How virtual economies created the digital wild west

In June 2020, months before the US-backed opposition to the dictatorship collapsed, a group of Venezuelans had found a better way of earning money than turning up for work: playing video games online.

Players were mulling around an area known as the Revenant Caves, an area ripe for “gold farming”, a spot in the game where characters could be levelled up quickly and then traded for US dollars online.

The process involved waiting for in-game enemies to appear before killing them as a means of rapidly building a high-profile account. Do this for long enough, and the next step is to sell the account to someone with a disposable income willing to pay up in order to skip the time investment required to build a high-level character.