Millions of Us Presents. . . . .Governor Mark Warner of Virginia
Published on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by reubenOK, this is a piece of news I’ve been dying to break. Tomorrow at 12:30 PST in the New Globe Theatre on the Millions of Us sim, Mark Warner, the Democratic Governor of Virginia, will be announcing his entry into. . . . Second Life.
Speculation has been going on for the last month or so about who would be the first politician to open shop in Second Life. I honestly didn’t expect this to happen for a while, but it’s just a testament to the ability of Second Life to astonish me. Hamlet covers the event and Governor Warner’s background really well here.
What I’d like to share are a few cool and surreal details form today as we scrambled to get ready for the event. In politics, image is everything, right? Well, there we were, constructing the avatar for a man we’d never met face to face, tweaking pixels and complaining about SL’s avatar creation tools. We’d send a screenshot over and hear back fro the folks at Forward Together, Warner’s PAC, things like, “His head looks too small” and the like. And then we realized, we’re sitting here tweaking the avatar of the man who could be our next president. . . . .
Other fun details included rehearsing the grand entrance with Warner’s team and debating whether it would be more appropriate to walk into the Globe or fly. You can guess which way I voted. Anyhow, totally exhausted, but looking forward to tomorrow and the months ahead — join us at the New Globe and in the new Forward Together group in Second Life. The town hall has gone digital!
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August 31st, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Fallback Candidate Mark Warner to Visit SL…
Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “fallback” candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes’s Wagner James…
August 31st, 2006 at 2:36 pm
[…] “Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely ‚Äúfallback‚Äù candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes‚Äôs Wagner James Au, at 12:30 SLT (3:30pm EST), in an event produced by Reuben Steiger‚Äôs Millions of Us” […]
October 2nd, 2006 at 4:39 am
[…] Governor Mark Warner Enters Second Life 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.” I ask her if she’s concerned about skeptics who may wonder why Governor Warner would spend his time in something that seems like an online game. Ms. Mandelbrot is undeterred. “The Governor likes to tell how when he decided to get into the cell phone business– he co-founded the company that became Nextel– his friends said he was crazy. ‘No one’s going to want a phone in their car!’ So he doesn’t have a lot of time for people who will write off new technology without trying it. There’s nothing trivial about social technologies. They connect people together, we need more of that. Why waste time trying to second guess innovation? Let’s try it out, see if it works… He’s used to giving speeches, answering questions, in the physical space. This will be a new experience for him.” If persisent 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. […]