Ron Paul march in Azeroth

by Mike Schramm Jan 2nd 2008 at 8:30PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Culture, Events, real-world, Events, in-game, Raiding, News items, Virtual worlds

Here's video via Gamepolitics.com of the march that took place last night in Azeroth (a.k.a. the World of Warcraft) to support Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for the president of the United States. We originally reported on this topic over at WoW Insider (which, if I may say so, was one of the reasons so many people showed up), and we'll have more coverage of the march last night there soon.

But while Gamepolitics gives a good man-on-the-scene writeup, they also avoid the real question here: does real-world politics belong in a world like Azeroth at all? No one questions it when politicians show up in Second Life-- in fact, the few Second Lifers I know take it as a badge of honor that their world is important enough to host those folks. And certainly there are places where politics don't belong-- on WoW's roleplaying servers, discussion of the real-world is a no-no.

But let's not forget that we players aren't just avatars in a game- we're real people with opinions of our own to express, whether they be political or otherwise. Whether they should have or not (and many players on Whisperwind, where the rally took place, where extremely unhappy with the queues and congestion on their server last night), they expressed those opinons last night.

Update: Looks like Paul also wins the presidential naming race.

Tags: azeroth, expression, opinions, political, rally, real, real-world, roleplaying, ron-paul, second-life, virtual, world-of-warcraft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

paul4pres said on 8:19PM 2-14-2008

Found a website that is organizing the information for the march

http://march4paul.com

check it out

gravel kucinich paul nader said on 12:31AM 2-15-2008

barack obama mike huckabee vs machine

huckabee obama:
we understand your disgust.
subversion of democracy.

know this:
gravel kucinich paul nader
will fight any ticket
with clinton or mccain on it.

your eyes & ears are open...

Mike Gravel Dennis Kucinich Dr Ron Paul Ralph Nader
united by truth elicit fear smear blacklist.

Too many lies,
democracy rising democracy now.
Rage against the machine.

Honesty compassion intelligence guts.

No more extortion blackmail bribery division.
Divided we fall.

Stropp said on 6:06AM 1-03-2008

Hi Mike,

I answered this question on my blog at http://stroppsworld.com/2008/01/03/keep-your-reality-out-of-my-fantasy/
with a resounding NO.

I don't believe that real world politics belongs in a game at all. We need to think why we play these games in the first place. It's to have fun, right?

So why allow our games to be turned into campaign battlegrounds?

jeppe said on 7:02AM 1-03-2008

Agree with Stropp, real world politics has nothing to do in a game. Especially when it comes to republicans...

Ghen said on 8:17AM 1-03-2008

I'd like to point out that my guild's level 1 run from durotar to ironforge pulled more people than this. Kinda depressing actually, I was hoping to see a server crash. It only takes about 200-300 people in one zone to crash a server.