Kingbananallama

Bio

About me

I'm a male born and raised in the pacific northwest. I was born in the late '90s to a family that had recently come to America after leaving Ukraine as Jewish religious refugees in the late '80s, part of a mass immigration wave going on at the time. I spent my childhood eating and drinking Ukrainian cuisine while mostly being raised by my grandparents. My favorite Ukrainian drink has to be Kvass (a fermented rye bread soda).

My Wikipedia activities and goals

I am currently taking an English composition class as my first class back to college and one of our first assignments is to write a bio (exactly like this one). Some of the projects will have me and my classmates help better Wikipedia with our accumulated knowledge. My new goal is to talk about the "Stateless". The Jewish people who would immigrate in the '80s from Europe to America with absolutely nothing after being forced to leave their countries due to political and social pressures. They had the opportunity to choose what country they could go to and some thought that they would find a better life in America. Having to bribe and get swindled at every turn on their way to America. Only able to keep the contents of one suitcase as they said goodbye to their former life and everything that they had ever known. My mother was one of them.

Article Evaluation

I'd like to talk to you about something that I've been passionate about my entire life and that I've devoted 1186 hours on just 1 account in. Runescape is a game created by two brothers in their parent's kitchen, originally a text-based game with no graphics in it. Soon became a game that in just seven years would already hold a Guinness world record for having 138million people play globally since it launched in 2001. The company Jagex whom the brothers had started together claims to have now had over 200million people play globally. I visited the Runescape article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: The lack of information on the game mode "DarkScape", The condition of dead links in the citations, and the aged state of the "reception" section of the article.

Darkscape

Runescape is an open-world sandbox massively online roleplaying game that is played using mostly the mouse while the keyboard is used to chat with other players. It features a top-down perspective of your character where you use your mouse to control your character's movements and actions. It features an incredibly active player versus player community where players fight amongst each other risking everything that they bring with them to the fight for the chance of victory and the spoils from their enemy. The player versus player activities can only be done in a section of the game called "The Wilderness" a no man's land where no one is safe. Jagex thought it would be a great idea to create a new game mode that takes that active hardcore player versus player community into something even more dangerous and unforgiving. The world is no longer safe and you can be attacked by any player at any time. The only safe places that existed were banks and even then you could be attacked. There were NPC guards at each bank that could take out an attacker. But if they were clever and skilled enough, then you were never safe. The game mode was popular on release but soon it lost players by the droves. The community hated the game mode and was frustrated with being attacked even when trying to bank their items. It died out in only six months and was quickly brushed under the rug. Unfortunately, the article doesn't tell you about any of that. Instead just gives the generic description of its release, closure, and that it was in fact a player versus player combat game mode. I find that to be disheartening when the legacy of the game mode is such an exciting story of abject failure leading to something great. Its successor called "Leagues" has become one of the most popular and successful E-sporting events on all of Twitch.TV. There is so much that could be done to expand on it.

Dead Links And Citation Needed

Many of the links that are used as citations in the article are dead. I scrolled down and I clicked on every citation listed from 1 through 20, it included 31 links, and of those 31 links, 11 were active. The rest are all leading to 404 pages, dead websites with a strange error in the corner, or "sorry we can't find that" on an article. With a game that came out in 2001, I think that it's fair that some information could be lost or misplaced. But I also know that Runescape has a unique community that catalogs everything that happens about the game, on the game, and down to the statistics of every movement and aspect of the game. To think that someone hasn't saved the article or that there would have even screenshots of the webpage is laughable. With people like July, the Runescape historian, and a video game that has two separate wiki's for each game mode it has Oldschool Runescape with 25,206 and Runescape having 60,559 as I'm currently writing this and an incredibly active community all over the internet. It would be reasonable to think that there could be ways to make the links lead to the information somehow.

Reception

The reception section is sincerely lacking as it only talks about a few articles and awards given to the game from 2003 to 2013 at the latest. To say the least, the reception has changed in a decade. It does little to talk about the reception given by the multiple YouTubers and Twitch streamers who have accumulated hundreds of thousands of subscribers talking about and playing Runescape. Many of the people who play the game now started when they were children back in 2008 and played their entire lives. They create videos reminiscing with the community about the past and creating love letters in the form of thousands of videos on the topic. With an active community on nearly every social media. For example, having two subreddits Runescape with 296,000 members and 2007scape having 628,000 members. This game has reception every day from the community and people all over the world. People who would be reading the article would be a decade behind and that's not just unfortunate but also dated information that wouldn't be much use now.

Conclusion

Runescape is an awesome game and maybe one of the greatest that's ever been made. Reading the article on Wikipedia about it would leave you with only dated surface knowledge of the game and its history. The article needs significant improvements on fixing dead links and updating the information throughout the article. Fleshing out sections like Darkscape, adding sections about its history such as all the Runescape riots, and adding more relevant information about its awesome community all over the internet.