Presidential Campaign Strategists Dismissive of Second Life

Think it all comes down to bang for your buck, if you get one of these set up, it doesn't cost anything, cept maybe a little bit of manpower, maybe it won't get but a few more votes, but until it goes through a couple cycles, we won't know for sure, but i have a suspicion that it won't be very decisive either.

The only SL political campaign that I've seen have ANY success is the one associated with Front National, a French nationalist (read: not quite neonazi, but leaning pretty strongly in that direction) party. Their land gets a lot of traffic -- and exposure, via the protests of various communist and anti-fascist groups on SL -- but I don't know how much of that, if any, will translate into new votes. Many of the curious onlookers, including myself, aren't even French. They're nice guys, though, so I help drive up the traffic count a bit by hanging out there sometimes :)

As for other political sims... most remain empty except for the occasional griefing attack. I've visited a few of the US ones, and they were so damn boring (and empty) that I saw no reason to stick around. Hillary Clinton's barbie beachhouse campaign HQ particularly creeps me out -- the girly unicorn seems to have been removed, but the pretty leaping dolphins remain, and of course, there's never anyone there.

I believe that for a SL campaign to have any success whatsoever, the HQ NEEDS a staff. And I don't just mean a bored intern or two from the real life campaign, I mean hardcore SL players with no real affiliation to the candidate in question... people who can and will debate the candidate's merits for hours on obscure forums... people with *nothing better to do*. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about FANBOYS. With a dedicated staff of fanboys at your disposal, you will a) attract traffic to your sim, since people often check traffic counts and watch for dots on the map to see if anyone's there, b) grow your fanboy (and potential voter) army, since a fanboy is more likely to know how to appeal to others of his demographic, and c) save money, since you obviously won't have to pay them :D

Wait I thought Mitt Romney called video games a cesspool of violence and pornography leading our children's morals in a downward spiral. Why is he campaigning in a video game? Especially on so many claim to be addicting as Second Life?

After trying Second Life, I wasn't really impressed.

""gold dubloons? I’m not a SLer, but I think “everyone” under 40 knows that you can exchange $Linden for $US ""

It says in the Second Life Terms of Service that LD of no actual monetary value and that they should be in no way viewed as such. Linden Dollars are basically the same as gold from World of Warcraft, except in this game Linden encourages people to sell their in-game space money for actual money and vice versa because it makes them filthy rich.

This is also why a 15 year old "griefer" can cost someone the LD equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in the course of a few hours, possibly bankrupting someone who makes a living off the game, but Linden has no obligation to give them more money (and won't) and the poor sap who lost out is screwed because the "griefer" did nothing legally worse then teamkilling on an FPS server.

So why does Linden insist their money is worth nothing when their advertisements act like it it? Because this way they don't have to pay taxes. Yeah.