On a recent afternoon in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Alexander Marinez, who has short-cropped black hair and three-to-four-day stubble, sat in front of his computer tracking herbiboars in the mushroom forests on Fossil Island. He pressed down on his glowing mouse, the newest addition to his otherwise timeworn gaming setup. The pixelated character on his computer screen followed the tracks of a hedgehoglike creature with triangular tusks and herbs growing out of its back. Outside Marinez's one-story house, the sun bore down on the dirt road. His home lies about six miles away from the strait that connects the Caribbean Sea with Lake Maracaibo, one of the world's richest sources of oil. The character inspected a tunnel. Suddenly, the herbiboar appeared, and the character attacked, stunning it.

RuneScape is making its way to mobile devices this summer. Although the classic MMORPG has been in early access on iOS and Android for a while, it'll open up to everyone within the next few months. RuneScape will remain free-to-play, with extra skills, quests and other perks for paying subscribers. Publisher Jagex says the game had more than 2.1 million installs on mobile during early access. It also hit a record-high number of subscribers last year, with more than 1.2 million.

The idea that gamers are antisocial grumps who stay up all night eating junk food while playing Call of Duty in their mother's basement is woefully outdated. According to a new survey, about half of all gamers admit they've been playing more since the pandemic started, but nearly three-quarters use it to socialize. Only ten percent of respondents said they munched on junk while gaming, compared to the 37 percent who don't eat at all while playing. Nearly half of respondents kept their gaming to between 8pm and midnight, while just seven percent burned the midnight oil. UK game developer Jagex first came on the scene in 2001 with RuneScape, a popular fantasy massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).

In 2001, the video-game studio Jagex launched Runescape, an online role-playing game. This week, the developers announced that the original version of the game, one that consumed vast quantities of my time as a middle schooler and remained online until now, is shutting down. In 8th grade I desperately wanted to play Everquest, the dominant online role playing game at the time, but I didn't have a credit card, and my parents wouldn't let me use theirs. So I typed in "free online RPG" into a search bar and my brief, fiery affair with Runescape began. I played it in a browser, and it was archaic looking even then compared to Everquest's graphics.