Check out the article.

“Your income will not be treated any differently than if you earned it working nine to five in an office.”

If a virtual transaction has real world implications – if it can be attributed a monetary value – it attracts the attention of the Tax Office. Sites such as slexchange.com set rates for swapping Second Life’s Linden dollars for “real” money.

“The real world value of a transaction may form part of your taxable income, even if it is in Linden dollars,” the ATO spokeswoman says. “In addition, there may be GST to consider.”

In other words, if you are turning over the equivalent of more than $50,000 selling virtual jewellery to Second Life avatars, you must get an ABN and register for GST.

Jack Emmert heads up design over at Cryptic, of course. And it looks like he just delivered a keynote at th Serious Games Summit in DC. Serious Games Source has a write-up. Among the things that jumped out at me:

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Looks like Multiverse is ready to show some stuff off. they have announced open beta on their forums. (via ReBang).

Grr.

So there I am in Outlook 2003, about to delete an email unread. Muscle memory kicks in, and instead of hitting CTRL-Q to mark it read, then Del, I hit CTRL-A, CTRL-Q, Del, a sequence I use many times a day when wiping out all the spam in a folder.

So I delete my entire Inbox.

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Today, a couple of articles about the aging audience for new media and games in particular strike a chord.

Nintendo actually ran demos at an AARP event, apparently.

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Posting the Sunday Poem each week has become an interesting exercise. For one, few of you read them. For another, it’s something alien enough to the game world that I doubt most regular readers of the blog have any interest. I am sure that the various marketing types who hang out here would tell me that it “dilutes the brand” to some degree, because blogs that are tightly focused (and unambiguous, and full of bullet points!) are the ones that quickly get lots of traffic. Ah, the odd ways in which commerce intrudes.

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It’s been a while since I did a straight-up design topic, and both Sara Jensen (at her new blog!) and Brian Green jumped in to reply to Ryan Shwayder’s original post on the subject, so why not perpetuate it?

Basically, the issue is this: when you kill some dude standing around in pink tights, a floppy hat, and elfin chain mail, do you get the pink tights, floppy hat, and chain mail? Or do you get something else, if anything?

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Here’s a nice way for games to poke a hornet’s nest! MyBrainTrainer is a web-based version of the popular “brain training” style games that have crossed from Japan, notably on the Nintendo DS. The web version offers a wide array of tests, ongoing tracking, age bracketing and other benefits that come from having a large database to make comparisons against.

Now, in the election season, it’s comparing the cognitive function of Republicans and Democrats.

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I was feeling guilty about not having posted much lately (and what I have been posting is mostly reblogs!) and I realized that I probably had stuff lingering on the hard drive that I’d been meaning to upload to the site. One of the first things I stumbled across was the slides from the PARC Forum I gave (PDF). I previously posted links to the audio download (MP3) and video stream as well as a liveblogged summary, but somehow forgot to post the slides themselves. Oops.

This is a good chance to point to Nick Yee’s PARC Forum from earlier this year, too, entitled “The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction.” Worth checking out.

Yep, written by Danielle Crittenden.