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Maine's "World of Warcraft" candidate Colleen Lachowicz appears to win State Senate seat
Colleen Lachowicz made headlines earlier this election season after she was attacked for playing World of Warcraft. Her opponent's party felt that her gaming was a negative factor that should sway voters into not voting for her. Lachowicz posted on Facebook this evening the following message: Facebook kind of disappeared from view for a little while, but with good reason. With one town of 300 left to report, the results cannot change. I am now the Senator-Elect of District 25 with a total of 8561 to 7545. With these numbers it would appear that Lachowicz has secured victory for herself as a Maine State Senator. For more on Lachowicz, take a read of our interview with her back in early October.
Interview: Maine Senate candidate tells why gamer shaming bodes ill for the future
Is playing World of Warcraft so bizarre and disturbing that players should be considered unfit for public office? According to the Maine Republic Party, the answer appears to be yes. Late last week, the party launched a jaw-droppingly clueless campaign attempting to shame Democratic State Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz for -- oh yes, here it comes again -- playing a video game. "We're not attacking Colleen for being a gamer," Maine Republican party communications director David Sorensen denied in an interview with Polygon. "Our website and mailers are focused on Colleen's extremely offensive remarks made in connection with her gaming, including saying that Maine's governor must have been a child prostitute or drug dealer, and how she might drown conservative activist Grover Norquist in a bathtub." Despite the GOP backpedaling, one look at the mailer and ColleensWorld, the supporting website, makes the gaming slur (and the noncontextual nature of Lachowicz's comments) painfully obvious. Clearly, whoever conceptualized the campaign suffers from a lack of cultural context. Perhaps they didn't know that World of Warcraft is even used as a teaching tool in public schools, making gaming a natural fit for 48-year-old Lachowicz, a licensed social worker, stepmother, and licensed foster parent. We're guessing they probably didn't visit Lachowicz's campaign Facebook page, where a clip from gaming innovator Jane McGonigal outlines how gaming in moderation actually makes people better at the other things they do. Why does nonsense like this persist? In an exclusive phone interview with WoW Insider, Lachowicz told us why the Maine GOP's embarrassing misstep hasn't negatively impacted her campaign but still fills her with foreboding for the future of young people growing up in the digital age.
On the surreal attack ad against a State Senate candidate who plays WoW
First, let me assure you... yes, we heard about it. We weren't blithely ignoring the news that a bizarre political campaign attacks a Democratic candidate for the Maine State Senate, or that actual mailers using actual paper were also printed. Trees died for that print campaign. We tend to notice things like that, somewhere between our advanced Google alerts and the Cataclysm-level flood that hit our inbox like it was time to wreck Booty Bay all over again. We're reaching out to Colleen Lachowicz for comment and interview, because frankly, we question her gem and talent strategy. Oh? You mean, we should comment on the political absurdity? Huh. Okay. Thing is, we're not a politics blog. We're a site about World of Warcraft. We don't tend to dwell on politics around here, unless it's about the unmitigated incompetence of Garrosh. Some folks have Very Strong Feelings about the Wrynns, the Thralls, and the national climate of Azeroth. But when it comes to real-world politics, we resemble a LOLcat screaming "Do Not Want." We're about WoW here. And this incomprehensibly surreal attack on Colleen Lachowicz shares as much to do with World of Warcraft as my socks. They just happen to sit on the feet of somebody who plays WoW, just like all that forum chatter and such coincidentally takes place on WoW-related forums.
