I feel I must blame my nephew for my RPG addiction. Back when he was about 10, he was telling me about his favourite video game, Runescape. I sat patiently while he showed me how it worked & I watched him kill a few digital monsters. He wanted to set me up with an account so I let him create me a character. A couple of weeks later, before we visited his family again, I thought I should just have a little go, so I could humour the kid and say I did it, so I logged into Runescape.

Four hours later, it was time to cook dinner and I had to tear myself away, with much reluctance, from my slaying, mining and adventuring. I eventually levelled that character to 63 before I quit cold turkey.

I have subsequently played other RPGs but nothing matched the simple fun of Runescape.You don’t need a big install – it just runs in your browser. The graphics are perhaps not what you’re used to for other games, but the simplicity of use makes up for it. For a while, while levelling my original character, I had a paid account, but it was only $5 per month so it wasn’t a capital expenditure, and I never made in-game purchases or bought gold. I only played World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online when they became free to play. I’m also not a social gamer, so I tried to avoid the RPGs where you had to adventure as a team. Surprisingly, games that allow you to solo (and meet my strict medieval milieu requirements) are not common. Eventually, I deleted both LotRO and WoW from my computer, partly because they were a time-suck I didn’t need and partly because they weren’t as fun as Runescape (though LotRO beat WoW hands down for the fun factor – probably because I was already into the universe).
But the other night I was just looking for something to kill time while listening to podcasts, and so I wandered over to Runescape and created another account. I suppose I could have recovered my password, but I wanted the fun of levelling up another character again. So now I’m a n00b all over again.