WoW Politics

I viewed a great video during election week that was both humorous and pointed. Here is the URL on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5Kg-K7em20 (I’ve also included the video below). By the way, I found this video while reading www.Ubernoggin.com, a blog written by Sarah Robbins (Intellagirl), coauthor of Second Life for Dummies, and a social networking consultant at my place of employment (the IU Alumni Association).

The video was a series of interviews with World of Warcraft (WoW) players about their political stances regarding the upcoming election (it was made just prior to Obama’s election). World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). In a virtual 3D world of wizards, elves, and orcs, players fight their way to attain supremacy over other lands, races, and/or beasts. View the video to get a glimpse of how these virtual worlds overlap with our own. (For instance, notice that warriors and priests overwhelmingly preferred McCain over Obama, something generally real in the real world as well). Do people project their real worlds into these virtual environments? Does their Avatar represent more about them than is normally supposed? What can we learn about education in virtual worlds from such a humorous video? Will students also project themselves and their ideologies onto their virtual selves, their worlds, and everything they touch? While possibilities for self-expression are exponentially expanded in these virtual worlds, such self-expression may be just that — self expression. Are these truly second lifes, or are they merely extensions of first lifes? Perhaps virtual world educational adventures may be more immersive and real-world than I had at first assumed.