Tactic: Using Online Games for Organizing

Written by Mary on January 4, 2008 – 9:48 pm -

Organizer: Ron Paul fan site Revolutioni.st
Purpose of Action: Revolutioni.st organized a march in World of Warcraft, the purpose of which was to raise awareness of the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul.
Organizing Tools: World of Warcraft, web site, YouTube
Outcome: About 150 players attended the march, though the effect on Ron Paul’s candidacy was negligible.
Ease of Replication: Extremely easy if you are already a member of the game. You just need to e-mail your friends in the game and tell them to appear at a certain location at a certain time.


It has been proposed that online worlds present meaningful opporyunities for spaces for activism and mobilization. In Second Life, one of the most famous online worlds, the Do Tank at New York Law School, created Democracy Island, a virtual laboratory for democratic process. In a blog post, I leveled some significant criticisms against this idea, because Second Life is populated almost exclusively by middle-class tech-savvy people from developed countries. What is the benefit of an experiment in democracy if the “franchise” is so limited?

Online games, however, are a different matter. While a relatively tiny percentage of the world’s population plays massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the demographic is not as elite. Many young people play, particularly in Asian countries like Korea and Japan.

In fact, MMORPGs have already been used for organizing in Asia. In Korea in 2001, a protest was organized in the popular MMORPG called Lineage after unscrupulous players exploited a faulty piece of code in the game and started making counterfeit weapons.

In the case of the Ron Paul march, a fan site called Revolutioni.st organized a march within World of Warcraft on New Year’s Day to show support for Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign. They used a web site to publicize the march and then made a video of the march, which they put on YouTube. The video publicized the action for people who did not attend the action online.

The effect of actions in online worlds is less clear. There are still so few people that participate that their impact is unlikely to be definitive. Nevertheless, their innovative nature can help draw media attention to your cause. Also, as more people enter online worlds, the ability to organize large numbers of people online will increase. The time of organizing in online worlds is not here yet, but it could be soon.


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Posted in Americas, Tactics, Virtual Worlds |

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