across between the Caribbean Sea in OSRS gold Atlanta, nearly 2,000 miles away from Marinez There lives Bryan Mobley. In his teen years, he played RuneScape constantly, he told me during a phone conversation. "It was enjoyable. It was a method to avoid homework, and shit like that," he said.

Aged 26 now, Mobley sees the game differently. "I do not see it as an actual world anymore," he told me. For him, it's an "number game," which is similar to virtual Roulette. A rise in the amount of game currency is an increase in dopamine.

Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the aughts, there was a black market in the game's economy. In the realm of Gielinor, players can trade items such as mithril's longswords, yak'hid armor, herbs harvested from herbiboars--and gold, the in-game currency.

Later on, players began exchanging in-game gold for actual dollars. This is known as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer, prohibits these exchanges.

Initially, trades in real-world terms was done informally. "You might buy some gold from your friend at school," Jacob Reed, the most well-known creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape known as Crumb wrote in an email to me.

Lateron, demand for gold exceeded supply which led to some players becoming full-time gold farmers or players who buy OSRS GP create an in-game currency that they can sell to real-world money.