Ted Castronova is interviewed by Daniel Terdiman (yet another example of how we’re all a clique who talks to each other and get press thereby! But it’s all for good causes, honest!) about his Shakespeare-themed virtual world “Arden,” which Ted is using Multiverse for, I believe.
I loved this little design tidbit:
This is a document that perhaps should get framed, just because it’s a landmark for it to exist at all. I speak of a Congressional press release about taxing virtual worlds (PDF) that actually responds to some of the MMORPG sites, including perhaps THIS one, about the issue of taxation in virtual worlds. It’s damn short, but an excerpt is after the fold anyway:
It has been a while since I did one of these posts, and as a result, I have a largish backlog of books to mention. This doesn’t even begin to cover everything I read, but hey, it’s a start.
The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 13) wraps up the saga of the unfortunate Baudelaire siblings. Alas, I fear that children worldwide shall be perplexed by the conclusion to this saga, for it is rather existentialist in tone (a word which here means “not going to answer any questions”). But adults may find it challenging and intriguing. You see, it’s been a bit of a lie all along that these books are really solely aimed at kids. In the last book, we discovered that the most fearful thing in the whole series was a giant question mark that rose from the bottom of the ocean, conveniently termed “the Great Unknown.” We saw that the clean lines of division between good guys and bad guys are seldom real, and exist mostly in our minds. There are some revelations: it becomes clearer who Beatrice was, for example. But mostly, what we learn is that all real stories begin and end in in medias res, that there are no tidy endings, and that significant and even unfortunate events are often familiar retreads that have been lived by others: the deaths of parents, most notably. All in all, I still think that this is a far deeper and richer series of books than one might expect to find on the children’s bookshelf, and will long stand as a classic. It’s also probably the single best-written book I will review this time around.
Recently I blogged about the Next Gen list of core books for everyone in the game industry. A few of the books on that list are hard to find or out of print. One of the best of them is Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities — which it turns out you can obtain as a PDF by clicking on this link. Hooray for e-publishing! This is the best book I have ever read on online community formation and design, and it hasn’t become dated much at all even though it came out in 2000. Once, Alex Pham from the LA Times borrowed my (autographed) copy, and I pestered her for a year to get it back. 🙂
Virtual economies attract real-world tax attention – Yahoo! News
“Right now we’re at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth,” said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
