In Venezuela, where in 2019 95 percent of the population did not earn more than the poverty limit in the amount of $1.90 per day, according to an investigation conducted by a Venezuelan university OSRS Gold. Marinez is performing better than the majority of.

Alongside the pocket change he gets at a nearby pizzeria and earns about $60 per month playing RuneScape that is enough to buy rice and cornmeal for arepas as well as rice for himself and his younger sister. However, for Marinez working on the internet isn't just about the arepas. It's about escaping, even if he is of the opinion that medieval fantasy is boring.

Amid one of the worst economic slumps over the past 45 years outside of a war, he and other in Venezuela are turning to a video game as a way to survive as well as a possible route to migration. Playing video games doesn't imply being in front of a screen. It can mean movement. Hunting herbiboars for food in RuneScape can finance today's food and tomorrow's future in Colombia or Chile, countries where Marinez has family.

Over between the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, close to 2,000 miles from Marinez is Bryan Mobley. When he was a teen the game he played was RuneScape incessantly, he told me in a phone call. "It was enjoyable. It was a way to obviously skip doing homework, shit like it," he said.

The 26-year-old Mobley has a different view of the game. "I don't think of it as the same as a virtual reality," he told me. He sees it as a "number simulator," like virtual roulette. An increase in a stash of currency in games is an increase in dopamine.

Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the early 90s, there has been a black market bubbling beneath the computer game's economy. In the realm of Gielinor it is possible to trade items like mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, plants harvested from herbiboars, and gold, the in-game currency. In time, players began exchanging gold in the game for real dollars buy osrs fire cape, a process referred to as real-world trading. Jagex the game's developer does not allow these exchanges.