Marinez who is 20 years old “does offer services” as a player playing Old School RuneScape, a hugely multiplayer online role-playing game. World-wide players pay him through Bitcoin usually to complete quests and up the skills of their characters such as miners fighters, or hunters OSRS gold.
In Venezuela, where in 2019 there were 96 percent of the population earned less than the international poverty standard of $1.90 per day, as per an analysis conducted by a Venezuelan university, Marinez does better than the majority of.
Alongside the pocket change that he earns while working in a local pizzeria, he earns about 60 dollars a month playing RuneScape and can afford rice and cornmeal for himself and his younger sister. But for Marinez working online isn’t just about the arepas. It’s about escape–even if he is of the opinion that the medieval video game boring.
One of the biggest economic collapses in the past 45 years, without a war, he and other in Venezuela are turning to a video game as a means for survival as well as a possible route to migration. Playing video games doesn’t imply being on a couch in front of the screen. It can mean movement. Herbiboar hunting in RuneScape can fund the cost of food today as well as the future of the world with Colombia or Chile, countries where Marinez is a member of the family.
across in the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, nearly 2,000 miles away from Marinez, lives Bryan Mobley. As a teenager, he played RuneScape frequently, he told me in a phone call. “It was amusing. It was a way to clearly get away from homework, shit like it,” he said.
The 26-year-old Mobley thinks differently about the game. “I don’t think of it as an actual world anymore,” he told me. According to him, it’s the definition of a “number game,” something akin to virtual roulette. A greater amount of in-game currency can be an injection of dopamine OSRS GP.
