Now 26 years old, Mobley views the game in RuneScape Gold a different way. "I do not see it as a virtual world anymore," he told me. He sees it as a "number simulation," an analogy to virtual roulette. The increase in the supply of money in the game is an infusion of dopamine.

Since Mobley began playing RuneScape in the early 90s, a black market had been growing under the computer game's economy. In the land of Gielinor it is possible to trade in items such as mithril's longswords armor, herbs from herbiboars, and gold, the game's currency.

Soon, players started exchanging the gold they earned in game for real dollars, a process referred to as real-world trade. Jagex, the game's developer is against these exchanges.

The first time, real-world trading took place informally. "You might buy some gold from a fellow student at the school." Jacob Reed, one of the most popular creators of YouTube videos on RuneScape who goes by the name of Crumb on an email I sent to him. The demand for gold was higher than supply which led to some players becoming full-time gold farmers, or those who produce in-game currency to sell for real money.

Internet-based miners were always associated with by massively multiplayer games, or MMOs, including Ultima Online or World of Warcraft. They even worked in several text-based virtual realms, claimed Julian Dibbell, now a lawyer for technology transactions who wrote about virtual economies as Cheap RS Gold a journalist.