For my Digital Artifact, I am looking to delve deeper into the community history and involvement of the game Old School Runescape in order to represent how through nostalgia and participatory media culture the game narrative has changed in order to meet the demands of their demographic, simultaneously boosting its popularity. The importance of this research will be to highlight the benefits of participatory culture in making and continuously updating a game.
Below is an outline of my field site which I have documented and condensed into the following categories: access, places, people, agency, motivation, inspiration and content. This field site not only consists of official OSRS resources, but manly accumulates fan resources that document the lore and history of Old School Runescape from the perspective of the audience.
I will be achieving this by uploading a YouTube video once a week, to be released on Sundays, reflecting upon any epiphanies developed through my research, with some examples including the evolution of the ‘Gnome Child’ meme as well as the events of the ‘Falador Massacre’. Below I have framed my weekly process in producing my content as well as a weekly timeline dictating my efforts in the weeks leading up to my Beta.
Here are also some links to academic and other offical resources that I wish to reflect upon while I conduct my research into the OSRS Community:
TransCoding – From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture by Barbara Luneburg
https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/29530/9783839441084.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Participatory Media Culture and Digital Online Distribution – Reconfiguring the Value Chain in the Computer Game Industry by Sven Jockel, Andreas Will & Florian Schwarzer
https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/doi/full/10.1080/14241270802262419
Video Games as Time Machines: Video Game Nostalgia and the Success of Retro Gaming by Time Wulf et al.
https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/docview/2088033268?accountid=15112&pq-origsite=primo
Games 2.0: Participatory Game Creation by Jose Pedro Tavares and Licinio Roque
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.585.3212&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Real Economics in Virtual Worlds: A Massively Multiplayer Online Game Case Study, Runescape by Tanla E. Bilir
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1655084
I’m beyond excited to upload my first video next Sunday but until then, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading and stay tuned!
-Bree
drawoncedrawtwice 
As a fellow Runescape player, I absolutely love this pitch idea! Thought to be fair I play RS3 a bit more than OSRS but I still absolutely love OSRS. Firstly the mind map is a great supportive source for the pitch and really shows how thought out your plan for your DA already is and with a great timeline. Much like the Falador massacre, I do hope you include other intrinsic bits of RS history such as the party hat economy.
Ideas for what you could potentially include could be RS’s influence on other MMORPGs such as WOW or even newer games such as Elder scrolls online, or even Fallout 76. In terms of nostalgia, you could potentially expand to nostalgic quests that are no longer available in RS3 like Romeo and Juliet, or even how in OSRS you were able to examine nearly everything and have some form of witty or stupid description which is no longer a thing in RS3 (or at least in the newer areas).
Lastly, you could also talk about the differences and optimizations between RS in 2007 and the current OSRS and if they have had a significant impact on gameplay or nostalgia.
Overall I really love this pitch idea and chances are ill probably watch what you do with it while playing OSRS of course, also remember half off 99 is 92
LikeLike
Never played runescape but would love to learn more so I would be checking out this DA. I think that overall you done a great good at outlining the concepts that you would investigating in this Digital Artefact. You also outline how you are going to complete this DA which was defiantly is a good thing. Overall I think you did quite well and I am excited to see how this DA pans out.
LikeLike
This will be a very interesting DA idea as somebody who has never played Runescape but has many friends who play it religiously over similar titles like World of Warcraft. It’s evident that you have engaged with the course content and have a great understanding of it. Your field site and schedule are both well thought out which will help with keeping the Digital Artefact on track throughout the semester. One side note I’d like to mention is that you could also explore why old school Runescape succeeded while WOW Classic was not so successful. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/08/world-of-warcraft-classic-maybe-you-cant-go-home-again/ This most likely could be contributed to the major expansions still being pushed bringing waves of new content to the modern World of Warcraft. If your struggling on finding something to explore this could be a great comparison you could look to.
One issue, I have with the pitch is that you didn’t go into detail about the academic sources you collected. It would have been nice if you provided a short summary of maybe two of the sources you had collected and why they will be important for your research on the OSRS community. This will help with providing evidence that the material you have gathered will actually be beneficial and would help us as an audience understand some of the ideas you will be exploring in the future!
Remember to share your content not only on YouTube but other websites for example Twitter, The Runescape forums, Reddit and Discord. This will help bring traction to your videos which in turn will bring more comments, likes and dislikes which will help you shape your future content in the most successful manner possible, as explored in this academic source. https://web-b-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=db71f63c-7f3a-4487-b46f-d4dc00433f4e%40pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=130790241&db=bth
Other than that you’ve done extremely well in the coherence of your project and it’ll be very cool to see what you discover over the semester, best of luck!
LikeLike
I think this is a great DA, it will be an excellent way to research how games are able to pull out of a dive towards becoming obsolete, consistent updates and developers that listen to their audience can combine to ensure a game like Runescape remains popular today. Your plan is excellent and well thought out. I will be excited to see what epiphanies you have, I also think it would be interesting to include how Runescape has influenced other videogames, and why its community has remained dedicated to this game.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Game Cultures.
LikeLike