The Maine Republican Party are on the attack against democratic State Senate Candidate Colleen Lachowicz, not because of her stances on how to better serve the fine state of Maine, but because of her love for the online role-playing game “World of Warcraft.”
To keep track of Lachowicz’s shameful pastime, Maine republicans started the website colleensworld.com, a site dedicated specifically to the task of tracking down old forum posts Lachowicz made and then posting them completely out of context in order to show how violent and vicious she has become since starting her trek into the dark, polygonal abyss.
Is playing video games still so stigmatized by the masses that a politician can be lambasted just for partaking? Are we not in the age of technology? Of information? The realm of politics is so consistently riddled with scandal that it is jarring that anyone would even bat an eye at a politician who plays video games.
People can argue that video games make people violent until they pass out, but that’s not going to change the fact that there is no data that exists proving it to be true. So why are people still stigmatizing video games? The only thing that I can think of is that there still lingers the idea that kids are the only ones who play games anymore, making anyone who partakes an obvious candidate for categorization as an individual with arrested development. Again, not true. According to the Entertainment Software Association (the guys and gals who regulate video game ratings and who go to bat for us whenever video games enter a political discussion), the average age for someone who plays video games is 30. So maybe that’s a bit of an age drop for the 48-year-old Lachowicz, but is it enough to warrant a question of her maturity alone on the idea that she plays video games? I think not.
And since we are breaking down all sorts of myths today like Adam Savage, why don’t we include the fact that 47 percent of all video game players are women? So if you’re keeping track at home, video games are played by men and women of the average age of 30–so immaturity based off of a love for video games alone is sort of a ridiculous accusation–and they don’t cause people to become murderers, making video games (gasp!) simply another form of entertainment like watching TV, listening to music or even seeing a movie.
So let’s go ahead and stop this overzealous stereotyping of people who like entertainment the same as everyone else and step away from negatively attacking Lachowicz for her enjoyment of playing video games. Besides, she made several comments about being lazy and not wanting to work while she was at her job, which seem an awful lot more damning to me than just liking to “stab” things in a video game.
