What I find most interesting about Ron Paul is how massive internet support does not translate into mainstream success. And I doubt that stunts like the recent World of Warcraft rally will change anything about this interesting imbalance.

One of the reasons being that despite its apparent popularity, WoW is simply anything but mainstream – as a game based on a subscription service with its own codes and vocabulary it certainly isn’t accessible to a large part of the population (= the ones on the other side of the digital divide, people not interested in MMORPGs etc.). Even if the rationale behind the march was to receive mainstream media coverage, it is likely that it would have been too cryptic for the people beyond the constituency that is going to vote for him in any event.

As a commentator on gamepolitics remarks:

… I think this was the wrong venue, and a badly misguided idea, if for no other reason than Ron Paul is already regarded as the crazy candidate, and having a bunch of warlocks and mages and gnomes marching in support doesn’t make him look any more sane to the mainstream.

What’s left is a unique, self-congratulatory stunt, that would have been more interesting if the march would have been raided (to the confined group of WoW-adherents anyway) – and certainly did not pushed the envelope in utilizing a game space for political means since it didn’t take advantage of the unique qualities of games (namely their simulational nature). Had Paul’s supporters created a Facebook application that explained his agenda in the form of a game all the while being as accessible as Scrabulous (according to Level Up the most important game of 2007 – “a game that most people know with a well-populated community of people with whom users have a real-world connection”) we’d be talking.

-Jens