Tonight I dropped in on virtual Capitol Hill (teleport SLURL) to check out the new interactive tools the owners have put in place. As much as I admire what the Clear Ink guys have done creating the faux government sim, I have been discouraged by the lack of interest in the sim, mostly due to very few activities or interactive features present. It looks like that is slowly changing as we get closer to election time.
Hit the jump for details on the new interactive tools and other US political activity in-world...
To the east of the main capitol building is a neat scripted billboard created by Kiwini Oe of Clear Ink. If you get close to it and type into chat a zip code, the billboard pulls up the name of your local representive in Congress. You can click on different buttons to get links to the congressperson's website, address, email, and congrespedia entry. For some reason it wouldn't take any New York zip codes that I tried, but worked fine for California and Maryland. Maybe someday the billboard will include the inworld landmarks for your representative.
Floating above the Capitol building itself are a couple of screens playing some historic public service videos about the US government. The one I watched was a very hokey dramatization of what America would be like if we had no Congress.
Even cooler, to the west of the capitol building is another billboard with in-world landmarks to help you find unofficial and official in-world headquarters of candidates for the US presidency. Only four are available now, all democrats. Presumably more will show up as the field broadens. The four are:
Barack Obama (teleport SLURL)
Hilary Clinton (teleport SLURL)
John Edwards (sorry no picture available at this time, but here's the teleport SLURL)
and Wesley Clark (teleport SLURL) .
There's also an anti-Rudy Guiliani smear site that I refuse to put up the SLURL to because it's so inane and uninformative. You can easily search for it if you really want to see it. But trust me, there's nothing of interest there even if you hate Guiliani.
All-in-all, Second Life is becoming an interesting place for political avatars like me to hang out. Looking forward to more in-world builds and events as we get closer to the elections.
