A college student is attempting to level two "pacifist" characters up to the top of World of Warcraft’s character progression, characters he’s playing without attacking anything. It’s partly to try out the philosophy of pacifism in the violent virtual world, and partly to see if he can do it.

Very cool, but 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. Doing keyword searches and imposing page blocks is comparably quite easy for regulators, but policing online communities for low-key forms of political expression is downright impossible.