I should admit at the start of this that I am not a citizen of Second Life - or of any other virtual world. While I understand the financial potential, online gaming has never really appealed to me personally. So I was a little puzzled recently when I came across some material on US Presidential campaigns setting up shop in the virtual world of Second Life.

Why would someone serious about real world issues and government spend time sitting at a computer screen trying to convinces people who were deeply involved in a game to think more about the real world they were try to escape by playing that game? It still seems like a contradiction...




Whether I "get it" or not though, what I realized was that in a virtual world people try to act out life. They express themselves and communicate ideas that relate to the real world. And with half a dozen companies in China trying to develop virtual worlds for the Chinese market, and with many of them attracting some level of venture capital funding, the question is this: how will the Chinese government respond to similar activity when it occurs in a Chinese game environment?

Let me give you an example of the sort of activity I'm talking about. Last year the Second Life "headquarters" of one candidate for President was vandalized. Among other things, cyber-feces (whatever that is) was smeared on his building and racial slurs were left by the vandals.

I have no doubt that the Chinese government will censor Chinese virtual worlds. The fact that game activity takes place in real time might make that more difficult. But they'll find away. And that censorship will reduce the commercial value of the games somewhat...

Stan Abrams at China Hearsay agrees with me. There will be political expression in China's virtual worlds and it will draw censorship.

...you have to wonder what the future of political expression is in the gaming world. In China, the subject leads inevitably to the control of political expression (i.e., censorship), but as I've said before, the virtual world and other online environments give folks out there an unlimited number of outlets with which they can creatively, and often in a very subtle fashion, get their opinions circulated.

It will be interesting to watch the development of virtual worlds in China.