After Senator Lieberman’s internets disaster a few weeks back, I was starting to lose faith in politicians and their ability to navigate the growing digital landscape. Color me surprised when I heard that Governor Mark Warner of Virginia had decided to take part of his campaign to Second Life.

Second Life is the virtual world where you can be a rock star, build a business, or just hang around and generate scads of wacky, wild inventions in a MMO setting. It has become the ad hoc meeting ground for the internet savvy even outside of the gaming community.

Governor Warner conducted a brief interview with a virtual avatar, and announced that he will be holding a virtual town hall meeting to discuss American politics later this fall.

Politicians should pay close attention to experiments like this. More and more, games like Second Life are attracting increasingly diverse groups of participants. These groups are becoming increasingly savvy and often represent highly skilled professionals as well as the traditional “gamer” demographics.

The future of politics is learning how to reach out through an ever increasing set of tools both offline and on. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll all tune into CSPAN and log into WoW to watch the next presidential debates.

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