Video games are about power fantasies, the conventional wisdom goes: Fight enough dragons to reach level 99, sell enough wolf skins to buy a gaudy gold cape, and become rich or strong or accomplished in the world of the game—even if you aren’t in real life. For Catdicax, a Finnish woman now in her 30s, the online fantasy role-playing game Runescape was a place where she could obtain more and more in-game items through hard work and time. And it paid off: After 10 years of playing, she had amassed a menagerie of high-end relics.
Eventually, though, Catdicax became restless. It felt like a waste of labor, a fruitless grind,
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