This article first appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 233. Written by Matt Lees.
What are you doing, Matt?” asked my friend. It was March 2002 and he had spotted me through the window of our college computer room. Why wasn’t I in the pub with the rest of our friends? I explained that I was playing a free fantasy MMO called Runescape. Technically, that was true. It was certainly true enough to suffice as an answer for now.
“Oh. Right.” He was clearly unimpressed by the low-resolution 3D blobs trundling around the screen. “Is it to do with killing dragons and goblins?” “Yes,” I lied. “It’s just a bit of fun.” I wasn’t happy that my new friends at college thought I was spending all my free time killing waves of magical monsters, but it was better than the truth. The truth was that, driven by impatience and greed, I had found myself running a coal mining business fuelled by child labour.
In my defence, I didn’t intend for it to end up this way. I don’t think anyone living in rural Cheshire ever really intends to get into child exploitation. I never really planned to start buying Rage Against the Machine albums, and I wouldn’t recommend that either.
None of what I achieved back then could be carried out today, anyway. In 2007, Runescape’s developers introduced the Grand Exchange, a marketplace in which players are able to easily buy and sell their goods for fair and reasonable prices. Back in 2002, though, Runescape was a wild new world. Outside of the game’s NPC shops, buying and selling items usually relied on players simply standing on the streets for hours at a time, shouting their best offers at anyone who’d listen. It was a world ripe with opportunity for deceit.
I wasn’t always a manipulative git. My earliest obsession with Runescape was driven by a confused fascination. My younger brother had started playing shortly after the game first went online in 2001, and initially I was happy to watch over his shoulder as he mindlessly pottered around this strange and muddy world of unappealing shapes and colours.
Most of his exploration revolved around an area known as ‘the Wilderness’, an anything-goes PvP zone that was especially deadly for low-level players unaware of the dangers. My brother explained that if you were quick, you could nip across the border and grab bits of unwanted loot from the corpse of the winner’s victim. The trinkets were cheap, but he seemed to enjoy playing the part of a professional vulture.
Mostly though, he’d be in the windmill. “I’m making pies,” he said, picking up two freshly spawned tins from the kitchen floor.
“You collect grain from outside, then grind it in the mill to make flour,” he explained. “Then you get clay to make a jug, and fill it with water to turn the flour into pastry. You put that into the tin with some berries or meat, then it goes in the oven and you sometimes get a good pie.” This specific distinction explained the abandoned black discs that covered the kitchen floor, and why none of the other players seemed interested in scavenging them.
Part of me knew I should stay away, but there was something strangely compelling about an MMO that wouldn’t give you the ability to make a pie until you’d burnt about 15 of the bastards. In February of 2002, my character Magicpants was born.
At first, Magicpants just wanted to be a warrior. After hours of constant battle, he learned the true cost of warfare: fruity pies. Healing up naturally took ages, so it was always best to stock up on tasty cakes before dashing into the field. Pies were expensive to buy though, so most of the world’s bravest warriors would run out in to the Wilderness, fight for a while, and then retire to the kitchen to master the art of pastry. It was odd. The elves in The Lord of the Rings might have had a penchant for magical chunks of bread, but you can hardly imagine Legolas nipping off to make a cheeky Bakewell tart. After seeing the carbon-coated carpet of the windmill’s kitchen, I decided I’d be better off risking death.
Unfortunately, this meant that I often found myself biting off more than I could chew. Fights were tough, and weren’t made any easier by a zoomed-in interface that made it almost impossible to move and talk at the same time. To compensate, players would boil down messages to impenetrable acronyms that, even now, make very little sense. Sporadic bursts of movement paired with exclamations of “HH” usually translated as: “Oh God, help me! I’m being killed by a goblin!” Few players ever worked out these cries, causing me to fall again and again to depressingly avoidable deaths.
After one too many, I realised why so few people in the game seemed capable of social interaction.
Go to page two for the rise of the Magicpants empire.
Runescape was slow, ugly, and idiosyncratic. On the other hand, it was free to play, and would run on almost any computer without an installation. These two points alone made it the perfect choice for anyone who lacked money, power, or admin access to their computer. Runescape was a game designed for children. In many regards, it still is.
This was the point at which I should have logged off. I didn’t. I couldn’t resist the opportunity. All good MMOs tease the potential for grand social status, but this golden goose was too juicy to neglect. Given time, dedication and careful planning, I could easily become a Runescape master. I had an intellectual edge, my social skills were better, and I didn’t have to be in bed by nine. I was going to be rich.
My ambitions had an endgame to begin with: I wanted a suit of mithril armour. But that didn’t take long, and it didn’t end there. In just over a month, I was the 63rd best Runescape miner in the world.
Mining appealed to me initially because it was so simple: wait till the ore reappears within a rock, then use your pickaxe to collect the goodies. Filling your inventory with 27 lumps of ore was easy enough, but the overwhelming demand would tend to slow things down. With more than one person trying to farm the same rock, mining could quickly become utterly infuriating.
In the early days of mining bronze and iron, I would happily wait until the person in front of me had finished, but my patience quickly faded once I realised the money I could make by spending more time creating items at the furnace. Before my smithing skill hit level 30, I had been able to easily crank out iron bars at a regular rate. Now that I had stepped up to smelting steel, however, there was an additional ingredient required: two lumps of coal. I could personally collect the iron ore needed, but if I was going to maintain my previous momentum I’d need help with the rest.
“Hello JomboJames. Would you be interested in selling me some coal?” JomboJames stopped mining, and slowly walked towards me.
There were a few seconds of silence as he typed out his first response: “WUT”. Persisting, I explained that I was interested in buying his coal. These days you’ll be lucky to get a piece of coal for less than 250 gold, but my offer back then was a meagre 50g for 10 lumps. After another few moments of weighing the deal up, he came to his final decision: “OLK BRB DINNER IS READ."
Once Jombo’s dinner was no longer read, he met me by the bank. Over the days that followed, he proved to be an invaluable employee – delivering around 20 pieces of coal a day when he wasn’t busy doing his homework or being sent to bed early.
At this rate though, progress was still slow. Smelting ore was practically automatic – you simply found a furnace then chose how many metal bars you wanted to make. Consequently, I had lots of extra time on my hands. I decided it was time to expand my operation.
It had turned out that Jombo had a couple of friends who were also looking to earn some shiny fictional coins, and who would all meet me at the bank south of Varrock once a day to turn in their goods.
In retrospect, there was clearly a strange kind of reverence involved. All three would travel together, and approach me one at time – with JomboJames always the first to complete his part of the transaction. I expect this might have had something to do with the fact that I’d once told Jombo I was 17 years old – a revelation that could cause anyone under the age of 10 to find themselves suddenly lost in a fog of awe.
I don’t think I ever asked how old they all were, but none of them seemed to have been alive for long enough to master words or numbers – given that each was being ripped off on a daily basis by a man in pink trousers who really should know better. “THANSK”, they might say – departing once again to begin another pickaxe-pilgrimage. It was basically a lot like the Nativity, except that the three wise men weren’t wise, or men, and delivered only triple coal.
Jombo’s crew were reliable, but they weren’t my only suppliers. In under a week my influence had spread to three separate mining communities, with more than 20 different children contacting me on a daily basis to try to sell me the coal they’d been hoarding. I had suddenly become a coal baron, exploiting my workers with low prices, making trinkets and selling them on at enormous profit. Like most war criminals, I don’t remember the names and faces, only the time, the location and the profits.
Go to page three for the beginning of the end.
Despite his weeks of loyalty, JomboJames was soon left behind by the swarm of children willing to bring my coal straight to the furnace at Al Kharid – an under-used smelting location which had now become my second home. After just three days at maximum capacity, my smithing skill hit level 40 and it was time to begin working with gold. I’d been preparing for this for a while – I had plenty of precious ore in the bank ready to be forged into gold necklaces, one of Runescape’s best money-making trinkets.
Aside from the remarkably high profit margins, the best thing about working with gold was the simplicity. No additional ores or reagents were required to make a gold bar – a refreshing contrast to the logistical nightmares I’d had when mass-smelting steel. I wouldn’t need coal again until mithril opened up at smithing level 50 – but I’d planned ahead for this by keeping at least 100 chunks squirrelled away in the bank.
For the time being, I’d have to close the sweatshop down. Messaging as many suppliers as I could remember, my brief memo informed them that I didn’t need any more coal, and that they should stop constantly mining it unless they wanted it for themselves. Some understood, but most didn’t. Many had already mined a large quantity before I’d had a chance to tell them, which I bought out of a growing sense of guilt.
Many of these people again didn’t understand that this was a one-off final gesture, and took it as a sign that their long-term contract had been renewed. One child in particular flew off on a remarkable tangent when I told him that I didn’t want his 20 pieces of coal, returning four days later with 200 pieces instead, as if that might somehow be more appealing.
I didn’t realise I had a serious problem on my hands until my item bank ran out of storage space, filled to the brim with coal mined by children who should have been doing their homework, but instead thought they were making a profit from the friendly man called Magicpants, who traded them gold on street corners like it was sweeties.
Enough was enough, and the money wasn’t worth it. Travelling back to the mining patch where I had first started mining coal myself, I hoped to find solace from the ghost of nostalgia. Instead, I was greeted with an impromptu company meeting.
One by one the miners dropped their tools and came over to seek their fortunes. “COLAMAN” “COAL” “MAGICPANS!!” I wanted to apologise. I wanted to explain that they’d been stupid, and that I’d been unfairly manipulative of that for personal gain. I didn’t say anything. They’d understood so little of what I had said so far that I decided actions might speak louder than words. Surrounded by the heartbreaking reality of the pixel-poverty I’d built an empire on, I slowly removed every piece of my mithril armour – dropping them to the ground as a token apology for the collective wrongs of my evil regime. For a moment, I felt like Bob Geldof – which was obviously quite distressing. Logging off from the Runescape server, I left the college computer room and decided to join my friends at the pub.
Returning today, ten years later, I’m surprised I still remember my password. The first place to find atonement is likely my friends list, but it doesn’t look like anyone I know has been online for a very long time. A lot can happen in a decade, and it’s frighteningly likely that some of these children now have a couple of their own.
Travelling through the centre of Varrock, I’m overwhelmed by just how much the game has changed since I left it in 2001. My turquoise beard is now a dull brown goatee, and my pink trousers have ceased to exist – and not even in a sexy way.
Amazingly, one of my previous contacts is still playing – a man called Grak who used to be a boy called ||Joseph||. I think he used to know my brother. I ask if I’d paid him to mine coal for me ten years ago, but he doesn’t remember.
I’d like to give something back to the community I once abused, but it’s unclear what I can do to help. Ten years of change have evolved Runescape into what looks like a proper MMO, and I don’t really understand what’s going on. My attempts to buy a clear conscience are met with the shrug of an eroded economy. Illegal currency sellers offer millions of gold for the price of a fancy sandwich, and my enquiries as to whether or not my fortune of 55K is “a lot of money” are met with a simple answer: “No.”
I used to be a Runescape mogul, but now I don’t know what to do. JomboJames probably won’t log on ever again, so the only option at this point would be to convince Jagex to give me his personal account details so that I could track him down and apologise in person. Maybe I could pop over to his house and give his kids a bag of coal.
