Primary season is almost over, and a nominee will soon be anointed to take on the sitting president. At issue are philosophical differences on how to stop financial fraud, how government should operate and what role law enforcement should play.
But Bush-Kerry this is not. This is the all-out, bare-knuckles campaign for the presidency of Alphaville, the biggest city in The Sims Online. And this Saturday, two challengers will square off in a final primary for the opportunity to unseat Alphaville's incumbent president, the appropriately named Mr-President, in next month's general election.
"I've always said this government is for the 'citisims,'" says Mr-President, otherwise known as Arthur Baynes, "and that it wasn't me running the whole thing." Citisims are the citizenry of The Sims Online.
Until now, however, Baynes has effectively been the standard-bearer of the so-called Alphaville Government, which has no official power but is viewed by many players as Alphaville's de facto authority. He founded the body in April of last year in an attempt to give organized help to new Alphaville arrivals certain to be accosted by other players trying to scam them out of simoleans, the game's in-world currency.
The Sims Online, or TSO, is the massively multiplayer online version of The Sims, the best-selling computer game of all time. But TSO has never lived up to Electronic Arts' huge expectations for it, and observers say that's partly due to the harassment many new players receive immediately upon entering the virtual world.
Indeed, differing approaches to protecting newbies from scams have evolved as the central issue in the presidential campaign. And while Mr-President seems highly popular and likely to fend off his opponent next month, he could lose to a candidate seen as tougher on scammers.
If she survives Saturday's primary, that candidate could be Ashley Richardson – the avatar name of a 16-year-old girl named Laura. Of four candidates running in the previous round, she got the most votes out of 213 cast by trumpeting her platform of confronting scammers and giving newbies as much help and welcome as possible.
"I think that some things are getting a little out of hand and I want to help Alphaville for the better," says Richardson. "I have many ideas and want to put them to action.... There are scammers in our city who try and steal money from innocent players."
Richardson's primary opponent is Seth Galloway. His campaign is centered on restricting the number of would-be governments and pseudo-police operations springing up and confusing Alphaville's citisims.
But Peter Ludlow, the editor of the definitive blog about TSO, The Alphaville Herald, thinks Mr-President has the most to fear from Richardson.
"The scammers seem to be scared to death of Ashley," says Ludlow, who in his spare time is a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. "They're on the warpath against her."
Ludlow looks at the Alphaville election with an academic perspective. Given that the winner takes over leadership of a virtual government in a virtual city in a virtual world, one might wonder whether there's anything to take seriously here.
"It's government after a fashion, I suppose," says Ludlow. "It's fair to say that the Alphaville Government is in large measure role playing, but I also think it's a real social institution within the game that could do things to improve the quality of the game."
But he also recognizes that the Alphaville Government has power only in the sense that players respect the lead it has taken in trying to make life for Alphaville newbies palatable and to help protect them from being scammed.
"Obviously, there aren't that many things you can do to a sim," Ludlow explains. "You can't lock them up, and you can't kill them. All you can do as a police enforcement mechanism is to give them red tags, or negative reputational tags.... It is a way of marking someone as being a scammer or a troublemaker of some sort. If you had control of the Alphaville Government, and you retain control of their foot soldiers, their police force, as it were, you'd have about 100 people for tagging missions."
On its website, the Alphaville Government touts its maintenance of several law enforcement agencies. Its "CIA" is mandated to gather "intelligence from honest and trustworthy sources, as well as conducting research experimentations for intelligence purposes," while its "FBI" is tasked with protecting Alphaville against terrorist attacks or "foreign intelligence operations or espionage," though it doesn't define such activities.
All told, Baynes says he's got about 120 players signed up to work for the various agencies. Included among them are 15 Secret Service agents, some of whom are assigned to protect the president from harassment.
In any case, once Alphaville voters decide between Richardson and Galloway, the winner will face Baynes on April 10.
Baynes says he long ago decided that the president should face the voters every year. And so, in opening up the Alphaville Government to a possible new leader for the first time, he allowed any player who had been a member of Alphaville for more than 125 days and who could correctly answer questions about the government's constitution to run against him.
Ludlow thinks the challengers have a tough hill to climb to ascend to the presidency. In fact, he says that in Alphaville Herald interviews he's conducted with each of the four original candidates, no one was willing to say they were dissatisfied with the job Mr-President has done.
"I haven't gotten anyone to say that," Ludlow explains. "I think it's going to be hard to defeat Mr-President.... They all say he'd be fine. If I don't win I would vote for him."
