In to the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, just a few hundred miles from RuneScape Gold Marinez, lives Bryan Mobley. As a child playing RuneScape continuously, he told me during a phone conversation. "It was fun. It was a way to obviously skip doing homework, shit like it," he said.

The 26-year-old Mobley is a different person to the game. "I don't consider it to be a virtual world anymore," he told me. For him, it's the definition of a "number simulator," similar to the virtual version of roulette. A rise in the amount of currency in games is an infusion of dopamine.

Since Mobley started playing RuneScape in the late aughts there has been a black market growing under the computer game's economy. In the realm of Gielinor, players can trade their mithril longswords, yak-hide armor, herbs from herbiboars. Gold is the game's currency. Eventually, players began exchanging gold in the game for real dollars, a practice known as real-world trading. Jagex is the game's creator, prohibits these exchanges.

Initially, trades in real time occurred informally. "You could buy some gold from a friend at college," Jacob Reed, an acclaimed creator of YouTube videos on RuneScape known as Crumb wrote on an email I sent to him. Later, demand for gold outstripped supply and some players were full-time gold farmers or people who create on-game currency and sell it for real-world money.

Internet-age miners had always accompanied enormously multiplayer online games, or MMOs such as Ultima Online as well as World of Warcraft. They even toiled away in certain text-based virtual worlds declared Julian Dibbell, now a lawyer for technology transactions who once wrote about virtual economies in his journalistic work.

In the past of these gold farmers were mostly in China. Some hunkered down in makeshift factories where they killed virtual ogres and scavenged their corpses in 12-hour shifts. There were even news reports about the Chinese government using prisoners to RS 2007 Fire Cape gold farm.