n addition to the pocket change that he earns while working in a local pizzeria. He earns an average of $60 a month with RuneScape and can afford cornmeal for OSRS gold arepas and rice for his son and sister. However, for Marinez working online doesn't mean just arepas. It's about escape--even if he finds the medieval fantasy game is boring.
Amid one of the worst economic recessions of the past 45 years, excluding a conflict, the president and other people in Venezuela have turned toward playing video games as a way of surviving and possibly a way to move. Playing video games doesn't imply sitting in front of a computer screen. It can mean movement. Herbiboar hunting in RuneScape could help finance the food we eat today and also the future of the world to Colombia or Chile nations where Marinez has relatives.
In in the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, almost 2,000 miles away from Marinez, lives Bryan Mobley. When he was a teen, he played RuneScape constantly, he told me in a phone call. "It was entertaining. It was a means to avoid homework, and shit like it," he said.
A mere 26 years old, Mobley thinks differently about the game. "I don't think of it as an actual world anymore," he told me. It's for him more of a "number simulator," similar to virtual roulette. An increase in the quantity of game currency is an injection of dopamine.
Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the early 90s there was a black market that had developed beneath the economy of the computer game. In the world of Gielinor the players can trade in items such as mithril longswords and yak-hide armor, herbs harvested from herbiboars, and gold, the game's currency. In the end, players began to exchange in-game gold for actual dollars, a practice known as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer does not allow these exchanges.
In the beginning, trading in real life was done informally. "You could buy some gold from a friend at school," Jacob Reed, one of the most popular creators of YouTube videos about RuneScape known as Crumb, wrote through an email that I received. Then, demand for gold was higher than supply and some players were full-time gold farmers, or people who create in-game currency which they sell for real-world cash.
Internet-age miners always played by massively multiplayer online gaming or MMOs like Ultima Online as well as World of Warcraft. They even worked on some text-based virtual worlds, explained Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who wrote about virtual economies as a journalist.
In the past of these gold miners were primarily located in buy OSRS GP China. Many hunkered in makeshift factories, where they slayed virtual ogres and looted their bodies during 12-hour shifts. There were even accounts of Chinese government using prisoners to run a gold farm.