With World of Warcraft having the combined worldwide population of a small country, and the combined US population of a small state, people have been finding various ways to infuse their politics into the game. This can only be seen as a natural occurrence – people will naturally want to bring their out of game ideals into the game to express themselves.

We've covered various politically and socially minded groups in the past here and there. And with the end of the political season we've seen an increase in the number of political expressions in WoW.

Let's take a look back at the top five politically and socially relevant WoW thing-a-ma-jigs on the net in 2008.

Ron Paul campaigns in Azeroth



On January 3rd, 2008 supports of then presidential candidate Ron Paul gathered on the Whisperwind US realm to march across Azeroth. The event drew around 250 players and stands as the first major political rally held in WoW.

It is interesting that one of the event organizers said "The RP Revolution guild is on Whisperwind to stay! We made so many wonderful friends, and had a blast being together in a guild where we could intelligently discuss the world's problems with likeminded folks. Most of our members came from other servers, and many (including myself) are now considering moving our mains there. It's highly likely that many of those who joined with the free trial will be staying with the game as well."

However upon examination of the WoW Armory today, it appears that only a few are still active. They don't have any character above 66, and upon clicking through most of their guildies, only a couple have been on since the last armory reset (we know this since their character data isn't available).

Tags: 2008, barack-obama, democrat, endofyear-2008, george-bush, glbt, political, political-review, republican, review-2008, ron-paul, second-life, taint, virtual-world, wow, wow-politics

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Events, Virtual selves, Odds and ends