Venezuela's coffers were empty after the country spent its largest recent oil cashflow on social programs like subsidised food from wilkinson's blog

In between the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, just 2,000 miles away from Marinez, lives Bryan Mobley. When he was a teen playing RuneScape continuously, he told me via phone. "It was entertaining. It was a way to obviously avoid homework, and OSRS gold
shit like it," he said.

Aged 26 now, Mobley is a different person to the game. "I don't think of it as it's a real world anymore," he told me. For him, it's an "number game simulator" similar to virtual roulette. The increase in the supply of currency in games is an injection of dopamine.

Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the early aughts there was a black market that had been bubbling up beneath the computer game's economy. In the world of Gielinor there is a possibility for players to trade items such as mithril's longswords, yak- armor, plants harvested from herbiboars. They also have gold, which is the game's currency. Then, players began trading gold in the game for actual dollars, which is referred to as real-world trading. Jagex, the game's developer has a ban on these exchanges.

At first, real-world trading occurred informally. "You could buy some gold from a person you know at high school." Jacob Reed, one of the most popular creators of YouTube videos on RuneScape known as Crumb through an email that I received. Lateron, demand for gold was higher than supply and some players became full-time gold farmers, or people who create the currency in game to trade for real-world cash.

Internet-age miners had always accompanied the massively multiplayer internet games, or MMOs like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. They even worked on several text-based virtual realms, explained Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who wrote about virtual economies as a journalist.

In the past, many of these gold-miners were primarily found in China. Many hunkered in makeshift factories where they slayed virtual ogres and pillaged their corpses during 12-hour shifts. There were even stories of Chinese government employing prisoners to run a gold farm.

In RuneScape the black-market economy of gold farmers was quite small until 2013. Players had been dissatisfied with how much the computer game had evolved since it first launched in 2001. The players subsequently asked Jagex to reintroduce an earlier version. Jagex released a new version from its archive, and subscribers went back to what later came to be called Old School RuneScape.

A lot of these players were like Mobley. They played RuneScape in their teens and remember fondly the angular graphics and kitschy soundtrack. Even though these 20- to 30-year-olds had time to themselves as children however, they were now cheap RuneScape gold juggling responsibilities beyond their homework.