In from the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, almost 2,000 miles away from Marinez lives Bryan Mobley. In his teen years playing RuneScape constantly, he told me during a phone conversation. "It was entertaining OSRS Gold. It was a method to get away from homework, shit like this," he said.

Now 26 years old, Mobley sees the game differently. "I don't think of it as an actual world anymore," he told me. According to him, it's an "number emulator," similar to virtual roulette. A rise in the amount of in-game currency is an infusion of dopamine.

Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the aughts, an underground market was rising up beneath the computer game's economy. In the world of Gielinor it is possible to trade items--mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herbs from herbiboars, and gold, the game's currency. In time, players began exchanging the gold they earned in game for real dollars, an act known as real-world trading. Jagex is the game's creator, prohibits these exchanges.

Initially, trades in real-world terms happened informally. "You could purchase gold from a fellow student at college," Jacob Reed, one of the most popular creators of YouTube videos about RuneScape who goes by Crumb wrote in an email to me. In later times, the demand for gold surpassed supply, and some players became full-time gold farmers, or even those who make in-game currency to sell for real money.

Internet-age miners had always accompanied hugely multiplayer games or MMOs such as Ultima Online or World of Warcraft. They also worked in various text-based virtual universes, declared Julian Dibbell, now a technology transactions lawyer who once wrote about virtual economies in his journalistic work.

In the past, a lot of these gold-miners were mostly situated in China. Many hunkered in makeshift factories, where they slaughtered virtual ogres and pillaged their bodies during 12-hour shifts cheap runescape accounts. There were even instances of Chinese government using prisoners to gold farm.