Terra Nova

A Taxpayer May Wonder

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's "taxpayer advocate," Nancy Nina Olson, announced the release of her office's annual report to Congress, a yearly federal ritual whose long and impeccable streak of unnewsworthiness was broken this year by the inclusion of an item that actually made headlines. IRS May Push for Tax Compliance in Virtual Worlds, was the Washington Post's. IRS Official Recommends Policy on Virtual World Transactions, echoed the gamers at Kotaku, and IRS Report Recommends Self-Reporting Virtual World Income, added Second Life watcher Wagner James Au at New World Notes. The stories all correctly related the basic fact of the matter: In a detailed, 13-page passage, the report urged the IRS to "proactively address emerging issues... arising from virtual worlds." And if the stories all nonetheless failed, each in its own way, to relate the real news of the matter, that's understandable, because the news here is subtle: What this report delivers, in effect, is nothing more and nothing less than official recognition that the question of virtual-goods taxation is actually, like, a question.

Gaming and Guanxi

I recently read and enjoyed a paper that has been posted to ssrn on gaming and guanxi in China, and I wanted to post about it here because this is the kind of new scholarship on online gaming that we need. Guanxi is the management of relationships of reciprocity in China, primarily through gift-giving, and it is a topic with a long history in the anthropology of China. Here, Silvia Lindtner, Scott Mainwaring, and Yang Wang accomplish what has been a relative rarity in game studies -- they give an account of how the rise of online gaming there shapes and is shaped by this longstanding cultural practice. What is really impressive about this kind of new work is that it resists two common temptations. They do not reduce online gaming there to existing cultural forms (which would be the old wine in new bottles argument), nor do they argue the exceptionalist position -- that online gaming changes everything and sweeps away the past. While I would like to see this kind of work weave in more participant observation data (the emphasis here is on interview material), this is a step forward. Highly recommended.

1984 2.0

So, in the interests of blatant self promotion, my short essay encouraging government to respect privacy interests in virtual worlds is now up at www.yalelawjournal.org.  But I wanted to take this further: I think our acquiesence to the rule of contract law in virtual worlds has come home to roost.  Bad law combined with EULAs are to blame for our loss of civil liberties in virtual worlds.  More on this admittedly controversial statement after the fold.

Serio II

[Comments are still borked. Apparently the system is receiving them, but not displaying. It's a problem with Typepad; nothing we can do directly. But I will open a new thread here to allow some commenting to continue.]

My closing thoughts: I hear what everyone is saying and I respect it. Sometimes I just have to get hit in the face with something before I see it. For example, last week my wife and I were invited by my chairman to a dinner, with another professor couple. We asked what we could bring. The chair's wife said "Nothing, just yourselves!" My wife asked me, "Well, what are we bringing?" I said "Nothing, of course. That's what she said isn't it?" My wife rolled her eyes. She got some little flowers. I rolled my eyes. We get there and the other wife had brought big flowers. My wife, whose suffering of my ways has been long and not always patient, glared at me. OK, OK, OK, finally, I get it: "Nothing" means "Flowers."

I do think the world is a better place with such things and so I respect what this community is saying about the Serio. You've convinced me; I made a mistake. Therefore I will not ignore emails that have no Serios attached. I will try to read everything I get. This is nice anyways because it also allows me to go back to Thunderbird, which I prefer to Outlook.

However, I still like the virtual game aspect of the Serio. So if someone gets an Attent account and sends me some Serios  - which you can do without Outlook - I will perk up and notice, if only because the sender seems to share my interest in virtual currency. Heck if you want Serios, just go get an account, email me a request, and I will send you some.

Serios remain on my radar. If you are someone I don't know and you really, really, really want to dialog, do the Serio thing and I promise to get to your message quickly.

Thanks everyone for your comments and if I offended, I apologize.

On The Serio

[1/13/09 there's a tech glitch with typepad right now that seems to be messing with some of the fields, including comments. we are trying to figure it out.]

A few days ago I sent an message to my distribution list (full text below the fold) telling everyone that I'm starting to sort my Inbox using a currency called the Serio. The Serio is a virtual currency that can be attached to emails. Since it is a scarce resource, I know that a message with more Serios attached means more to the person who sent it. For that reason alone, I should pay more attention to that message.

That was my reasoning. Since I sent the note out, there has been quite a lot of negative reaction. That is not all that surprising if you know much about the history of public reaction to prices - people hate them. Making things more heated in this case is the frequency with which people think that virtual is the same as digital which is then thought to be costless.  As a result, the idea of applying a price in terms of a virtual good, to ration attention, a good that has always been thought to be free, has stoked some angry discussion. The anger in turn calls for a calm reflection on what prices are, why we have them, how virtuality changes prices, and how all of these things relate to human well-being.

New Paper on UGC

Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: "User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity "

User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment. The present article puts these claims under scrutiny and in a more differentiated manner seeks to identify the value of UCC within digital game environments considering the constraints upon players and upon creative play that these impose. The article subsequently tests whether UCC in its dynamic sense of a creative and communicative process can be seen as a channel for the promotion of cultural diversity and if so, what the State should (and could) do about this.

It is a brilliant paper.  Burri-Nenova manages to synthesize the current thinking on user-generated content and virtual worlds in wide variety of fields.  She presents a wonderfully sophisticated analysis of the policy issues presented.  (Photo Credit: Clairegren)