Internet-age miners had always accompanied massively multiplayer online games

Across the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, close to 2,000 miles from Marinez is Bryan Mobley. As a teenager was playing RuneScape incessantly, he told me on a phone call. "It was amusing. It was a way to clearly skip doing homework, shit like that," he said.

Now 26 years old, Mobley thinks differently about the game. "I don't see it as an actual world anymore," he told me. He sees it as something of a "number game," like virtual roulette. The increase in the supply of game currency is a boost of dopamine.

Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the early aughts, a black market had been bubbling under the game's economy. In the lands of OSRS gold players are able to trade things like mithril's longswords, yak-hid armor, plants harvested from herbiboars, and gold, the in-game currency. Then, players began trading in-game gold with actual dollars, a process referred to as real-world trading. Jagex the game's developer, prohibits these exchanges.

Initially, real-time trading happened informally. "You might buy some gold from a person you know at or at school." Jacob Reed, an acclaimed creator of YouTube videos about RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb on an email I sent to him. Lateron, the demand for gold surpassed supply, and some players became full-time gold farmers, or people who create in-game currency which they sell to real-world cash.

Internet-age miners had always accompanied massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, including Ultima Online as well as World of Warcraft. They even worked various text-based virtual universes, declared Julian Buy OSRS gold, now a lawyer for technology transactions who once wrote about virtual economies in his journalistic work.