Today, I attended the very meaningful, deeply profound Raffles Institution Community Day. Let me sum up my intense feelings of it with a humble work of prose:

…Um…Err…It was awfully boring.

Ah. That doesn’t sound very impressive. This means that I would have to stand upon the giant shoulder of Master William Shakespeare in order to truly express my feelings, in, let’s see…Title: How shall I compare thee to a Runescape day.

The moment a new player joins in RuneCommunityDayScape, he is immediately teleported to the Tutorial Island (the first step you took in the RI compound). Progress in Tutorial Island is only made by the player walking around aimlessly for no apparent reason (which is mostly what’s going to happen for the better part of the game). When the player feels that he had leveled up enough in the skill of walking, he enters assembly area. Walking into the assembly area is like entering Lumbridge Castle of RuneScape in World 29 i.e. the place is freaking overcrowded with endless multitudes of similar players all wasting their time. The noise level of the area is so high, unless your brain could simultaneously address and handle ten conversations at once, you would slowly discover that talking to a friend is no different than conversing with your own self.

Death rates in RuneCommunityDayScape are high. Even though PKing (player killing) is removed from its mechanics due to interests of insurance benefits, players are still subjugated under high risk and strain. The only possible way to die in RuneCommunityDayScape is to be killed by Boredom, a monster which, like a sepulchral knight in RuneScape wilderness, suddenly springs out of nowhere and savagely kills players left and right, and, before the players recovered enough to amass a counterattack, would disappear into nowhere again.

The only weapon powerful enough to defeat the mighty Boredom is something called a Girl, but since years of searching by players yielded no findings of such a weapon, most players ranked its possibility of existence between the Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.

So the most effective way to defend oneself against Boredom is an antiboredom shield, normally a book/gameboy/psp/whatever your interests, which provides you with good defense against the worse attacks of Boredom. But as other players slowly become more and more paranoid, fearing themselves to be the next victim of Boredom, antiboredom shields are widely subjected to looting. In the eye-witness account of one player: “A pro player came in to the assembly area with three storybooks, a gamboy advance and a camera. He was then surrounded, tackled and raided by the many noobs around him. When the mob receded, the player was left with nothing. Even his clothes are taken. Then he was banned for life from entering the assembly area due to reasons of indecency.”

Players wear the RI Community Day shirts as their starting armor. The best armor a player could hope to attain is the Raffles Institution School Uniform, which unlocks for you the god-mode and immunizes you against any strenuous task your CCA teacher might devise.
At approximately eight a.m. players converged into the school hall like voluntary sardines swimming into cans. The flat, monotonous voice the speaker used to lull players into hypnosis is not, as some might have concluded, a work of a very boring person. It is, instead, an ancient forgotten summoning clause, which calls forth the more powerful minions from the domains of Greater Bores. Indeed, such minions suck out the soul-energy of players, leaving them glaze-eyed and drooling, as the ceremony proceeds.

When at last the assembly ended, players stirred themselves up like communist troops after the siege of Stalingrad. They milled about like sheep, shepherded by their respective CCA teachers into ominously rumbling buses. My particular CCA (NPCC, in case you didn’t know, which would not surprise me at all) organized a trip to East Coast Park. The trip there was eerily similar to RuneScape’s ‘Ernest the Chicken’ quest, which requires you to gather spare machine parts for a weird professor in a haunted house. However, framed in the backdrop of blue skies, softly swaying palm trees and a couple smooching, the East Coast Park is scarier than any haunted house you can come across.

We were split up in groups and ordered to go litter-hunting. We picked up rubbish, sand, empty cans, sand, cigarette butts, sand, plastic bags and did I mention, sand? After the mission was accomplished, the plastic bags were confiscated and taken to Saradomin knows where. Although many agree that the plastic bags would eventually be cruelly and heartlessly destroyed, some still retain the romantic notion that the rubbish in the plastic bags would be dumped back on the beach, to be picked up by another NPCC cadet one day in the future.

After rubbish picking, we of the NPCC decided to revive the spirit of Mao ZeDong’s communism. Armed with only a basketball, we embarked on a Long March in search of a fabled basketball court. Like Mao, we espoused a policy, known as:

The enemy retreats, we advance
The enemy camps, we advance
The enemy tires, we advance
The enemy advances, we also advance, what the hell.

However, unlike Mao, we did not manage to reach our target, create a base and liberate the country from capitalists and top hats. In fact, about two kilometer into the journey, someone passed the word that there was no basketball court in front, fabled or otherwise. We then turned around and went back to camp, where we were robbed by the legions of highwaymen and -women who sold us half a fried potato, twin slices of cement with fat in between, and sugared water, for seven dollars and twenty cents.

Then we went back to Raffles Institution, dear alma mater.

RuneCommunityDayScape is different from it brethrens in a way that it allows, no, it forces the players to go back into the Tutorial Islands after they finished with the gameplay, when they would unlearn their walking skills, which would not be needed until the next year of RuneCommunityDayScape.