What’s going on WordPress, today I want to talk about the week I spent in January playing Old School Runescape. For those of you that don’t know, OSRS is a point and click RPG video game that was extremely popular back when I was in intermediate school. The basis of the game is to level up your character in a variety of different skills that will allow you to interact with harder content further into the game. It is extremely time intensive to grind out those levels and I have a large amount of respect for players who are able to reach level 99. I have a couple of friends who still play the game daily and I was very into chopping down trees back when I was a young adult. So, due to a conversation with a fellow Ultimate Frisbee teammate of mine, I decided to tryout the game again for the sake of fun and nostalgia. After a week of playing I took away four primary insights that can be applied to life in the real world. These four insights are:
- Do Something Always.
- There Are Multiple Ways to Reach Your End Goal.
- Tunnel Vision is a Powerful Tool.
- It is OK to be Mindfully Mindless…Sometimes.
Staying busy
In OSRS there are two primary resources that you are going to be wanting to gather. These two resources are experience and gold. The most efficient way to play the game is to gather both of these simultaneously. This way of playing can be overwhelming to new players because there is a tremendous amount of ways to get one without the other. The variety of activities within Runescape typically leave new players frozen between making a decision on which activity they would like to do. This leads me to my first rhetorical question. Do you know whats better than thinking about the best ways to gain gold and experience at the same time? The answer is actually doing an activity that will allow you to gain gold or experience. I feel like often times in life we get stuck between deciding what it is that we should be doing. The process of deciding what to do often times consumes the precious time that we could be using towards improving a certain aspect of our life. Whether this is making money, working out, or even focusing on alleviating mental stress; It is important to just do something if not anything that will benefit you in the long run.
Multiple paths available
At first, my goal in OSRS was to earn enough gold in-game in order to purchase one month of membership. Think of this like the Hulu spotify deal without commercials. Once I started my grind that was chopping down trees and fishing lobster, I quickly realized that this was a much harder goal than I had originally expected. Therefore, my next and final goal was to try and experience as much of the free-to-play quest lines as possible. That means that rather than focusing on efficiency, I could instead explore the games content. During my grind towards membership I quickly realized that their were a lot of different ways to earn gold and experience. Additionally, I started to understand that time was my most valuable resource. What I failed to understand though, was that whenever I was exploring the game I was also working towards my original goal of obtaining membership. In life there are infinite amounts of opportunities that will potentially lead you towards fulfillment in life. With this in mind, I plan to stray away from the mindset that there is only one way that I can work towards my long-term goals. Instead, I am going to see which paths it is that life presents me and then adapt my short-term goals based on those same options.
Tunnel Vision
In OSRS there are 23 different skills that get exponentially harder and harder to level up as the game progresses. All of the skills contain a multitude of activities that fall within various tiers of difficulty. The highest tier activity for any given skill typically provides the most experience and often times yields the heftiest coin payout. This is why the most common method of leveling up a character is to focus on one skill in particular. This allows you to farm the highest tier resources within the early stages of the game.
” If you’re lucky enough to be good at what you like, become tunnel vision.”
Gary Vaynerchuk
Imagine if Lionel Messi had spent half of the time he spent training for football on learning the culinary arts. He probably would not continue to hold the title of being the best football player in the world. He might still break the top five…but that is besides the point. The point is, the reason why Messi is the best is because he lives a life dedicated to football. This is why focusing on that one thing you love the most can often times lead to the most fulfillment in life. Such as reaching level 99 woodcutting in OSRS because you love chopping down virtual trees.
It is ok to do nothing
Finally, one of the hardest but most rewarding things I found about OSRS was the idea of spending time doing tedious activities for what seemed like an eternity. I constantly found myself questioning why I was playing the game and whether or not I was wasting my day. After the first couple of days I began to find the game play to be relaxing and somewhat a challenge. I found the discovery of new farming methods to be very rewarding and fairly difficult. I also enjoyed just talking in chat with a lot of my friends who have become veterans of the game themselves. Anyways, this experience that I had within OSRS reminded me of an important takeaway that I discovered through working as well. This takeaway is that sometimes you have to allow your brain to wander and rest for the sake of your own well-being. It is ok to do nothing whenever you find yourself overworked. More often than not, your body tends to perform better after longer intervals of rest. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed my time on OSRS but I would not recommend it for the sole reason that the game play can become very addictive. Additionally, please let me know if you have ever played Oldschool Runescape and also what you thought about it in the comments.
Semi-Poetic 