RMT Taxation starts in Korea from 1 July 2007, says this translation of the original Korean article. It only applies to those who have a certain volume of transactions — folks doing more than 6m won every six months (around $6500) will have the mediating party (e.g., the RMT company) collect the tax, and folks over 12m won in a half year have to get a business license.
Apparently, this is a deal cut by the RMT companies…
You’d think there weren’t many examples. And you’re right. But when you do find it, it looks like what Stephen Totilo and N’Gai Croal are doing with their dissection of Manhunt 2 (The MTV version: part one, part two; the Newsweek/MSNBC version: part one, part two, hopefully more to come).
Not having played the game, it’s near impossible for me to comment on the game itself. I’ve publicly commented that much of the Rockstar output seems to me to simply enjoy pushing buttons and boundaries, rather than really reach for social commentary or redeeming value of any sort. Today at lunch, I had the odd experience of describing Manhunt (the original) to a table full of people — and oddly, the description sounding more artistic than the actual game was.
Lots of comparisons to film are used in the discussion between Croal and Totilo; the question comes up as to whether Manhunt 2 is comparable to a Bonnie and Clyde, a Natural Born Killers — or whether it’s just the equivalent to a snuff film. In the end, we probably won’t get to decide, because pre-emptive censorship (both from the governmental and the platform-holder side) means that debates like the one that Croal and Totilo are having simply won’t be had. And that in itself seems to leave us all impoverished, regardless of the quality of the game.
Virtual Worlds News: More Cyber Thieves Prefer Virtual Money to Real
“McAfee now sees more malware programmed to steal passwords for World of Warcraft now than trojans aiming for banking information, said Craig Schumager of the McAfee research labs.”
Sorry this is late, but I spent much of today messing with it!
The actual guitar piece is very old. It’s one of the first instrumentals I wrote on the guitar, as I recall. Very simple to play, too.
Here’s the chords for the whole thing.
I’ve mentioned it before, and of course Gene hangs out here on the blog from time to time. But now that Adobe has put up a case study of Sherwood Dungeon, it seems like a good chance to remind everyone that this browser-based Shockwave MMO has quietly amassed 1.3 million unique players a month, with 4000 PCU. It’s ad-supported, I believe. Oh yeah — and despite stuff like physics systems, mocapped anims, and so on, this is a small enough shop that Gene’s email is posted on the website.
As it happens, my daughter got hooked on Adventure Quest (featured there at MaidMarian.com as well) while I was away at the Virtual Goods Summit. Within minutes of my walking in the front door, she told me that she wanted to spend $20 on microtransactions for something. I told her no. 😉
