Bones to Bolivars: Venezuelans and their Emigration to a Virtual Land
Old School Runescape is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that features a very broad, heavily player-involved, and peer-to-peer item economy. A centralized marketplace within the game, known as the Grand Exchange, allows players to sell a variety of bulk goods to one another, opening supply lines between the gatherers who harvest raw goods, artisans purchasing the raw materials to then develop other products, and the eventual warriors who use these products to kill monsters and make money in the form of loot. The core gameplay element of Runescape, essentially, is to find a demand that one’s character’s skills and the player’s effort can supply, profit from the venture, and use those earnings to progress the account with new levels, skills, or other features. With much of the game’s content locked behind an in-game paywall, and the grind to surpass it taking several thousands of hours worth of playtime, it was only a matter of time before the impatient and well-to-do began paying the less fortunate for their in-game gold.
Developed and managed by Jagex, a British company, the game features an in-game currency of gold pieces (gp) that has maintained relative stability at a conversion rate of around $0.50 (in USD) per million gp. There exists a concept known as Real World Trading (RWT) in which third party sellers or organizations of sellers will offer their gp in exchange for a backroom deal of real-world currency, most often in cryptocurrency, where it can easily be wired, converted to any global currency, and eventually delivered to the seller. The act of RWT, according to Jagex’s official rules pertaining to Runescape, is illegal such that “virtual items are a property of Jagex Ltd and players are only granted a limited, revocable permission to use accounts and virtual items.” In order to deter RWT, the company introduced an in-game item, known as a bond, which costs players real-world currency and, while more expensive than the current exchange rate of gp, can either be redeemed for two weeks of in-game membership or sold on the Grand Exchange for profit. Despite this, the lower price of black-market gp exchanges causes many up-and-comers to break the game’s rules, and opens a lucrative market for those who can’t make fifty cents elsewhere.
For people in developing countries or areas marred with civil strife, earning half a dollar per hour playing a video game is more economically sound than working an average wage job, especially when their currency is unstable or incredibly inflated. The Venezualan Bolivar, for example, was projected to reach inflation rates nearing 10,000,000% by 2019, since the sale of oil, the nation’s chief export and the primary reason to trade in Bolivars, crashed in 2015. As a result of the economic recession, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro ordered mass money-printing to pay off the nation’s debts. Where the average minimum wage in the United States approaches $10 an hour, average jobs in Venezuela pay around $10 a month. This isn’t enough income to pay for the resources necessary to emigrate, let alone pay for the food needed to survive the month. With little barrier of entry to the game other than an inexpensive computer and a steady internet connection, and a pressing need to make ends meet, many Venezuelans are left with little choice but to RWT to survive, and subsequently experience the same levels of job insecurity, legal profiling, and ire of the local population in-game that South Americans migrating to the United States would face in the real world.
In response to the rise in players committing RWT, Jagex assembled a team of employees capable of tracking a player’s actions and transactions, following the hands between which money transfers, and permanently disabling accounts that follow RWT behavior. This means that, not only do RWT sellers lose the physical means of earning gold, but they also lose their progress within the account. This includes both the levels earned and the equipment bought that grant them access to higher-paying money-makers. This means that, not only can Venezuelan RWT participants have their hourly wages grind to a halt due to account banning, but once they create another account and get back to work, they need to work the account back to the position they were in to make said money in the first place, costing valuable time and as much as halfing their would-be monthly income. Such an organization banning RWT draws sharp comparisons to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement team, who, in any given raid on a Southern Californian farm, could detain and deport several farmers who had immigrated illegally, uprooting those farmers’ chances at a newer, more prosperous life.
Within the game’s player community, Venezuelan players have become infamous for their presumed association to RWT. To “Venezuela” an in-game task is often synonymous with grinding it out endlessly and senselessly for as much profit as the game will allow, and typing “Venezuela R” into a Google search gives as much chance to return “Venezuela Runescape” as it does “Venezuela Refugees.” Many players that speak Spanish or use budget equipment are often assumed to be Real-World-Trading and immediately reported to Jagex staff. Because they appear Venezuelan, and their creed is commonly associated with illegal in-game activity, hispanic players are automatically perceived as rule-breakers and are treated with contempt as a result. Meanwhile, as Hispanic-American illegal immigrants sit in cages awaiting deportation, their contemporaries and peers, law-abiding or not, are presumed by many American citizens to also be nothing but criminals.
As racial violence in America has often proven, people are apt to take responsibility for their own perceived version of “justice” into their own hands. In Runescape, however, there exists a region of the world map known as the Wilderness, which possesses many highly valuable and highly farmable resources, but is also player-versus-player enabled, meaning a warrior could ambush and kill a player grinding the area’s valuables. In these instances, accounts made specifically for player-killing, with stats and equipment built specifically for finishing off kills, are much more likely to win a fight over, for instance, a Venezuelan player trying to make some quick cash and unaware of the impending ambush. And when one player kills another in the Wilderness, the killer is entitled to all but three items on the victim’s person, which could include both their equipped gear and every resource they had collected in that trip. Under most circumstances, a slight monetary setback would not be as damning to a RWT player’s income, but when gold-farmers are seen as easier prey by player-killers, and a Reddit post detailing how to target specifically Venezuelan players made headlines back in 2017, simply playing in this world has become increasingly hostile for people trying to make a living.
With every log chopped or monster killed in the game, gp is minted - rather than being circulated - and granted to the player. The inflation of gp naturally rises with player activity, and unchecked inflation, as seen with Jagex’s original and vastly less popular version, now known as Runescape 3, can and will completely devalue the gold piece, causing money-making gameplay to become close to impossible. For the sake of the game’s longevity and the players’ experience, it is in their best interest to stem the occurrence of RWT. However, for the company that believes the player earns them money, and for the blindly racist player-killers that do Jagex’s policing job for them, it is important to remember that no lives or livelihoods need to be put in danger over a nineteen-year-old video game.
