You never know where a butterfly flapping its wings will send a hurricane.

On the 9th day after the United States raided Venezuela and arrested its president Maduro, a game called RuneScape once again made history. On this day, the number of concurrent players in RuneScape exceeded 258,000, marking the highest point in the game's 25-year history.

Two seemingly unrelated events have miraculously intertwined.

"Will the U.S. attack on Venezuela lead to an increase in RuneScape's gold prices and changes in player numbers?"

While the world focused on international oil prices or the Venezuelan stock market due to the turmoil in Venezuela, RuneScape players were paying attention to the in-game gold and prices, as well as the fluctuations in the number of RuneScape players.

If Maduro's "departure" from Venezuela marked the end of an era, then the Venezuelan players' "departure" from RuneScape also signified the end of an era.

The end of the old era only means that history relentlessly moves forward; it does not equate to new hope. The three elements of Venezuelans, RuneScape, and cryptocurrency were once so intensely intertwined, telling a story of survival and escape.

Survival

Due to oil, Venezuela was once one of the wealthiest countries in South America, but since 2013, the country's economy has gradually collapsed.

The process of collapse is like a snowball rolling down a snowy mountain, constantly amplifying and accelerating. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's GDP cumulatively declined by about 75% - 80%, marking the most severe economic collapse in the world due to non-war reasons in the past 45 years, surpassing the scale of the Great Depression in the U.S. and the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 2021, 95% of Venezuelans lived below the income poverty line, with 77% living in extreme poverty.

In August 2018, just before the reform of Venezuela's currency "Bolívar," the country's annual inflation rate had already exceeded 48,000%. In just four months, the black market exchange rate of the Bolívar to the dollar plummeted from 1,000,000:1 to about 7,000,000:1, rendering banknotes as worthless as scrap paper.

In this continuously deteriorating life, Venezuelans discovered RuneScape. At that time, the exchange rate of the in-game currency "gold" in Old School RuneScape (hereinafter referred to as OSRS) to the dollar was about 1,000,000 - 1,250,000:1, far more valuable and stable than the Bolívar.

Although OSRS launched in 2013, it is actually a fork of the RuneScape version from August 2007. The company behind the game, Jagex, made an attempt to bring back the old version to reverse player attrition and negative reactions to updates.

This attempt unexpectedly succeeded, and OSRS continued to develop, allowing the RuneScape IP to thrive. This attempt also had an element of fate, as it was an old version that could be played through a web browser, requiring low computer hardware specifications, enabling a large influx of Venezuelan players to work in this virtual game world to solve real-world survival issues.

On YouTube, there is an old video published in February 2018 showing someone playing OSRS on a Canaima laptop with only 2GB of RAM. In the 2010s, the Venezuelan government distributed millions of free Canaima computers to students to aid their education.

Who would have thought that knowledge could not help these children change their fate in the face of national decline, but this computer, with its extremely limited capabilities, helped them breathe in the face of survival difficulties.

Venezuelan players had been using OSRS to solve their livelihood issues at least since 2017, if not earlier. In September 2017, a Reddit post teaching OSRS players how to hunt Venezuelan players in the "Eastern Dragon Zone" went viral and later became an important meme in OSRS history:

The "Eastern Dragon Zone" refers to an area in OSRS where a monster called "Green Dragon" spawns in the "Graveyard Hunter Zone." Venezuelan players crowded this area from 2017 to 2019. They frantically hunted dragons, selling the dragon bones and hides dropped by the Green Dragons on the RuneScape trading market for gold, which they then exchanged for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

According to an article by a user named "fisherman" on Steemit published in August 2017, farming Green Dragons could earn 500,000 OSRS gold per hour, equivalent to $0.5. This method of making money even made it to Venezuelan newspapers:

Advanced players would farm another boss, a giant snake with wings called "Zurlah," which could increase hourly earnings to $2-3. Such an hourly wage was already higher than what most university-educated Venezuelans earned.

A few years ago, when Venezuelan players were most active in making a living in OSRS, several English media outlets interviewed them. The interviewees generally reported earning $100 or more per month from OSRS, while their parents earned only about $10 per month. They viewed OSRS as highly popular among Venezuelans, a mainstream way to make money that could support their families and protect their hard work from the devaluation of the Bolívar.

Just like in Hong Kong, where we see many Filipino domestic workers filling the labor needs of daily household affairs, Venezuelan players in the OSRS world filled the labor needs of the monotonous and repetitive monster grinding/leveling and collecting processes. Besides farming dragons, snakes, and deer for various materials, Venezuelan players also took on tasks like skill training and item crafting for others. However, unlike Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, who can leisurely gather in groups on the streets for coffee, Venezuelan players, due to Jagex's crackdown on real-world trading of game items, used multiple burner accounts to avoid the risk of being banned, similar to how cryptocurrency users use burner addresses to prevent phishing risks.

In March 2019, Venezuela experienced a nationwide blackout. During those days, the Green Dragons lost their most loyal dragon slayers, leading to a sharp decline in the supply of dragon bones in the market, causing prices to rise.

Players' attitudes towards these Venezuelan gold farmers can be described as mixed. On one hand, Venezuelan players are generally manual players, unlike those from other countries who work in studios to earn money at scale; they genuinely earn gold through fair manual gameplay, solely for survival. Sometimes, more casual players even believe that the presence of Venezuelan players actually enhances their gaming experience, as they do not need to spend too much money to directly enjoy the game fun they desire.

On the other hand, such profit-seeking behavior inevitably affects the gaming experience of regular players and the economic mechanisms of the game. The actions of Venezuelan players in the OSRS world to survive also impact the survival of the OSRS world itself. Over the years, opinions on Venezuelan players on Reddit have been contentious, with anonymous malice as well as anonymous warmth.

Until the Venezuelan players left.

Escape

In today's OSRS world, only the legends of Venezuela are heard, but the gold farmers of yesteryear are nowhere to be seen.

Starting in 2023, Venezuelan players began to gradually leave OSRS. While Venezuela's economy continued to collapse, the gold prices in OSRS also faced a decline. Those tireless, non-stop bots began to compete with the manual Venezuelan players, leading to a surge in OSRS gold production, which corresponded with a continuous drop in gold prices. Currently, the price of OSRS gold to the dollar is about 1,000,000 gold: $0.16 - $0.2.

For Venezuelan players, gold farming has not stopped; it has simply moved to more cost-effective places—they have turned to games like Tibia, Albion Online, and World of Warcraft, continuing to seek a livelihood in the virtual world.

But there will always be questions, "Is this kind of life right?" Thus, some players resolutely left these virtual game worlds, and even left their real-world country.

According to the latest data from earlier this year, about 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country, marking one of the largest refugee crises in Latin America and even globally. In English media, we can see some interviews with Venezuelans who escaped Venezuela by making money through OSRS.

José Ricardo, an OSRS gold broker, earns profits by buying OSRS gold and reselling it to buyers. A few years ago, in an interview, he reported a monthly income between $800 and $1,200. He invested these profits in cryptocurrencies and had the money needed for vacations in Brazil, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago. He still lives in Venezuela, but that is just one option; he does not want his life to be permanently tied to one place or one thing.

Victor Alexander Rodriguez decided to supplement his family's income by playing OSRS for 14 hours a day with his sister starting in early 2017. At the beginning of their gold farming journey, he discussed with his sister, "One day, we will leave." Together, they worked hard to gather $500 through OSRS and went to Peru in 2018. Later, he became a security guard, earning a higher salary than he did while gold farming in OSRS. During his leisure time, he occasionally returns to the OSRS world on his phone, but this time he is truly a player enjoying the game.

But not every story of escape is so beautiful. Bran Castillo once described the experience of a friend of a friend—who successfully earned money for a trip to Peru through OSRS, but after arriving in Peru and continuing to play OSRS, found that the income that was sufficient in Venezuela was no longer sustainable. On Reddit, Venezuelan players have addressed questions about this; although their public services have quality issues (the most outrageous being that they relied on mobile data to log into OSRS for the first time because the copper wiring of the broadband was stolen), they generally do not have to pay much, and the money they earn mainly covers basic needs.

There are even darker rumors that some female OSRS players from Venezuela, after fleeing the country, did not know how to sustain their lives and resorted to more desperate measures…

OSRS players have a saying that is almost like a belief: "The game never ends; you don't leave, you just take a break."

The most touching blessing I have seen is, "I hope that one day, we have nothing to worry about outside the joy of the game, and we can just enjoy this game."

Conclusion

The connection between Venezuela and the cryptocurrency industry is both numerous and profound. Now, we might relish the potential Bitcoin reserves of up to 600,000 coins under Maduro's regime, deeply analyze why the "petro" issued by Venezuela failed from various angles, and examine the economic and daily life patterns after USDT became widely adopted as the local currency…

But this time, when we try to find the stories of "people" rather than starting from the "macro industry" phenomena and perspectives, we see how cryptocurrency and a 25-year-old game have helped Venezuelans solve their livelihood issues. Entangled in the virtual world, conveying emotions and battling, all for survival in reality or to escape that damned fate.

Without cryptocurrency overcoming geographical, linguistic, and cultural barriers, coalescing a sufficiently large value consensus worldwide, and providing a solid foundation of world-class trust at the settlement level, the story of OSRS and Venezuela might not have happened.

Whether struggling to maintain a crumbling life in the virtual world or escaping from both the virtual and real worlds to pursue new hopes, these seemingly trivial personal choices actually promote the progress of the industry.

Their stories gradually fade in OSRS, and in the cryptocurrency industry, they pass by like outsiders and quietly leave, yet they represent the real hardships and struggles behind the progress of this industry.

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