Colleen’s WoW character (according to the attack site)

You might want to sit down for this one.  It seems that the Maine GOP is attacking a Democratic State Senate Candidate over her World of Warcraft character and playing habit.  Their tagline?  “Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.”

Oh, yes.  This is a wild one.

They’ve devoted an entire website to attacking her WoW hobby and her postings about it:

Colleen Lachowicz, AKA Santiaga, is a gamer in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft(WoW), which takes place in the make-believe land Azeroth. Today, Colleen/Santiaga is an orc assassination rogue playing at level 85–the highest level one can attain.  She and the members of her “Wreck List Guild”—Colleen/Santiaga’s WoW online alliance—post comments to each other on liberal online forums including the Daily Kos, where they discuss politics, military policies, and WoW battle tactics.

Studies have found the average WoW gamer is 28, and spends 22.7 hours a week playing in Azeroth.

God help the first political candidate that is found to have played MafiaWars on Facebook.

It seems that Daily Kos (a very influential Progressive/Democratic blog) has a bunch of readers that play Warcraft, fashioned a guild inside the game around the Kos community and post discussions about WoW and politics in WoW-specific threads on the Kos site.  Lachowicz is a member of that guild.

From that context, the anti-Lachowicz/WoW site is pulling a few quotes about how she likes poisoning and stabbing.  It isn’t necessarily obvious she’s talking about that in terms of game play.

On the other hand, the quote

Now if you’ll excuse me, I may have to go and hunt down Grover Norquist and drown HIM in my bath tub.

is most likely sarcastic hyperbole, but is a “dairy” posting on Daily Kos, not part of a WoW discussion.  The attack site isn’t making contextual distinctions between any of the quotes.

I’ve never heard of a candidate being derided for their choice of game before.  A lot of that attack site is the equivalent of somebody saying they like to use artillery when playing Risk or put hotels on properties in Monopoly.

I have heard of favored authors being political talking points for the opposition.  Paul Ryan’s love of Ayn Rand has come up as a political topic, but there’s more of philosophical component to that.  I’m still waiting for a candidate to come out as a big fan of 50 Shades of Grey.

On Lachowicz’s campaign site, the Issues page addresses Jobs, Economic Fairness, Renewable Energy and so forth.  It is disappointingly lacking in her stands on character class, alignment, or battle tactics.  It seems that these last three things are now a political debate topic in Maine.

I’m so glad to see Maine taking up important political issues.

We’ll see how soon somebody points out the celebrity Republican Chuck Norris was featured on Warcraft TV Ads…

6 COMMENTS

  1. Well, come on, this was bound to happen sooner or later. One side has always attacked the other side’s candidate over the most foolish things. This isn’t really any more foolish and is only interesting because it’s new.

  2. This is a comic book website. The WoWC connection is basically nonexistent and the politics connection IS nonexistent. I’m a nonpartisan, by the way. This stuff seems tacky and desperate on your part, and I’d be saying the same thing if you posted a story about a Democrat attacking a Republican for video game playing as well.

  3. Do you hear the ethereal chorus of elves singing or the earth-shattering thunder of a dragon’s roar? World of Warcraft is calling you! The official Web site of World of Warcraft is worldofwarcraft.com. Learn more about the game, meet some people who play it on the forums, and download a free ten-day trial on Word of Warcraft’s Web site.

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