A mere 26 years old, Mobley is a different person to the game. "I don't think of it as something that's a virtual space anymore," he told me. He sees it as the definition of a "number game," similar to the virtual version of roulette. A boost in the stash of currency in games is an increase in dopamine RuneScape Gold.

Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the early 90s, an underground market was bubbling beneath the computer game's economy. In the lands of Gielinor players are able to trade their mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herbs gathered from herbiboars. Gold is the game's currency. In the end, players began to exchange gold in the game for real dollars. This is known as real-world trade. Jagex the game's developer, prohibits these exchanges.

In the beginning, trading in real life happened informally. "You could buy some gold from a friend at school," Jacob Reed, a popular creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb through an email that I received. The demand for gold outstripped supply and some players were full-time gold farmers, or even those who make an in-game currency that they can sell to real-world money.

Internet-age miners have always been part of the massively multiplayer internet games or MMOs like Ultima Online as well as World of Warcraft. They even toiled away in several text-based virtual realms, explained Julian Dibbell, now a lawyer for technology transactions who once wrote about virtual economies as a journalist.

In the past, many of these gold farmers were mostly in China. Some hunkered down in makeshift factories, where they slayed virtual ogres as well as looted their corpses over 12-hour hours. There were even stories of Chinese government employing prisoners to create gold farms.

In RuneScape the black market economy that gold farmers supported was rather small--until 2013. People were unhappy with how much the computer game has changed since it was first released in 2001. They contacted Jagex to bring back a prior version. Jagex published a new version from its archives, and users went back to what later came to be referred to as Old School RuneScape OSRS Account.