In the following days, Marinez continued to hunt herbiboars and spent more than 36 hours on the task OSRS Gold. "There are times that I can't bear the sight of being a part of the hunt ... but when it's in exchange for money, I'll put up with the sight for a little while," he messaged me in Spanish, adding later "It's simply my job. And from it, I'm able to live."

Marinez 20 an old man "does services" for players from Old School RuneScape, a massively multiplayer online role playing game. World-wide players are able to pay him using Bitcoins to take on quests and to level up their characters in the roles of miners, fighters, or hunters.

In Venezuela In 2019, in Venezuela 96% of the population did not earn more than the poverty line of $1.90 each day. according to the findings of a study conducted by a Venezuelan university, Marinez has a better performance than many.

In addition to the pocket change he earns working at a nearby pizza shop, he makes approximately $60 every month on RuneScape which is enough to purchase rice and cornmeal for himself and his younger sister. For Marinez who is online, it isn't all about arepas. It's about freedom, even if he believes that the medieval fantasy game is boring.

Amid one of the worst economic slumps over the past 45 years without war, he and others in Venezuela are turning to playing video games as a means of survival and possibly a way to move. The game of video doesn't have to mean sitting at a desk. It can mean movement. Hunting herbiboars in RuneScape can help fund today's food and the future of tomorrow in Colombia or Chile, countries where Marinez has relatives.

Over in the Caribbean Sea in Atlanta, almost 2,000 miles away from Marinez lives Bryan Mobley. In his teen years was playing RuneScape continuously, he told me in a phone call. "It was fun. It was a way for me to skipping homework, or something like this," he said.

At 26, Mobley views the game in a different way. "I don't think of it as a virtual world anymore," he told me. He sees it as a "number game buy osrs infernal cape," an analogy to virtual roulette. A rise in the amount of in-game currency can be an increase in dopamine.