Trump waved his hand, stirring up the gaming hurricane in Venezuela

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

Nine days after the United States raided Venezuela and arrested its President Maduro, a game called RuneScape once again made history. On that day, RuneScape's concurrent online player count exceeded 258,000, the highest in the game's 25-year history.

Two seemingly completely unrelated events were magically connected.

"Will the U.S. attack on Venezuela cause RuneScape's gold price to rise and its player count to change?"

While the world focused on international crude oil prices or the Venezuelan stock market due to the country's political turmoil, RuneScape players were watching the fluctuations in the game's gold, item prices, and player numbers.

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

The end of an old era only signifies history's eternal and relentless march forward; it does not equate to new hope. Venezuelans, RuneScape, and cryptocurrency—these three elements once intertwined so intensely, telling a story of survival and escape.

Survival

Thanks to oil, Venezuela was once one of the wealthiest countries in South America, but its economy began to gradually collapse starting in 2013.

The collapse process was like a snowball rolling down a mountain peak, constantly growing and accelerating. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's GDP cumulatively fell by approximately 75% - 80%, the most severe economic collapse in the world over the past 45 years not caused by war, surpassing the scale of the Great Depression in the United States 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, on the eve of the redenomination of Venezuela's currency, the "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 US dollar plummeted from 1 million:1 to about 7 million:1, rendering banknotes practically worthless.

Amid this continuously deteriorating life, Venezuelans discovered RuneScape. At that time, the exchange rate for Old School RuneScape's (hereinafter referred to as OSRS) in-game currency, "gold," to the US dollar was approximately 1-1.25 million:1, far more valuable and stable than the Bolívar.

Although OSRS launched in 2013, it is actually a fork of the August 2007 version of RuneScape. The game's parent company, Jagex, made an attempt to bring the old version into the new era to reverse player attrition and negative reactions to updates.

This attempt was unexpectedly successful. OSRS continued to develop thereafter, keeping the RuneScape IP evergreen. This attempt also felt fateful because, being an old version, it could be played simply through a web browser with low hardware requirements, allowing a massive influx of Venezuelan players to work in this virtual game world to solve real-world survival problems.

On YouTube, there is an old video published in February 2018 showing OSRS being played 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 learning.

Who would have thought that knowledge couldn't help these children change their fate in the face of national decline, but this computer, with its extremely limited capabilities, helped them catch their breath in the struggle for survival.

Venezuelan players started using OSRS to solve livelihood issues at least as early as 2017 or even earlier. In September 2017, a Reddit post teaching OSRS players how to hunt Venezuelan players in the game's "Eastern Dragon Zone" went viral and later became an important meme in OSRS history:

The "Eastern Dragon Zone" refers to the eastern part of the "Graveyard Hunter Area" in OSRS where a monster called "Green Dragons" spawns. Venezuelan players crowded this area from 2017 to 2019. They frantically farmed dragons repeatedly, selling the dragon bones and hides dropped by Green Dragons on RuneScape's marketplace for gold, then converting OSRS gold into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies for cash.

According to an article published in August 2017 by Steemit user "fisherman," farming Green Dragons could earn 500,000 OSRS gold per hour, equivalent to $0.50. This money-making method was once featured in Venezuelan newspapers:

Higher-level players would farm another winged giant snake boss, "Zulrah," increasing hourly earnings to $2-3. This hourly wage was already higher than what most university-educated people in Venezuela earned.

A few years ago, when Venezuelan players were most active in gold farming for survival in OSRS, several English-language media outlets interviewed them. Interviewees generally earned $100 or more per month from OSRS, while their parents earned only about $10 per month. In their view, OSRS had very high awareness among Venezuelans and could be considered a mainstream way to make money, enough to support their families and protect their hard work from Bolívar devaluation.

Just as in Hong Kong, we see many Filipino domestic helpers filling the labor needed for household chores. Venezuelan players in the OSRS world also filled the labor for the tedious, repetitive grinding/leveling/collecting processes. Besides farming dragons, snakes, and deer for materials, Venezuelan players also took on jobs like power-leveling skills or crafting items for others. However, unlike Filipino helpers in Hong Kong who can leisurely appear on the streets in groups for coffee, due to Jagex's crackdown on real-world trading (RWT) of in-game items, Venezuelan players, much like cryptocurrency users using burner addresses to prevent phishing risks, maintained multiple burner accounts to avoid the risk of being banned.

In March 2019, Venezuela experienced a nationwide blackout. During those days, Green Dragons lost their most loyal slayers. The supply of dragon bones in the market plummeted sharply, and prices rose accordingly.

Players' attitudes towards these Venezuelan gold farmers were mixed. On one hand, Venezuelan players were generally genuine manual players. Unlike gold farming studios from other regions that could earn money at scale, they were truly earning gold through fair, manual gameplay like other players, and solely for survival. Sometimes, more casual players even felt that the presence of Venezuelan players actually improved their gaming experience, as they could spend less money to directly enjoy the game's fun.

On the other hand, such profit-seeking behavior inevitably affected normal players' experience and the game's economic mechanisms. The actions of Venezuelan players in the OSRS world for real-world survival, in turn, affected the survival of the OSRS world itself. For years, opinions about Venezuelan players on Reddit have been contentious, filled with both anonymous malice and anonymous warmth.

Until the Venezuelan players left.

Escape

In today's OSRS world, only legends of Venezuela remain; the gold farmers of old are nowhere to be seen.

Starting in 2023, Venezuelan players began gradually leaving OSRS. While Venezuela's economy remained broken, OSRS gold prices also fell. Tireless, non-resting bots began competing with manual Venezuelan players. OSRS gold production surged, corresponding to a continuous decline in gold prices. Currently, the price of OSRS gold to USD is approximately 1 million gold: $0.16 - $0.20.

For Venezuelan players, gold farming didn't stop; it just moved to more cost-effective places—they shifted to games like Tibia, Albion Online, World of Warcraft, continuing to seek real-world livelihoods in virtual worlds.

But some always ask, "Is this life right?" Thus, some players resolutely left these virtual game worlds, and even left their real-world country.

According to the latest data from early this year, about 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country, one of the largest refugee crises in Latin American and global history. In English media, we can find interviews with Venezuelans who used OSRS earnings to escape Venezuela.

José Ricardo, an OSRS gold middleman, profited by buying OSRS gold and reselling it to buyers. In an interview a few years ago, his monthly income ranged from $800 to $1,200. He invested these profits in cryptocurrency and had the money needed for vacations in Brazil, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago. He still lived in Venezuela, but it was just one option; he refused to let his life be forever stuck in one place or one thing.

Victor Alexander Rodriguez decided in early 2017, along with his sister, to play OSRS for 14 hours a day to supplement the family income. From the start, he discussed with his sister, "One day, we will leave." Together, they worked through OSRS to gather $500 and went to Peru in 2018. Later, he became a security guard, earning a higher salary than OSRS gold farming. In his spare 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 escape story is so beautiful. Bran Castillo once described the experience of his friend's friend—who successfully earned enough money through OSRS to go to Peru, continued OSRS there, but found the income sufficient in Venezuela couldn't sustain them in Peru. On Reddit, Venezuelan players have answered questions about this. Their public services, while of questionable quality (the most extreme case was first logging into OSRS using mobile data because the copper wires for broadband were stolen), basically cost little money; earnings were mainly for food and basic needs.

There are even darker rumors that some Venezuelan female OSRS players, after escaping the country and not knowing how to sustain themselves, turned to sex work...

OSRS players have a saying like a creed: "This game never ends; you don't quit, you just take breaks."

And the most touching blessing I've seen is: "I hope one day, none of us have anything to worry about beyond the joy of the game, just enjoying it."

Conclusion

The connection between Venezuela and the cryptocurrency industry is so numerous and deep. Now, we津津乐道 about the Maduro regime's potential Bitcoin reserves of up to 600,000 coins, deeply analyze from various angles why Venezuela's once-issued "Petro" coin failed, and examine the economic and daily life patterns after USDT became the widely adopted de facto currency among the local populace...

But this time, when we tried to find stories about "people" rather than starting from "industry macro" phenomena and perspectives, we saw how cryptocurrency and a 25-year-old game helped Venezuelans solve livelihood problems. Entangled in the virtual world, conveying emotions and fighting, all for survival in reality, or escaping that damned fate.

If not for cryptocurrency overcoming geographical, linguistic, and cultural barriers, consolidating a sufficiently large global consensus on value, and providing a solid foundation of world-class trust at the settlement layer, the story of OSRS and Venezuela might not have happened.

Whether struggling to maintain a collapsing life in the virtual world or doubly escaping both virtual and real worlds to chase new hope, these seemingly personal, mundane choices actually promoted industry progress.

Their stories, gradually fading in OSRS, passing through the cryptocurrency industry like outsiders only to quietly leave, are the real bittersweet struggles behind this industry's advancement.