It was a way to obviously get away from homework

Posted by lowes Emily on August 12th, 2022

The other side of in the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, nearly 2,000 miles away OSRS gold is Bryan Mobley. As a teen, he played RuneScape for hours and hours, he informed me over the phone. "It was entertaining. It was a way to obviously get away from homework, shit like this," he said.

The 26-year-old Mobley has a different view of the game. "I don't consider it something that's a virtual space anymore," he told me. For him, it's something of a "number game," similar to virtual roulette. The increase in the supply of currency that is in-game can be a source of dopamine.

Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the late '90s an underground market had been bubbling up beneath the economy of the computer game. In the land of Gielinor the players can trade various items--mithrillongswords, yakhide armor, herbs harvested from herbiboars, and gold, the in-game currency. Later on, players began exchanging in-game gold for actual dollars, a practice known as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer, prohibits these exchanges.

In the beginning, trading in real life was done informally. "You may buy gold from a friend at school," Jacob Reed, an acclaimed creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by RuneScape gold, wrote via email. In the following years, demand for gold outstripped supply and some players became full-time gold farmers, or those who produce in-game currency which they sell to real-world money.