> They start arriving even before the security shutters at the west Caracas storefront roll up at about 8:30 a.m. For 11 hours a day, they’ll hunch over old-fashioned cathode-ray tube monitors and bang on greasy keyboards in a dim space with a boarded-up window and a blanket of dust. They pause just long enough to smoke cigarettes in the stairwell. And if someone lingers too long, another eager person claims their seat and starts hunting make-believe monsters.
> Crisis-wracked Venezuela has become fertile ground for what’s known as gold farming. People spend hours a day playing dated online games such as Tibia and RuneScape to acquire virtual gold, game points or special characters that they can sell to other players for real money or crypto-currencies such as bitcoin.
> We’ve never made this much before,” says Efrain Peña, 29, who plays seven days a week at the Mona Pizza cybercafe to support his wife and child. Most Venezuelan gold farmers make the equivalent of a couple of dollars a day, but in many ways they’re better off than salaried workers, because their earnings are indexed to Venezuela’s black-market dollar exchange rate. “What job can match what we’re making now?” says the onetime graphic designer.
This is insane.People's will to survive never ceases to amaze me.
