As a result of one of the largest economic slumps over the past 45 years, without a conflict, the president and other people in Venezuela have turned toward the video game to help them survive as well as a possible route to migration. Video games don't mean sitting before a screen. It can mean movement. Hunting herbiboars in RuneScape can help fund today's food and even the future of tomorrow's food within Colombia or Chile nations where Marinez has relatives.

across between the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, almost 2,000 miles away from Marinez There lives Bryan Mobley. When he was a kid, he played RuneScape continuously, he told me during a phone conversation. "It was entertaining. It was a way for me to skip doing homework, shit like this," he said.

Now 26 years old, Mobley thinks differently about the game. "I don't think of it as any longer a virtual space," he told me. He sees it as a "number simulator," an analogy to virtual roulette. A rise in the amount of game currency can be a source of dopamine.

Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the early 90s the black market has emerged beneath the game's economic system. In the lands of Gielinor the players can trade items--mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herbs gathered from herbiboars. They also have gold, which is the game's currency. Then, players began trading the gold they earned in game for actual dollars, a process referred to as real-world trading. Jagex is the game's creator restricts exchanges like this.

Initially, real-world trading was conducted informally. "You might purchase gold from a friend at high school." Jacob Reed, a popular creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb, wrote through an email that I received. Later, the demand for gold surpassed supply and some players were full-time gold farmers or those who produce an in-game currency that they can sell to real-world currency.

Internet-based miners have always been a part of the massively multiplayer internet OSRS gold  games or MMOs, including Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. They even toiled away in some text-based virtual worlds, stated Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who once wrote about virtual economies as a journalist.

In the past, a lot of these gold farmers were primarily resided in China. Some hunkered down in makeshift factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres and looted their bodies during 12-hour shifts. There were even news reports about the Chinese government employing prisoners as gold farms.

In RuneScape, the black-market economy that the gold farmers benefited from was quite small until 2013. Many players were not happy with the extent to which the game has evolved since it first released in 2001. Therefore, they asked Jagex to bring back the previous version. Jagex released one from its archive, and subscribers went back to what later came to be referred to as Old School RuneScape.

Many of them were just similar to Mobley. They played RuneScape when they were teenagers and enjoyed the bold graphics and fun soundtrack. Although these 20 and 30 year olds had plenty of time when they were younger and had no responsibilities, they soon had obligations other than homework.

"People have jobs right now may have families in the future," said Stefan Kempe another well-known creator of videos on RuneScape with close to 200k followers and goes by the username SoupRS, when he was interviewed. "It's a limiting factor  cheap OSRS GP to how much time they have to play daily."