Will Second Life breathe life into campaigns?

I have spent several evenings this month walking an avatar around Second Life, mostly through quiet plazas where a handful of residents chat while their surroundings slowly finish loading. Those empty spaces are worth keeping in mind as campaign staffers start asking whether they need a presence in Linden Lab's virtual world before 2008. The honest answer is maybe, for a narrow set of reasons, and almost certainly not for the reasons in most of the press coverage.

What Second Life actually is

For readers who have not logged in, Second Life is a three-dimensional online world run by Linden Lab of San Francisco and opened to the public in 2003. Users, who call themselves residents, design avatars, build objects and buy virtual land. The world has its own currency, the Linden dollar, which trades against the US dollar at a rate of a few hundred Linden dollars to one greenback through an exchange Linden Lab operates. A basic account costs nothing. Owning land requires a paid premium account, and a private island carries a four-figure setup fee plus a monthly maintenance charge.

Registered accounts have climbed past two million, a figure that shows up in nearly every news story about the platform. That number deserves skepticism, which I will get to below.

The precedent everyone cites

Last August, former Virginia governor Mark Warner appeared in Second Life as an avatar for an interview in front of an in-world audience, widely described as the first such appearance by a politician of his profile. At the time he was considered a likely presidential candidate. In October he announced he would not run, so the experiment never got tested against an actual primary.

Since then, the world has drawn other institutions. Reuters opened a virtual news bureau in the fall with a reporter assigned to cover the economy and culture inside the world, and a number of companies and universities have built islands. The pattern is that organizations arrive for the novelty, earn a round of real-world headlines, and then struggle to keep the space busy.

Why "go where the people are" is weak advice here

The standard argument for a campaign presence in Second Life runs like this: millions of people are there, campaigns should go where people gather, and early adopters gain an edge. I disagree with nearly every link in that chain.

Start with the population. A registered account is not an active user. Many people sign up out of curiosity, walk around for an evening and never return. The figure that matters for an event is how many residents are logged in at once, and that number is a small fraction of the registration total. It is also global. A large share of residents live outside the United States and cannot vote here at all.

Then there is the hardware ceiling. Second Life is divided into regions, each one 256 meters on a side and run by a single server process called a sim. A sim can typically hold somewhere around 40 to 100 avatars before performance degrades badly or the region refuses new arrivals. A candidate who draws a crowd in the real world cannot draw a crowd in a single sim. An overflow event would need several adjoining regions, with the speaker visible from only one of them.

Finally, the people who are there are not waiting for a campaign. They came to build, socialize, shop, dance and role-play. A political event competes with all of that, and residents can teleport away in a second.

Where a presence could still make sense

I do not think the conclusion is "ignore it." Second Life does a few things that no website, blog or email list can match, and a small, cheap presence could exploit them.

• Talking to the technology press. Reporters covering the web are fascinated by the platform. A modest in-world event can earn coverage in outlets that would never write about a candidate's issue page.
• Small, intimate sessions. A sim's limits look like a problem for rallies but suit a question-and-answer session with thirty people, where avatars sit in a circle and each can type or speak a question.
• Recruiting technical volunteers. Residents who script objects and build spaces are exactly the kind of people a campaign's online team would like to recruit.
• Signaling openness. Showing up in an unfamiliar medium tells some voters the campaign is curious about new tools, though that message fades the moment every campaign is doing it.

The griefer problem

Any campaign planning an in-world event should study what happened last month when a technology news site held an in-world interview with Anshe Chung, the resident famous for her land business. Griefers, Second Life's term for users who disrupt others for fun, flooded the venue with obscene flying objects and forced the session to end early. The incident got more coverage than the interview itself.

A campaign event would make an even more tempting target, and partisan pranksters on any side would enjoy the screenshots. Mitigation is possible: Linden Lab lets landowners restrict access to a parcel, ban specific avatars and limit who can build or run scripts. Those settings exist, but a staffer has to know how to configure them, test them in advance and keep someone on duty during the event with the authority to eject troublemakers. Restricting access too tightly, on the other hand, undercuts the open-door message the campaign wanted in the first place.

A checklist for staff considering it

If I were advising a campaign online team, regardless of party, I would want answers to these before spending money:

1. Who on staff has logged at least twenty hours in-world and understands its etiquette?
2. What is the event for: press attention, volunteer recruitment or voter contact? Each needs a different design.
3. How will the campaign handle an audience that is mostly non-voters or non-Americans?
4. Can the space be rented for an event rather than owned year round?
5. Who records the session as text and video so the content reaches people who were not logged in?
6. What happens if griefers arrive, and who has permission to act?

The fifth point may matter most. An in-world event reaches dozens; a well-edited clip or transcript posted afterward can reach thousands. The virtual space becomes a stage for content distributed elsewhere, much like a town hall staged for cameras.

Early days, real limits

None of this rules out surprises. Two years ago, few people expected that a blog sidebar would become a fundraising channel, and Rosalind's post this week on how blog ads split along party lines shows how fast that market grew. Virtual worlds might follow a similar curve. They might also stay a niche hobby with a press-friendly image.

My plan is to keep visiting, attend whatever political events show up in-world over the coming months and report back on attendance, griefing and whether anyone in the audience can actually vote. Coverage will collect under civic tech. If a campaign of either party opens an office in there, my avatar will be somewhere in the crowd, however small it turns out to be.