Water Cooler Games - Will there ever be politics in Second Life?

Will there ever be politics in Second Life?
December 30, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Those of you who keep up with game industry news already know that Cory Ondrejka has left his post as CTO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. Cory is a respected friend, and I will be interested to see what he does next. On Friday, Cory mused on his last day on his new blog, Collapsing Geography. That may be one you want to add to your readers.

More directly related to our interests on this site, however, is Cory's discussion of one of his 2007 predictions, which have become a Terra Nova tradition.

6) At least one Presidential candidate will use Second Life to build a community around issues rather than simply holding a single press conference

4.5 for 6. This is a tough one. On the one hand, many candidates have had multiple events and built communities within SL, but I haven't seen a real commitment to building an ongoing issue discussion. On the other hand, NPR's Science Friday and SciIslands have built an ongoing, regular science discussion, use of SL to host global warming discussions is heating up. So, giving myself a half-right.

I spent a good deal of time in Persuasive Games talking about the difference between politicking and politics. In too-brief summary: politicking is campaigning; politics is policy. Campaigning is what we mistake for politics. That's why we pay much more attention to elections like the one going on now. The vast majority of what we see in Second Life, in terms of candidate to citizen interaction, is politicking. It's not just press conferences, as Cory suggests, but rallies and other simulations of the nearly politically meaningless events of real-world campaigning.

Of course, facilitating discussion can't be all bad. But there's something missing from Cory's evaluation of this prediction. Virtual worlds like Second Life offer the potential to model policy proposals themselves, to allow people to experience a world constrained by the new rules of a fiscal or social proposal. But realizing that potential requires building more than just projection screens and amphitheaters out of prims. Of course, that amphitheater looks a lot better on a press release than some computational model of a new social practice.

Comments (1) | Post a Comment

Comment from Dakota Reese on December 30, 2007

I assume you've seen this:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/12/ron-paul-suppor.html

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