Mini-State of Play reports
There’s a small symposium happening under the aegis of the State of Play conference, this weekend in New York. I’m not there, but the ubiquitous Daniel Terdiman is. And his reports are appearing on CNet, links and excerpts below. In addition, there’s a bit of news about a State of Play Academy. There doesn’t seem to be much on the blogosphere yet.
- IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable
“The key takeaway for the people” at State of Play,” Miller said, “is that congressional and IRS interest in this issue is simply a matter of time.”
- Who governs virtual worlds?
Ultimately, then, the panelists seem to suggest that if players want real governance, at least when it comes to issues between themselves, they are going to need to self-govern. As to complex issues between players and the publishers, it’s likely that real disputes will need to be elevated to the courts.
“The rules players develop do stop each other from bad acts,” said Fairfield, “and that’s all the governance we probably need.”
- NY Law School & There.com Launch State of Play Academy, an Initiative Designed to Develop Education in Virtual Worlds
New York Law School and There.com parent company Makena Technologies today announced the formation of the State of Play Academy (SOPA), the first voice-enabled virtual world learning environment and the first project specifically designed to explore strategies for using virtual worlds for distance education. Results of the first 10 classes will be reported at the State of Play / Terra Nova Symposium being held today and tomorrow in New York as part of an ongoing study of virtual world communities.
SOPA offers free online classes where participants are represented by avatars interacting on a virtual campus consisting of a classroom, library, coffeehouse and courtroom in There.com, one of the Internet’s largest virtual worlds created for online socializing. Instructors and attendees communicate using There.com’s real-time multi-person voice and text chat capabilities, including verbal exchanges mic’ed into the site and coordinated with avatars’ mouth movements to create lifelike online conversations.
It occurs to me that the tangles with taxing ingame transactions is even murkier than people think.
For example, if my stuff has value, and I quit, the company gets my stuff. Thus I am eligible for a deduction on lost property, and the company has net income from my quitting, unless they destroy it.
And that raises another thought. If virtual items have value, what opportunities does this afford companies which can create or destroy items with trivial amounts of effort? Could companies use manipulation of virtual assets to modify their tax position advantageously?
Now, that’s interesting. Why did the SOP folks take their business to There and not SL? Comments, Raph?
I suspect it’s a “whoever wants to give us sponsorship money” sort of deal. I was there, and SL was much more talked about than There was. Probably 90% of all conversations were about WoW and SL to the point where it would have seemed (to an outsider) that those were the only games anyone cared about, even though There was sponsoring.
*deadpan* There was there, but Second Life came in second.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. *flees*