-numbing achievement like 99 Runecraft has given me the confidence to believe that I can persevere through hard tasks in the real world. I’m no longer intimidated by warnings that drawabox could take years to complete, or that I might need to redo assignments several times before proceeding. I recognize that this is the cost of learning, this is what it takes to get better at something so difficult. Granted, if I had spent the hundreds of hours I’ve spent in RuneScape on drawing instead, I would probably be much further along in that goal. But as people, we need a healthy balance and to take time to recover from exertion. Muscles need to grow back between days at the gym, or progress will stall. Games are indeed art, and a large part of becoming an artist is engaging with art created by others. I do not regret the time I choose to spend on play, nor do I regret the time I choose to spend on work and self-improvement.
There is no easy route to learning a skill. So many YouTube videos and tutorials promise “tips and tricks” as if not knowing that a head can be approximated with a sphere is my problem with drawing anatomy. I don’t need tricks, I need hours of deliberate, targeted effort over a long period of time — I need to rewire my brain to see the contours of the world around me and to be able to recreate them on paper. This is a very difficult task. One of the reasons Old School RuneScape has become more popular than its more modern sibling is for exactly this reason — there are no shortcuts. No matter how good a player is at medieval clicking, it’s still going to take them many hours of dedication to achieve any given goal. Likewise, everything worth doing in the adult world takes time, commitment, and consistent, repeated effort. That effort requires constant struggle against the forces of inertia and complacency, and it’s impossible to win that battle every day. And that’s okay. Internalizing this has been extremely liberatory for me. I’ve accepted that I suck, and that I will suck for many many hours to come. But one day, I won’t. Everyone I admire started somewhere. I’ve got time. I can take as long as I need to accomplish my goals. It just takes the will to see it through.
