We Gay We Pay – The Player Side of Protests for RuneScape Pride

Let me preface this by saying I have actually never played RuneScape. As MMOs surged in popularity across the 2000s, I stuck to MapleStory and EverQuest, then moved onto other, now bigger, MMOs. I’m not a stranger to these massive online worlds, or the way that social movements within them often parallel real-life.  

Pink News has already done a fantastic write-up about the corporate side of the recent decision by new Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy to scale back in-game Pride content in RuneScape and Old School RuneScape for fear of online backlash, citing that their Pride content “is now controversial in a way it didn’t used to be.” 

It’s not an unfamiliar sentiment. While I don’t exactly bemoan the loss of corporate support for Pride, it’s a trend developing rapidly toward a bleaker future. Especially as here in the US, the Trump administration’s dogged effort to abolish DEI policies in the workplace, and efforts in many places to ban trans people from apparently every known place on earth. Already, companies and sponsors have pulled out of the real-life Pride festivals and parades these virtual events emulate, for fear of resistance.

Paradoxically, Bellamy has gone on to say Jagex supports and appreciates its queer community, and knows that RuneScape and Old School RuneScape is a safe space for that community. However, this decision undermines that sentiment. Several members of the team currently behind RuneScape have also pushed against Bellamy, their own desire to finish and deploy new Pride events overshadowed by this decision. Publicly yielding to the idea that these events are controversial invites the very backlash he seeks to avoid.

Protests have sprung up in Old School RuneScape as a result. I first heard about this from SapphicRowan, a friend and a co-founder of a large queer OSRS clan, and wanted to know more. We spoke over Discord DMs, and she described it like this: 

Rowan: The protests started due to word-of-mouth spreading during the Player & Jagex Moderator-run annual Pride Parade, which has for the past 3 years coincided with an in-game Pride Event Quest, telling sweet stories about various queer NPCs coming to accept themselves and rewarding fun Pride-themed items for the players to wear. 

An event was, in fact, planned and created by the Jagex Mods for this year’s Pride, and yet the recently promoted CEO, Jon Bellamy – aka Mod North – spinelessly caved to pressure from online bigots and decided to cancel the Pride Event and all future Pride Events – due to them being “too controversial” for the game.

Queer and allied individuals and communities large and small gathered impromptu, simply by friends sharing the news with friends, at the time-honored rioting location of Falador City Square, on the most populous members’ world (World 302 – the game’s largest trading hub world).

Franny: So RuneScape protests aren’t an uncommon occurrence, what’s the classic protocol? 

Rowan: It’s so ingrained it’s a meme. A game balance update we don’t agree with happens? ‘Ok y’all cannon up we’re rioting in Fally, haha.’ 

But this time it was something different, something affecting us from the outside of the game and something that people actually took seriously and took action on. 

Last time there was an actual Fally riot it was price hikes, another time it was because the former CEO put out a questionnaire to a select number of the player base and this questionnaire asked how they would feel about various extremely exploitative micro transaction practices in the game. This is why he’s the former CEO. And why the new CEO is only 3 months in the position, and already he’s fucking it up with the community. 

The paying player base in OSRS matters more than any other player base in any other game because: 

• The game literally wouldn’t exist anymore without the player base and strong community bringing it back from the brink of death. 
  
• And the entire development team and company is under threat from losing their BIGGEST moneymaker if they do anything in bad faith regarding the player base – and will go under. This is why the new CEO (Jon Bellamy) is directing the company to branch out in other directions and create other types of games using the RuneScape IP—the shareholders don’t want to be beholden to the playerbase of OldSchool Runescape (this is my theory).

The classic protest protocol is to throw down cannons in Falador Square. It’s a riot symbol mostly BUT there are guards who wander around Falador Square and as many people kept actively feeding cannonballs and firing, it was an ACAB statement as well. We got a lot of bigots banned for hate speech, but their voices were tiny and pathetic compared to our cacophony. Runescape subreddits are full of posts dunking on the CEO right now.

(SapphicRowan provided screenshots of these in-game protests.)

In one of them, flowers swarm the whole ground: That’s actually because someone was growing them in swastika patterns but an impromptu anti-flower countermeasure coalition was spontaneously formed to flood the whole area with a field of flower seeds, erasing the hate symbols almost as soon as they appeared.

Franny: Based on what I’ve read, the mods and other staff are kind of in resistance with the players against the CEO and Jagex, too. 

Rowan: From what I have put together from various sources, the Mods hosted – on their own time – the Pride March stream and giveaway. This is where the mods lead us in a march around part of the world. The video of the stream wasn’t up on the YouTube channel for rewatch for the first day or so afterwards but they did put it up on the official YouTube channel, possibly after complaints.

That’s where I first heard about this, directly from the Play and Jagex moderators at the in-game Pride march. We’re very lucky that a pretty big queer content creator (RenderScape) was covering this and spreading the word. 

The Pride Event is an in-game temporary quest with a short storyline and NPCs and some pride gear as a reward. They’ve been well-done and very sweet and have referenced historical queer icons. […]

To be clear, one of the oldest defining traditions of RuneScape is for Mods to create & host fun little events for the players on holidays—Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Game Anniversary, and most recently Pride—to show their appreciation for us and celebrate with us.

Franny: There seems to be a larger and longer-historied queer community in RuneScape, especially Old School RuneScape than I had any idea about. What can you tell me about that, and your place in it? 

Rowan: I made the clan with my best friend in OSRS—Local Honey—almost 4 years ago now.

Back then, I didn’t know any other queer people in OSRS. I met Local Honey as one of the only queers biting back in a very homophobic and transphobic minigame chat that we happened to find ourselves together in, on a dedicated mass-player world for that minigame. We decided to hop to another world and have our own game just to ourselves so we could chat without a flood of grossness.

It was an extremely cozy and bonding experience as the minigame, called Wintertodt, is about fighting off a giant freezing ice tornado entity by helping Pyromancers keep magical fires alight. We spent a long time there and became best friends, eventually seeking to gather together what friends we had made and try to make a safe queer space for people to hang out and game with each other, away from the places which inevitably turn toxic due to the mass of players. Turn off Pub Chat, tune into Clan Chat.

RuneScape was a safe haven in our childhoods from real life bullies and insults, and the Gender-changing Makeover Mage Pete/Peta has been in the game since its ancient history, helping to guide players on a test journey in a virtual world with a different gender presentation then they’re used to, if they so wish. Always reversible, always re-reversible.

Here’s the totally-not-queer Barber, from whom I got my first haircut which was allowed to be long – because it was just in a game. (Riot ongoing in background—Yes, the famous riot spot in Falador Square is directly across from a queer barber—I’m sure he very much supports it, as well as the people removing Nazi symbols from the front of his shop).

Franny: Despite the fact that Jagex and RuneScape seem to have always been inclusive and later explicitly supportive of its queer community, why do you think they’re backing away from it now, even when members of their own team disagrees with the idea?

Rowan: It’s very simple—CEO Jon Bellamy is a spineless coward who has caved in to his fears of what pathetic bigots on the internet might say, instead of embracing the community who dearly cares about the game he is in charge of guiding.

Back in 2017, Jagex had a notable bout with the anti-queer gamer crowd when they introduced a quest called Gilbert’s Colours, which involved finding the six strands of a rainbow and returning them to an NPC who would then give the player a rainbow scarf. It became a sort of manufactured controversy, wherein this single rainbow scarf was deemed too political, irrelevant, and inappropriate for a kid’s game by a portion of the player base. It sparked an unbelievable backlash of in-game riots where many of the participants weren’t even active players, but rather people who had hopped on from outside bigoted groups, and a disturbing amount of death threats and harassment directed at Mod Wolf, who created the event. RuneScape no further Pride events until 2022 because of it, but even the mod’s creator went on to say his only regret was “caving into pressure, fear and hate”—the same fear and hate that Jagex is now using as a reason to scale back Pride events nearly a decade later. A few years of resumed (and well-received) Pride events now facing an interruption out of fear of more manufactured controversy, would empower the same people who were sending death threats to RuneScape mods the first time, and it sends a completely backhanded message to the community Jagex is, in the same breath, promising to support.    

The main thing that strikes me as odd about this whole thing: why has Bellamy—speaking on behalf of Jagex—made an explicit statement about this fear of backlash, the perception of queer content as controversial, when they have an established routine of these events. RuneScape isn’t alone, either. Many other games and studios have consistently shown up for their queer players without crumbling under retaliation. Games like Warframe, Destiny 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have done just that and continue to do it. Studios like Bioware and companies like Wizards of the Coast continue to do it. RuneScape would be fine, especially continuing as they have been. 

To get some more perspective on this, I spoke with RenderScape, a player and RuneScape content creator in the UK. 

Franny: How would you describe the queer RuneScape community and your place within it?

RenderScape: So, I can only talk for Old School as that’s what I’m part of, but I’d say OSRS’s queer community is the game’s most dedicated, yet under-served section of the whole game. LGBTQ players routinely complete some insanely impressive in-game feats, and yet never receive the recognition that would be given to cishet players achieving the same thing. Queer players just do not pull the same numbers on social media that cishet ones do, I think as a combination of people ignoring them and the queer folk themselves trying not to draw too much attention to themselves to avoid too much hate.

OSRS‘s biggest content creators are also almost all straight guys with dubious at best track records on allyship. Bigotry is allowed to run rampant in their fan bases because they either don’t care or don’t want to risk losing the money from the viewership. Some are also clearly just bigoted themselves but Jagex refuses to ever address it, and even awarded one of the most notorious creators a “golden gnome” which is an award for making content that Jagex gives out once a year.

This is all to say that the LGBTQ community of OSRS has not been well served by Jagex, and the pro-Pride push we’re seeing now has been fuelled by years of frustration on their part for the way they are treated by large parts of the player base and the company itself.

As for my place, I should state that I’m a cishet guy myself, just so I don’t mislead anyone. I became known as “OSRS’s Biggest Virtue Signaller” by the right-leaning players on Twitter when I started calling out the horrendous way they talk to LGBTQ players, and I ended up adopting that title ironically as a way to stick it to them. Since then, allyship has become a big part of what I create and talk about. I built a substantial LGBTQ following because, in their own words, I was one of the only OSRS creators who was a safe space for them, since almost none of the large ones had any interest in ever taking a stand for them. 

This video showcases some of the stuff I’ve made in support of my queer friends. And they always loved to see it because it made them feel seen. And so, I’ve become something of a symbol for the “woke” side of OSRS, which is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. 

Franny: Can you speak to some of the in-game feats you mentioned earlier? Just to get an idea of what that looks like to someone not familiar with RuneScape.

RenderScape: Of course! So, by in-game feats, I’m talking about achievements and accomplishments in game. OSRS is defined by extremely long grinds and our LGBTQ players are some of the most dedicated players around. One notable one is my friend Witch Aileen, who is the rank 13th Hardcore Ironman in the game, which is very impressive as this means she has both never died in-game and also never traded with any other player. This stuff is a big deal to RuneScape players, I promise!

Franny: In your words, what kicked off the protests in OSRS and what’s been the general vibe around them?

RenderScape: The spark that ignited them was definitely this Reddit post talking about the Pink News article. Once that hit the front page of r/2007scape, people started assembling in-game to make a fuss. The vibe is very pro-pride, pro-LGBTQ, and very anti-Mod North. 

Counter-protesters do show up but they’re small in number and very quickly drowned out by the majority. Everyone is wearing colourful outfits, trying to spread the message, but also have a bit of fun with and make friends. It’s been an amazing opportunity for the often fragmented LGBTQ groups to find each other and start connecting.

Franny: Why do you think the CEO made this decision, despite Jagex already having gone through something similar in 2017, especially with this response backlash from the community and the RuneScape team?

RenderScape: If I may be blunt, the reason Jagex canned Pride is because North (or the shareholders he represents) already wanted to get rid of it. Pride has never caused players to quit and hurt their finances, and anti-Pride sentiment has been on the decline since 2022. The 2024 event had such little hate thrown at it that it barely registered. We know they didn’t scrap Pride to save development time because it was mostly already done and the devs offered to work for free to finish it on their own time, and yet were still denied the right to do it. I feel they are scrapping it now because the way the world is going right now, with us slipping backwards on a lot of progressive issues, they feel they can get away with it like many other companies are also doing by rolling back DEI and removing rainbows. 

Simply put, Jon Bellamy is either a bigot himself, or cares so little about queer folk that he refused to push back on whoever told him to do this. There is no logical or business explanation for the removal of Pride. It’s incredibly popular with OSRS players. 

The community has also really come together to try and make something positive about this, a Discord group got set up earlier [last] week for LGBTQ RuneScape players and has hit over 300 members already, which is pretty substantial by our usual standards.

Franny: In that Q&A, Bellamy spoke about how he knows OSRS is a safe space for queer players and wants to support that community, or the staff, in other ways, though of course it’s only been a few days or so, the results remain to be seen.

RenderScape: I feel he’ll say whatever he thinks will keep him out of trouble, while continuing to do whatever he wants. He can’t make any claim for keeping staff safe when we have players harassing jmods and getting them attacked by [infamous Twitter trolls] and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. He can’t claim to be protecting players when the removal of Pride has emboldened the worst side of the player base to start slinging f-slurs again.

Franny: Obviously there’s a desire for it, even just judging by the attention around your post in the subreddit, and between now and 2022 Jagex already withstood any backlash that was to be had. By making a public statement about rolling the events back, he’s just ripping open an old wound. And well, I’d also love to know about the inter-community responses! Like I said, I’ve been speaking with a friend who’s telling me about the protests, but I see you’re also working to promote queer artists, and have the community-organized Pride events taken on a new tone? 

RenderScape: You’ve put that perfectly, it really is like an old wound! And yes, the tone has certainly changed. When I first started planning the event, it was going to be this small gathering to have a bit of Pride fun. We suspected we weren’t getting a Pride event but didn’t know the full story, so it was fairly chill. But when the news article came out, it really exploded the enthusiasm players had for a big Pride gathering. Ironically, the cancellation could lead to the OSRS community having an even bigger Pride event than ever before! It became very apparent from my perspective that the queer community both needed and wanted more, so I started expanding the event plans into a much bigger deal than the initial small gathering. 

Franny: I feel like these online spaces are so parallel to real life, resistance matters here too. Like, it’s really not just about RuneScape, it’s important to resist bigotry everywhere we can, physical or not. 

RenderScape: My thoughts exactly! Exposure to people different from ourselves builds tolerance, and that counts whether it’s in the real world or the virtual one. These days a lot of us are spending more time in the latter than the former anyway.

At the conclusion of our chat, RenderScape connected me with some other members of the community. As someone who’s—again—unfamiliar with RuneScape, I wanted to gather more voices about the relationship between RuneScape and its queer players, and how this decision has affected them, so I asked for some statements.

Eme/Devotedpupa: Well I’ve been playing since 2006 and honestly I can say that this news [was] a bit soul crushing. Runescape was my first MMO and the unexpected joy I felt when first changing my gender with the Makeover Mage all those years ago remains a formative memory as a young NB person from Mexico. Even more recently, the Pride events felt… different from pandering from other games. Not only the rewards (I wear my NB flower crown for 90% of my gametime while skilling), the actual events feel genuine like no other thing like in the gaming space. The last couple Pride events have [dealt] with the history of our community and the struggles of trans folks in such a heartfelt way, I was honestly amazed. there’s a saying that you don’t quit Runescape, you just take breaks. Well, those definitely [played] a role in me coming back to OSRS. They didn’t feel like corporate rainbow Doritos®, they felt like some of the mods CARED. Mod North really did something unnecessary and heinous removing the events.

Sweater Paws: As of writing this, Runescape’s queer community is on Day 6 of rioting. We’ve been met with death threats and harassment, along with a slew of other nonsensical arguments, such as :keeping politics out of the game”. The main flaw in this argument is that the removal of the event itself is inherently political.

First and foremost, the cancellation of the event is a result of Mod North caving to pressures from one specific side of the political spectrum, at the detriment of the other. That is choosing a side, no matter how it is phrased.

From another angle, the ability to call oneself apolitical is a privilege. It is claiming that you are above issues, since they do not affect you. Your rights are not actively threatened, so you may fail to see, or willfully ignore, why this is such a big deal. They fail to see how deeply ingrained politics are in every aspect of our lives. Everything touched by a government entity is a matter of politics.

When my rights are threatened on a nearly global scale, having a game like Runescape, of which I’ve been a player for nearly two decades, suddenly flip their script and decide that my existence is ‘too controversial’, is akin to being told that I am no longer welcome somewhere because of my identity. Whether they like it or not, whether that is the intent or not, that is the message that is getting out there. That me, and my queer friends, are too dangerous to be celebrated.

In the end, what is left of this so-called safe space they claim to “protect”?

Newt: I’ve been playing for the better part of 15 years. The cancelling of Pride just makes me really sad, it was always fun and you could tell there was some real passion behind the events from some of the developers.

The worst part of this is that bigots are often emboldened by backing down more than even direct support; so North coming in and unilaterally canceling any official support of Pride is just telling the bigots that Jagex listens to their hate, even ignoring their own players to do so.

Ellie: I’m part of the LGBTQIA+ community and also play OSRS at a high level.

Jagex removing the pride event when it was already made in light of the current “world events” is so against what the community is and how the Jagex mods have poured their hearts into the game. The implications are that it communicates that LGBTQIA+ people aren’t welcome in the space that we exist in online and even moreso irl. Queer people are some of the most inclusive and loving people and to hear that mainstream don’t want us to exist is heartbreaking.

I feel like we have been loud enough at this point and to not get any word from the CEO is deafening. He has ruined all good will and burned any trust he had coming in.

OSRS is not just a game or space. It’s a community where we all go to hangout and feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. The world doesn’t give that in the slightest currently.

Astra Vampyre: I’ve been playing the game for about 5 years now, and as a trans woman, I always look forward to the Pride events. While the events themselves are typically short miniquests and may not seem terribly significant at face value, seeing myself and others like me represented is incredibly important. I think that the inclusion of such events have helped LGBTQ players feel more at home and welcomed in the community, and helps to remind us that we are accepted and that we are not alone. This has been very impactful for me, as there have been times in my life where I felt very isolated and like I had to hide who I was.

I think that the CEO’s decision to remove this event is incredibly cowardly, and is ultimately giving into a hateful (and unfortunately very vocal) minority of the playerbase. The large majority of players I have talked to are either in favor of these events, or indifferent to them. The events themselves require very little development time, and the team at Jagex has even offered to work on the events on their own time. I see no reason why these events should be discontinued, and it is incredibly saddening and disappointing to see the CEO give in to such hate.

I have cancelled my subscription, and I encourage others to do the same until this decision is reverted.

Sophie: I’ve been playing Runescape for over 20 years now, and it has meant a lot to me during various times in my life where I faced different struggles. One of these struggles was with my gender and sexuality, which I resolved by transitioning! Even back way before this would happen, I always remember playing as a female character in Runescape because it just felt nicer to me. With the launch of OSRS in 2013, I would eventually start playing again in 2017 or so, and really struggled to resonate with the community for a long while. The protests and backlash to the original Pride event back then still resonate in my mind and while I can take comfort knowing that many of the protestors were in fact not regular players of the game (as one of the former head moderators has stated), future events were canned. Nearly 10 years later, that pain is still fresh with this year’s cancellation. All around us, those of us especially in the US and UK, there’s been a massive and well-funded hate campaign directed towards trans people, and though I may not need the escapism as much as I needed to growing up, it still meant a lot to me to have Pride events in Runescape. I’m surrounded by so many other trans and queer friends that play the game now, and we have a lot of communities for each other, yet I still struggle to recommend friends to play Runescape because bigotry is still yet very common in the community, especially in high level PVM and skilling clans. The cancellation of Pride events enables the loud bigoted minority to feel validated in their hatred and makes Runescape even harder to recommend and is a financial loss for Jagex – I’ve seen several friends opt to quit already. Those who were against Pride events in the first place would never cancel when they did happen, but that non-action does not go both ways.

Morfred: I’ve played OSRS on-and-off ever since I was a kid, and I’ve had the fortune to witness the OSRS Pride events through two lenses: First, when I returned to OSRS around COVID, I had known I was Bi for a while, and felt pretty safe in my day-to-day life when it came to that. Second, the 2024 Pride, which had a very large impact on me, and resulted in me realising I was non-binary\I’ll mostly focus on the second point of view, and how it leads into the lack of a Pride event in 2025.

When OSRS Pride 2024 came around, the main character of the story – Kit Breaker – is heavily implied to be Trans, to the point that I’d not even really call it an implication. I didn’t realise it immediately, but seeing a character visibly working through gender-related issues made me realise things about myself. Pride needs to continue in any game that it would suit, so that people can interact with identities they may not see day-to-day.

However, we know that OSRS has cancelled Pride this year. Of course this sucks: it’s cut content. But what impacts me the most is the rise in hateful activities in the community. Reports of players using seeds to plant flowers in the shape of swastikas, slurs, and relating both sexuality and gender identity to pedophilia and harm to children – the latter of which I’ve been subject to at the Falador protests, as I’ve been wearing the non-binary colours. Gender identities seem to get the worst of it (not that anyone comes out on top, really), with lesser slights being messages of ‘Two Genders’, or LGB-minus-T speaking points like ‘Is this gay pride, or gender shit?’.

Jagex is a British company, and in the UK we have a struggling Trans community, which make up 0.5% of the population, but are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people (according to the home office figures), with an increase in hate crimes, especially since the recent UK ruling regarding Trans rights in women’s spaces, which has ended up with Trans folks being advised to just… avoid gendered public bathrooms altogether. With all this going on in the background, Jagex should be supporting those that are struggling to stay safe themselves, not just ignore them. Instead the CEO demands the removal of a complete/nearly complete Pride from the game for being ‘controversial’, whilst still selling Pride merch. It clearly indicates that we’re only good for them so long as we give them cash, and that stings when the creators that actually want to support us but can’t.

The CEO’s choices have shattered any goodwill I had with Jagex.

When my country is turning back the progression of social changes, the last thing I want is senseless bigotry being thrown both at queer players and queer jmods, emboldened by the choices of a CEO.

Birdhome: The stance Jagex and CEO Mod North has taken on this issue is plainly wrong. Withdrawing support for Pride within the company hurts the community. Old School RuneScape has always been a game made by the players and for the players. We (the players) want Pride in our game. The removal of Pride effectively communicates that Jagex does not want us in their game. I can’t help but worry that the events we are witnessing signify a greater culture shift within the company leading towards a future where the voice of the player base no longer matters. We, as a community, simply cannot stand for this. It is in the best interest of our games long term health to continue to provide a safe and welcoming environment for marginalized players. The leadership team at Jagex should be ashamed of themselves for abandoning the players and developers who work so hard to make this game as incredible as it is. I implore them rise to the occasion while there is still time for them to right this wrong.

Oog: I’m the administrator of a Discord Server called Rainbow Road, which is a space for LGBTQIA+ RuneScape (both Old School and RuneScape 3) players to gather and hang out, plan events, and find clans or other communities of like-minded people. Render and I have been friends for a while and managed to independently decide to put together some kind of community-run event since Jagex was holding out on us. The day after I opened up the Discord server, the Pink News article dropped and between Render and I, we managed to grab a pretty significant chunk of the LGBTQIA+ RS community on social media into one space where, so far, it has worked extremely well even though a significant portion of the community has history with each other. We’ve managed to come together and put aside whatever beef for at least a while and focus on the one thing we all have in common. Even bridging a gap between OSRS and RS3 is more difficult than you might think, but we’re doing that too. We’re planning to continue running pride events all year and trying to make enough noise that Jagex’s CEO cannot ignore us.

I’m a cis pansexual man and I have been a RuneScape player for almost as long as the game has existed. My original account was registered sometime in January or February of 2001, when the game was about a month old. I was a young teenager at the time and RuneScape was the first game I had ever really been social in. I grew up in a very rural area in Appalachia and my exposure to anyone that wasn’t white, cis, and hetero was pretty limited. My parents were bigots in every facet of the word, but my dad especially hated queer people. He told me as a young kid that if I turned out to be gay that he’d consider it a failure and kill himself. I was raised to believe that gayness was a sin of the highest order. When I was in my tween years and starting to get the feelings tweens do, I noticed that I didn’t only get those feelings for girls but I was always too afraid to ever admit anything like that. I hated myself. I was terrified of what would happen to me for being that way.

It wasn’t until I started chatting with some people on RuneScape that I started to really understand what I was feeling and feel less like it was a problem. A group of friends I had met while playing one day invited me to their IRC channel and I hung out with them and chatted. We were all around the same age and it turns out that the whole group was LGBT+. I never told them about my feelings or anything, I was just the “straight friend” in the group but seeing them be unapologetically queer was eye opening for me and started me down a path that eventually (almost 2 decades later) led to me accepting myself as pansexual. Pride was not a thing in games back then and especially not in RuneScape, but when we finally got a Pride Event, I thought back to those friends and how, despite their temporary presence in my life, their influence on me remains eternal. Pride isn’t just about the cute cosmetic items we get in-game, it’s about being accepted for who we are and sharing ourselves with people who’ve felt our struggle. It’s about knowing that, while the real world wishes we’d disappear, the virtual world we also inhabit doesn’t want us to be invisible and instead gives us ways to express our true selves through the little pixels on the screen. It allows us to see another avatar in-game and even if you never speak to each other, you know you two are at least a little connected.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types. The mage constantly flips back and forth too. The Makeover Mage has been there for decades and has always given players the opportunity to express their character in a different way if they choose. It was never controversial, and the game even required male characters to change to female for a quest at one point. Prior to the Pride event’s introduction, this was the smallest glimmer of queerness we had in the game. An NPC whose creation was mostly one of function, but whose significance to a number of queer people could not be overstated. Pride made us feel like we belonged just as much in Gielinor as a Pride event makes us feel welcome in real life.

Jon Bellamy’s unilateral decision to cancel a finished event is a direct attack on us and is not taken lightly. We’ve been actively protesting in-game for 6 days at the time I write this, and soon will have achieved the longest in-game riot in the history of the game. The kind of people that are happy about Bellamy’s decision are the people in-game creating swastikas out of flowers or fires, and attempting to trade us a chair and a rope, their not-so-clever way of telling us to kill ourselves. They’re the people that show up and spam slurs, or have names with slurs, or names that reference Hitler. These are the people Bellamy sided with over the ones who’ve passionately enjoyed RuneScape for two decades. […]

It might sound a little silly for us to be so invested in a medieval point-and-click MMO game, but it’s our silly medieval point-and-click MMO game and it’s been our congregating space for 20+ years. Bigots can’t have it. We’re not allowing it.

Sage: I’m transfemme, and RS was one of the earliest hints at my gender identity for me nearly 20 years ago. (Thanks, Makeover Mage!)

Pride events made us visible, they gave us time to celebrate each other and form communities together. Removing the pride event was such an abrupt slap in the face-  Calling our identity ‘too political’ is gut wrenching. It has done nothing but embolden the people who spew hatred and slurs at us. And those same people see Jagex as endorsing their behavior, telling us directly that “Jagex sided with them” and not us. 

Jagex sided with hate, plain and simple, with this decision.

Brew Sipper: Runescape to me has always been a way for me to escape the world around me and immerse into a fantasy, where I am creating my adventure with millions of others. Over the two decades I have been a player of this game, I have made so many friendships, created so many memories, and accomplished goals I am genuinely proud of myself for achieving.

To say Runescape is a big part of my life is a wild understatement. I even have a tattoo of a blue partyhat on my arm! (IYKYK)

I am also a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I am proudly demisexual, pansexual, and non-binary. I have felt that I was different my whole life, but it wasn’t until coming into community with other queer people that I learned about the feelings I had. Through the struggle of realizing my self-identity, I found comfort, peace, and pride in myself that I had never felt as a straight man. Pride to me is about honoring the people that came before me in the struggle, the friends that have stuck by me through everything, and myself for having the courage to say my differences are valid and do not disqualify me from a happy and fulfilling life

So when I heard the news that Mod North the CEO of Jagex (the company that owns Runescape), had canceled this year’s in-game Pride event, I was beyond heart broken. I looked forward to this event every year since it returned in 2022. See, I say returned because the first Pride event in Runescape happened in June of 2017, after a gay developer in Jagex created the event, celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community in Runescape. The event received incredibly visceral and violent backlash from a very loud minority of players, including homophobic and transphobic flooding in the comments sections where the event was posted, in-game protests where people spammed slurs of all types and wished violence on the queer community, and even death threats against the developer of the event, to the point that the developer left Jagex and cut ties all together with the community. When Pride returned in 2022, I saw it as the company having the backbone to stand up for the large LGBTQIA+ community that has always, and will always be, a part of the Runescape community.

But the new CEO of Jagex, Jon Bellamy, or Mod North, shut down this year’s pride event over fears of “backlash”. After an earlier article was posted about the event being canceled, a Jagex Moderator posted on Bluesky, saying not only was the article true, but the situation was so much worse than we thought. Internally, developers had volunteered their time to create the event, working for free and after hours, and had nearly finished the event. When they presented it to the Bellamy, he shut the project down, and over a meeting told everyone that there would be no official pride event in OSRS this year. Those same developers decided to host a parade in-game for Pride on their own, using their personal laptops and streaming the event from home, but they were not able to deliver to the community the event they had worked so hard on.

In my opinion, Jon Bellamy should be ashamed. What his actions have shown to bigots and trolls is that with enough pressure, they can get their way. He has said without saying that hate can be weaponized against marginalized groups in his games. His failure to demonstrate even a base level of respect for such a large portion of his game’s communities is very telling of not only his feelings towards queer people, but the climate he is creating within the company for queer employees of Jagex. His messaging is loud and clear, and we hear him all [too] well.

Kama: As a trans woman with a lot of queer friends of all flavors it was obviously upsetting not only seeing the lack of representation for most of my close OSRS friends, but that it happened only because the hate of the few was loud enough to do so.

But even with that, the fact that it sparked so many people to get together and make their own community pride with blackjack and hookers in response that it’s kinda hard not to feel hopeful that things’ll be alright in the world.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types.

I’m sure you heard that a few years ago (2017?) the original Pride event was met with right wing riots including people dressing up in desert robes and hoods to paint themselves as klansmen, and jagex (rightly) stamped on that shit, and many jmods (notably mod ash) have previously firmly responded to bigotry on social media by politely telling them to leave, more or less.

Of course, this decision by the CEO is cowardly and seems to go against what much of the jmods who actually engage with the community want, and is shown to be extra hypocritical since the CEO also claims to stand with the queer community, just… further away then before for “reasons”.

Previous pride events have been neat additions to the game though, like all events, they’re at most vaguely canon. there was one a few years ago that involved in-game representations of a few major queer figures irl like Marsha P. Johnson and Oscar Wilde among others.

And as someone who’s been involved in online communities for a very long time, and involved in moderation/leadership, a critical part of maintaining a healthy community is kicking bigots to the curb immediately and loudly when necessary. there’s the old “Nazi bar” thing everyone says, and it makes the overall vibes absolutely rancid. these guys say they don’t want politics in their video games, and respond by furiously putting their politics in the video game.

Anonymous: Honestly I’m heartbroken especially after the quality of events the last couple of years. Last year specifically I actually cried, it being a story of making someone truly believe in themselves and raising them up.

To cut this year’s content especially after having large portions of it already done is heart breaking. 

The riots have filled me with so much hope and good feelings, seeing so many people be supportive and loving and standing up against what feels like tyranny almost.

OSRS Pride Zine Organizers: Our response to the news that the OSRS Pride seasonal event had been cancelled by upper management was to start organising a digital fanzine of creative fanworks and commentary. Our project goals are to:

1. Showcase fanwork creators from the OSRS LGBTQIA+ community
   
2. Express support for LGBTQIA+ OSRS players and Jagex staff members
   
3. And create a record of thoughts, feelings and actions on the topic of LGBTQIA+ representation and inclusion in the game

We’re aiming to release the zine at the end of August. We hope, of course, that by the time of release Jagex has already issued a statement through official channels and reinstated this year’s Pride event. In the event that they have not, we intend to make the zine’s release a focus for further protest action. For example, hand-delivering a printed copy to Mod North at Jagex’s office.

Our website with the full zine info is here if you would like to learn more. And we are on social media including Bluesky.

UnionizeNow: Many people have asked why we care about an in-game Pride event in a medieval clicking simulator. My answer is this: There are no battles against fascism too small to be worth fighting. The removal of pride is a victory for a wave of violence and hatred sweeping over the whole world. A wave which is going to drown more than just us if it continues. Allowing it any victory, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, without a fight, is a mistake. It won’t stop until it IS stopped, by people, working together against the dark.

I’ll close on a short poem by A.R. Moxon which sums up my thoughts on the issue.

Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
I take one step forward. He takes one back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man

As of publishing, that aforementioned community Pride event organized and hosted by RenderScape has come and gone, a successful gathering of some of Old School RuneScape’s queer and allied players. Admittedly, I was hoping to publish this sooner, but life always finds a way to disrupt. So, I asked him one more time for a little reflection on the event and some final thoughts. 

RenderScape: I would say that the event was a massive success! At peak we had somewhere around 300 players in attendance during the main event, with so many players in one spot that the game couldn’t even show them all at once! The vibe was incredibly positive, so many people just hanging out, making friends and realising that they aren’t alone in this game has been incredibly heart-warming. I’ve received no end of messages from players who attended expressing their gratitude for the event, it’s very humbling to be part of something so big!

And, despite the event being advertised far and wide, including on the hateful platform that is twitter, there were almost no haters turning up to the event! I think I had to mute only about 5 people from stream chat and 3 in game all day, so the “backlash” to Pride is clearly not a big factor!

I think one of the most notable moments for me was when the former jmod, previously known as Mod Wolf, who made the original OSRS Pride event back in 2017, popped in to the stream chat to talk with us for a bit. He was delighted to see the little event he had put together all those years ago still inspiring people to celebrate Pride in game to this day. I was incredibly grateful for his efforts!

I spent a long time denying indelible truths about myself, having to rely on environments that didn’t really allow me to explore who I might have wanted to be. Those little windows into other experiences, seeing queer people, relationships, and narratives in video games, books, movies, whatever, were all steps toward examining the bigger picture of myself until I discovered my own ineffable qualities. There’s no reason for these qualities to be deemed controversial unless you look toward a future where they don’t exist at all. If it wasn’t for things like video games and pro wrestling, where queer narratives are abundant and beautiful, who knows how much longer it would have taken a younger and closeted me to fully understand myself and live in a way that actually made me feel aligned with my own heart in spaces where I belonged.

The protests within RuneScape went on for over a week, players gathering every day to support themselves and each other, buffeted by all kinds of hateful spectacles. These are the kind of stakes involved – it’s never just about RuneScape, or any other space where inclusivity is being sheared away, it’s about challenging these notions of intolerance regardless of where it pops up.