Virtual Tax of WoW
It's the same scene every year: panic, rioting in the streets of the Undercity, women pulling their baby Murlocs in off the sidewalks. Some rabble-rouser rides across the Internet like Paul Revere, shouting, "The taxmen are coming!" and we commence flipping our lids. All right, so it's really more of a collective slight nervousness than a full-on paranoid bedlam, but taxation's an easy topic to get touchy about whenever April rolls around. We can only stomach so many news stories describing MMO X as having a gross domestic product greater than Third-World-country Y before we start wondering when the powers that be will smell the money. Julian Dibbell speculated about its inevitability in his book, Play Money, last year...and a few months ago, Dan Miller-senior economist with the U.S. Congress' Joint Economic Committee-declared that, "The question is when, not if, Congress and the IRS start paying attention to these issues." Holy hell-am I headed to jail if I forget to mention my level 70 Night Elf Hunter on my 1040? ......More
