For those of you in America, today is Election Day…the day where the process of selecting the leader of our country for the next four years begins. (Immediately followed by disputed recounts, uproarious dissent and an eventual celebration for a full 47% of our citizens after the entire thing is decided by six old people sitting in a Stuckey’s in Florida.)

For those of you in any country other than America that could care less…boy, is your television programming going to suck today.

However, this isn’t “O’Reilly-ORama”, which means we need to filter the nonFREAKIN’STOP election coverage through the wonderful world of MMORPGs. Luckily, we have the Wall Street Journal to do the heavy lifting, thanks to a poll conducted with users of Gaia Online:

According to the survey of more than 37,000 respondents, 72 percent of teens and young adults would like to see Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.

Why was that the result? Well, some of the additional data might give a hint:

Forty five percent of teens believe intelligence is the most important quality a president should possess. Thirty eight percent believe honesty is most important, while 13 percent believe experience is.

Which means that Obama is perceived as being more intelligent than McCain by the users of Gaia Online.

Meanwhile, Last Chaos has been running its own version of the election…by selling in-game items in “booster packs”; one for Obama and one for McCain, each with identical items.

The presidential candidates package that sells the most between October 28th – November 4th 5:00 pm will be decided as the Last Chaos president.

And how are the totals looking, I hear you saying? Ask no more.

Election Update October 30th 2008
Barack Obama Package: 1077
John McCain Package: 968

Too close to call. And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one of the best MMO election efforts of all time:

(By the way, put “getting polled by a cow in a bikini” into Google, and the first result leads to the image on the right. I can plainly see the bikini, but I seem to be missing the cow. Don’t get me started on “polled”.)

There are plenty other examples (such as the electoral college map at Steve Nelson’s Capitol Hill in Second Life, scraped from actual polling data at realclearpolitics.com), but when you get right down to it, examining political data from the world of MMORPGs is about as sensible as asking Obama or McCain for their restro druid talent spec.

There’s only one thing left to say, and that’s this…if you do live in America, go vote. At the very least, it gives you four years’ worth of bragging rights. Or bitching rights. They’re equally valuable.

Even if it works like this for you:

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Tags: election, Gaia Online, McCain, mmo, mmorpg, Obama, Second Life