VIDEOGAME.RttP{WoW players march for Ron Paul...online...}

WoW Players Stage In-Game March for Ron Paul
Political action was surprisingly a largely civilized affair.

By Mark Whiting, 01/02/2008

Generally when one thinks of gaming co-mingling with real politics, the image that comes to mind is a carefully-crafted avatar in a suit taking to the pulpit in Lindon Labs' Second Life. Over the years, we've seen plenty of celebrities and pundits attempt to demonstrate their hipness to the jive by appearing virtually in SL -- everybody from John Edwards to Duran Duran. As a result, many gamers conceptualize Second Life as much more of a non-gaming online space -- especially compared to something like World of Warcraft.

That's why it's interesting to hear about the big demonstration that went down yesterday over on Blizzard's servers. Apparently, sometime around 8:30 PM EST on Tuesday, a throng of Alliance members took to the streets of Ironforge in a surprisingly well-orchestrated in-game demonstration designed to drum up support for (very real life) Republican dark horse presidential candidate and Internet darling Ron Paul.

Surprisingly, the WoW demonstration seems to have gone down reasonably smoothly, without much civil unrest or excessive PKing. The procession opened with upwards of 200 Alliance members who assembled en masse in Ironforge sporting names and guild affiliations (such as "RP Revolution") obviously designed to indicate support for the candidate. Some players went as far as to sport custom armor bearing a scroll symbol meant to represent the US Constitution.

Once assembled, the players marched in their armor through the streets of Ironforge (and subsequently through Stormwind and Westfall) in a long procession while chatting with each other and curious onlookers. The event's organizers marched personally at the head of the column, their avatars like drum majorettes corralling an unruly herd.

Server inhabitants were generally amused at the spectacle though a few reports of verbal (textual?) abuse and /spitting were reported by the event's participants -- hecklers it seems, remain a fixture of any political rally. A few gamers on the affected servers also reported some annoyance at the lag experienced as a result of the procession's substantial numbers.

The Paul procession is interesting in that it represents a genuine grassroots political activity which seems to have sprung organically from nothing more than the combination of American politics and WoW's 11 million + users. Though WoW is not particularly political by nature, such things do show how the real world can often impact in interesting ways on a medium best known to the outside world for crashing cars, headshots and zergling rushes. Perhaps many Alliance citizens would have preferred that the politics of protest stay at arms length from their level grinding and phat lewting, but political activism does have a pesky habit of hushing the buzz of those individuals simply seeking retreat from an intruding real world.

Of course, what really would have made the event spectacular would have been the sudden and unexpected appearance of an equally sized host of democrat-leaning Horde players engaged in staging their own political rally, but apparently that kind of thing only happens at funerals.