If you're planning on someday running for Governor of your home state, Congress or even just the City Council, pay attention: your online gaming activities might just be used against you.
While gamers understand that all the smack talk is just a role-playing element in online games like World of Warcraft (or Call of Duty or Battefield or Medal of Honor or World of Tanks), the folks who run political campaigns are either too blinkered to understand anything outside of their tiny universe or so cynical that they'll use anything they can twist around to potentially scare the dumbest voters.
Maine State Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz plays World of Warcraft as a level 85 orc assassination rogue called Santiaga and, if the posts floating around online are any indication, she reallygets into character when she's playing: "I love poisoning and stabbing! It is fun. I never thought I would love it so much either."
The Maine Republican Party is disturbed by Lachowicz's "time-consuming double life" and has set up a website called Colleen's World to expose the world of WoW to concerned voters because "Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen's fantasy world."
Lachowkski went on CNN this past Friday to talk about her campaign and her alleged double life:
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So here's the choice: accept that a new generation of public servants might have been dorks on the Internet or start teaching our eight-year-olds that anything they tweet or post on Facebook might someday be used in an attack ad. Please choose responsibly.
