Governor Mark Warner Enters Second Life

Posted on September 7, 2006

New World Notes (NWN) has an interesting report about Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, who became the first politician to enter Second Life. There is speculation that Warner, a democrat, may run for president in 2008. NWN has a transcript of an interview with Warner's team about how the Second Life idea was formulated.

"Well," Nancy Mandelbrot (RL info here) explains, "we were sitting in our offices one day and kind of goofing around, just geeking out about social technologies, gaming, that sort of thing, as we're wont to do. Someone made a joke about how great it would be if we brought an avatar of Governor Warner into Second Life.
"When we all quit laughing, we kind of looked around and said, 'Hey, that's not a bad idea.'
"One of Governor Warner's operating principles is to go where the voters are," she continues, "not make them come to you. We saw how rich an environment [SL] was. I mean, you can sit next to someone's avatar, strike up a conversation, and forget that you're not in the same room. We started to see that in Second Life, people can get together and talk politics with other folks without the obstacles of real life."

Second Life does offer a way for voters to sit and chat with politicians in a virtual setting. If persistent worlds like Second Life continue to grow in popularity as is expected then there is a good chance we will see many more politicians enter persistent worlds over the next couple years. There probably won't be many before the November elections but by the 2008 elections it couldn't be a completely different story. You can read more about Mark Warner's appearance in Second Life here.