Over in the Caribbean Sea in RuneScape Gold Atlanta, almost 2,000 miles away from Marinez and the home of Bryan Mobley. In his teen years was playing RuneScape incessantly, he told me over the phone. "It was enjoyable. It was a method to avoid homework, and shit like it," he said.
Aged 26 now, Mobley is a different person to the game. "I do not see it as a virtual world anymore," he told me. For him, it's something of a "number simulation" which is similar to virtual Roulette. An increase in a stash of currency in games is an infusion of dopamine.
Since Mobley began playing RuneScape during the 90s, an underground market was bubbling beneath the computer game's economy. In the lands of Gielinor it is possible to trade items--mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herbs from herbiboars, and gold, the game's currency.
Eventually, players began exchanging the gold they earned in game for real dollars, a practice known as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer restricts exchanges like this.
In the beginning, trading in real life took place informally. "You might buy some gold from a fellow student at college," Jacob Reed, a popular creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb in an email to me. In the following years, demand for gold outstripped supply and some players were full-time gold farmers, or even those who RS 2007 Items make the currency within the game, which they sell for real money.