A childhood playing one of the world’s greatest video games has made IRL (in real life) strangely familiar. Video games are the greatest educational technology since the written word, and there are a handful of online multiplayer games from the 2000s and 2010s, including RuneScape, that cumulatively served as the training grounds and inspiration for today’s most ambitious young people. How we played these games is an underrated signal for how we’re playing the modern, digitally native, “massively multiplayer role playing game” of life.
- Intro
- Gaming as the Psychological Defense To Modern Education
- Balancing Escapism and Passion
- Ender’s Game + Future Writing
Intro
Between the ages of 10 and 16, I lived a second life playing over 4,500 hours of RuneScape (RS), the world’s largest MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).
To fellow addicts, these hours are trivial. At the time though, I spent a third of my waking hours from middle school and high-school logged in and playing, and even more reading, strategizing, and participating in the game’s larger online ecosystem. RS was far more than a game – it was my most passionate hobby, an alternate reality so consuming that I eventually quit* at the beginning of junior year of high school to truly focus on real life. I thought I had to stop wasting my time.
Over the last 8 years since quitting, it turns out RS (and serious strategy / MMO gaming in general) has been one of my most striking similarities and sources of connection with fellow friends and strangers doing interesting, ambitious, and performance-oriented work. Many of today’s achieving young people trained themselves for their modern reality during the thousands of hours of their formative years spent seriously playing a set of games including RuneScape, League of Legends, Factorio, Civilization, Dota, CSGO, and Minecraft.
We spent a significant part of adolescence seriously competing, building in, and mastering intricate digital worlds, their larger media ecosystems, and the original technologies that powered them – from social networks and content creation to remote work and cybersecurity. We also saw early iterations of what are the most pressing themes and sub technologies driving the new world of the mature Internet, including AI and digital assets / economies. Most importantly, we lived countless complex in-game lives that imprinted key psychological lessons into our subconscious many years before real life would have.
Below is the start of an idea compiled from 8 years of notes, conversations, shortform pieces, and people. I also recently learned this idea was far from alone. Entire branches of managerial and economic research inquire into the psychological significance and predictive capabilities of video games, and coming across this paper about the game Civilization after this weekend’s newest release was the sign I needed to finally publish.
Special thanks to Omar and Nikola for helping riff throughout, and the countless friends I’ve rambled to over the past years. More to come.
*“You don’t quit RuneScape, you’re just on a break” is the community’s unofficial motto. My notable relapses include a college summer during my first internship, and the last month and a half while writing this essay…
Gaming as the Psychological Defense To Modern Education
Public education in the 2010s was outdated in every sense. Daily life even at specialized, gifted magnet schools revolved around maximizing “well-roundedness” in subjects, extracurricular activities, and vaguely noble life participation (volunteering, “leadership activities”, and competitive arts) to ultimately create an idyllic college application. Teachers and counselors preached the ideal of following an endless combination of other people’s proven paths to life security – higher education and safe careers – while the Internet eroded these paths and lifestyles in real time.
We became expert regurgitators and optimized procrastinators, and our high school’s ranking increased with the average hours of bullshit work they assigned. And yet these paths – a fixture of the recurring processes of entrance qualification, filtering, and eventual routing for young people with any ambition – were a necessary game to learn to play, especially for our crowd of first-generation immigrants and college goers. The key was playing them with gamer psychology.
Across America, video games were the ultimate (and sometimes only) places of full agency and unsupervised social interaction, especially in big city suburbs like Houston where it was only bearable weather for 2-3 months a year and everyone was a 30+ min drive away. IRL, my day-to-day avatar was limited to the monotony of school, the nearby biking trail, and whatever neighbors we could gather on the cul-de-sac to play soccer, Nerf wars, cricket, and netless tennis. Beautiful memories, but highly dependent on free time and emotional alignment between a bunch of extracurricular-ed out kids (a logistical nightmare).
Video games, on the other hand, were on-demand (login whenever), experientially rich (incredible diversity of playstyles), uniquely social (international, online, 24/7), and mostly unconstrained by the two biggest IRL limits: physics and money*. While school was a game of reluctant execution for unquestionable taskmasters, gaming was truly free to roam, and everything about my in-game performance (except RNG*** and lag) was a pure function of decision making, skill, and time.
Gielinor (the name of RS’s gameworld) was an early metaverse – a digital virtual reality home to millions of different real people logging in to play everything across PvP (player-versus-player), PvM (player-vs-monster), questing, skilling, minigames, gambling, and just live chatting. Unlike fixed games (e.g. playing through story mode as Master Chief in Halo), RS and most role-playing games have no specific endpoint. If you “finish” all the game’s official skills, quests, and achievements, you still have near limitless more in-game goals such as unearned rare loot (functional and cosmetic), sheer wealth, and competitive ranking tables in all the different sub-games, while weekly updates and consistent game expansions ensured there’s always more to be done. The most stimulating, mature in-game “end” content requires hundreds of hours of requirements and comes with its own niche learning curves, and the multiplayer nature means someone is always coming for your record.
Anything that can withstand and encourage such intense human attention requires initial brilliance in design. RS originated as a browser game in 2001 and is today still click-based (mouse and keyboard). This was one of the reasons for its virality, as no special hardware like controllers or supercharged GPUs was needed. It also was how I learned a crucial 21st century skill – a few months of my first summer vacation playing got me typing proficiency that years of computer lab and typing games couldn’t. Despite this archaic input (or maybe because of its simplicity), RS boasts the most diverse set of playstyles among leading RPGs and is today the longest-running, largest, and most-updated MMO. How you played RS inspired how you play real-life, from eventual careers to hobbies and vices:
The below is anecdotal categorization from 8 years of these conversations, keeping in mind that playstyles aren’t at all mutually exclusive. I’ll expand on the intricacies of these playstyles in further writing, and would love insight from other former players. I’ll also acknowledge a ton of other paths that are less represented by RS players, as creatives gravitated more towards Minecraft, engineers to Factorio, etc.
- PKers (player-killers) – law, trading, crypto, esports, athletes
- Merchers (in-game traders) – finance, investing, e-commerce, entrepreneurship
- PvMers (player-vs-monster / NPC, including bossing) – consultants, corporate, software engineers
- Skillers – doctors, industrial / chemical / civil engineers, academics
- Questing / Achievement Diaries – designers, creative writers, artists
- Clan / guilds / wiki – project management, social media managers and influencers, technical writers
- Duel Arena / GE games – gambling addictions, risk management, fundraising
To play well, you had to plan well – as each piece of higher-level gameplay meant a required hundreds of hours of playtime from even the most skilled or wealthy players. This “grind” was RS’s key innovation – fully gamifying the necessary hours of sheer time required to level your character into unlocking better, successively stimulating playstyles. The grind packaged the great habits of patience, delayed gratification, gamification of repetitive / arduous tasks, milestone-based goal achievement, and “mastering the basics” into the gaming experience while imprinting the truth about doing hard things anywhere – there are no shortcuts for the basics, and to be the best is a completely different goal than to be great. It takes ~13 million XP points to get to level 99 (the max) for a skill, half of which are earned between levels 92 and 99 (great to excellent).
Between my close gamer friends and I, the running joke was that we used to literally “work” for fun, as long-term strategy and commitment was necessary to ever have a shot at the most rewarding parts of the game. My school planner was split between writing actual schoolwork and the various skills / quests I needed to complete for my next, and my mind began to treat them the same way – necessary but less interesting tasks to optimize and “speedrun” so that my future self would benefit. Constant updates and infinite permutations of gear, skills, and game decisions made the minutiae matter, and I quickly learned to emulate best practices and avoid unnecessary risks from top players, guides, forums, and the subtext in each game update. When I finally knew how to play, I learned my second most impactful RS lesson – asymmetric joy and material reward came from doing the damn thing myself and taking taking my own risks. Like IRL, studying could only help me gain Knowledge, while Wisdom was earned through lived experience. Core values like discipline and patience fall in the latter, internalized only through repetition.
Authentically playing RS meant allowing myself to find the unique combination of time-wasting that gave me joy, pride, and kept me playing – a reality completely counter to the IRL structure of following an endless combination of other people’s proven paths to somehow find purpose. As my character levelled up, the grind also elevated with more complex, tougher requirements. But this hard work was no longer daunting, both in-game and IRL. It was an optimization problem.
My high school, for example, counted 89.5s as the same GPA as a 90 or 99 in any class. At first, ego and a lifetime of academic validation made me want to continue getting the highest grades and “playing school”. But between new friends, more enticing hobbies, and my now serious second life in RS, I instilled a new mantra for school and any similar future necessary but uninteresting thing – minimum effort, maximum result. I couldn’t compromise on my eventual GPA as I needed to hit basic college application filters, but there was no need to put an ounce of effort beyond it, as I was learning more through the Internet and good books than I was at school anyways.
“Hacking” school and free time this way served me well to get through similar bureaucratic games (college coursework, institutional programs like scholarships and awards, and even the mundane parts of internships and professional work). It also reshaped my restless temperament, as I had years of living proof that patience was indeed a virtue and “paying your dues” was a necessary step in the grueling early stages of anything worth doing. At the same time, I had to realize what I truly wanted was unique to me and only attainable through an unstructured path I had to plan and commit to myself. Sure, the game designers at Jagex were likely more rule-oriented and solvable than the chaos of IRL, but the principles of self-determination, min-maxing, and long-term thinking were the same.
Problems and future states of being, no matter how daunting, are meant to be broken down, strategized, and eventually solved by those with willpower and vision. Beyond bureacratic games, this methodology also breaks your personal limitations in things like fitness or mental health – once you’ve grinded 50k XP / hour for 100s of hours, you can grind anything else like gym consistency or meditation. What a gem of self-determination in a world that tried to educate my entire generation into victimhood. By also being massively multiplayer, RS was also a rich simulation of the reality of other people’s agency – across risk-taking, negotiation, markets, knowledge sharing, community organization / governance, and more. As we live under constant sensory and informational assault on social media by both algorithms and calculated friends and influencers, having a thick skin and a resolve immune from constant access and connectivity is paramount.
A shared Google Docs my friend and I made over winter break in 2013 to plan our characters. Notion MVP!
*On money — RS required a paid $7.99 monthly membership for the game to be worth playing that was unattainable during the school year. Luckily, RS’s parent game developer Jagex was acquired by growth equity giant Insight Partners right as I started to get good at playing and rich in-game (at the end of middle school). And their first revenue expansion strategy was to launch $ purchasable in-game bonds that could be redeemed for membership and traded to other players, effectively creating a legal** FX market for in-game gold and price of membership + freeing me from asking to use a credit card. That winter break, I spent 200M in-game to buy 2 years of membership.
**I’ll discuss RS’s in-game currency, GP (gold pieces) and its crazy economics later. Some see it as among the first scaled digital currencies (starting long before Bitcoin), as despite being illegal by in-game rules, GP has been exchanged for real-world money (real world trading) for decades. In fact, RS GP was for a few years more stable than Venezuela’s bolivar, and grown adults would play the game to make a living for their families, exchanging GP for USD through illegal game “FX” markets. GP is just like money in the IRL game of life as it 1) allows you to skip or speedrun earlier stages and fail with safety, but 2) is nowhere near a guarantee to play well.
***RNG = random-number generated, used as a shortform for “luck” in the game. RNG is a key driver to dynamics like drop rates (chances of you receiving valuable and useful items / loot) which drive a lot of gameplay. Algorithmic RNG is mathematically more clear than IRL luck / fate, but it’s random enough to be a useful substitute to understand the role of chance in life and develop a deep humility to the uncontrollable. You must detach your process and efforts (input of hard work) from outcomes and results, and acknowledge good fortune is a key component to any of life’s blessings.
Balancing Escapism and Passion
Despite all this learning and time, I’d never once written or talked about RS in any of the dozens of formal applications I’d completed across college, scholarships, ad internships. I couldn’t yet acknowledge gaming as anything beyond a private, escapist addiction, even to myself. My in-game avatar and my IRL avatar were distinct realities. After quitting, my success in the high school rat race reinforced this idea, from class rankings to extracurricular achievements to making more IRL memories with new friends with my newfound time. Gaming, it seemed, was my bottleneck.
Then, I moved into Austin with 50k+ strangers and less than a handful of familiar faces. In order to be myself and avoid another set of “other people’s paths”, I realized the story I told both to myself and about myself was my own decision. Gaming became a great icebreaker, a shared meme, and a gradual acceptance, combined with the nostalgia of cozy days in childhood against the chaos of making my own way professionally and socially. In my new role finding and encouraging student startup founders, it became a useful analogy and way to bridge the gap between a finance worldview and crowds of engineers, researchers, and generally more serious technical people.
A year later, fully energized by the world of college football, friends, startups, and paddleboarding, I was finishing a written application to be a college VC with Contrary. The prompt was nothing unique – “write about something not on your resume you’re proud of”. But for the first time, I could not only acknowledge, but rejoice in my love and achievement in gaming and RS. My blurb covered the thousands of real-life dollars worth of in-game wealth I’d amassed (and lost and rebuilt, many times over) from merching and betting and risk-fighting, the dozens of fellow players I helped organize over weekends and late nights in an international PKing* clan, the hundreds of extra hours I’d spent as an early user of new consumer software across streaming, team communication, and content creation and marketing–and the cherished memories I made throughout. I got in, and in our first student retreat full of tech and startup loving undergrads and MBAs from every major university, I met many fellow former gamers. RS came up unprompted in more than a few conversations.
This new world of ambitious and achieving former gamers was incredibly validating and also came with a heavy dose of FOMO. Clearly all 4,500 hours weren’t necessary and I had a brief period regretting that “wasted” time – what if, like all these founders / investors / engineers / traders, I had also found crypto instead of GP, made YouTube videos instead of screenshots on obscure forums, monetized my in-game skills, decided to code deeper software than just in-game clicking bots? And then I looked around – I was still in those rooms, learning more than I could have dreamed, and self-aware enough to have these thoughts. I had cherished memories (and a sick account), friendships, and a life I wouldn’t trade for anything. And more importantly:
Future Writing
In the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, 1) young people train and unlock their potential through intensive video games (The Mind Game), 2) gaming prowess is used as the selection criteria for the most important global institutions including the government and military, and 3) the gaming interface is ultimately used to execute the most intense real-world systemic operations of war and economy. This sci-fi universe and visualization of mature ed-tech, Internet, and augmented reality / simulation tech is consistently cited as among the most prescient and influential by today’s industry leaders.
I believe this thesis – of gaming as the ultimate educational technology and gamification as the eventual interface for engaging the social, physical, and economic world – is our budding reality. Internet-native MMOs were the first significant iteration, and we impressionable young players were the first cohort.
Please reach out on X if you want to riff! These are shorter overviews of writing drafts and conversations I’ve been having.
- Digital rarity – partyhats (an in-game tradable item originally coded in Dec 2001 continues to be the ultimate wealth symbol in the modern game, going from a handful of GP to tens of billions due to rarity), utility-based NFTs, and social signaling status as a “good enough” reason to drive price
- Grand Exchange (the original equity / commodity / crypto market) and in-game economies. Fantastical but “skin-in-the-game” trading simulations are more educational than paper trading real companies and assets for investing psychology, research skills, and live portfolio management. The importance of liquidity.
- Technological platform shifts from the everyday user / consumer / employee perspective – game mechanism updates (from small tweaks to Evolution of Combat) separated the live, agentic players from people OK with becoming obsolete. Same psychology as IRL adopters of “playstyle-shifting” tech from software / Internet to AI
- MMO training grounds for social trust, scamming, and time management with automation. In-game bots, scripting, and plugins as analogies for the “dead Internet” and how to decide what stays “economically useful”
- Alt and specialized player accounts (runners, mules, scouts, resource collectors) as early iterations of employee management, outsourcing, and business strategic integration