Additional Post, 10/7/2012: Political Gamers

  As a gamer myself, I don't know what I would be like if I grew up without them; as a child I played Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., and Legend of Zelda religiously. I knew it might be a problem when I spent 13 non-stop hours playing Elder Scrolls and wondered where the time went.
  And of course, I also play World of Warcraft. I committed 9 hours a week to the guild for raiding and having fun with my real life friends online. It was fun and relatively carefree.
  But what's the point of this post? Surely games don't have anything to do with politics?
  Wrong.

A Republican attack post card opposing Colleen Lachowicz, a democrat.

  Recently, the Republican party organized a large smear campaign on Colleen Lachowicz, a democrat who is running for state Senate in Maine. But they didn't just attack her, they used her character on Warcraft, which is the basis for her online personality, to focus the attack. They created a website, a press release, and circulated post cards (pictured above). In each, pictures of the hopeful senator and her character are featured prominently.
  What I find interesting, and what Colleen's defenders are screaming, is how the Republican party can expect to find support for this campaign? The post card shows Colleen's face over and over and poorly crafted reproductions of forum posts and cuts of images of her character to represent a negative side to gaming. After all, that's what they are attacking, as seen in the sentence on the card that reads, 'We need a Senator who lives in OUR world, not Colleen's World'. Yet, playing video games is a part of modern American culture, and has been around for decades at this point. Nowadays, its hard to find people who don't play as compared to finding people who do. If you even recognize Angry Birds, Tetris, or Farmville, you should understand this.
  Seemingly, this has backfired for the GOP, because even common republicans are rushing to her defense. This next image uses a meme format called a Demotivator to illustrate the point that Republicans shouldn't judge people based upon how they decide to waste their own time on their off hours. It made me wonder if she choose to use a demotivator for the purpose of knocking on the smear campaign to begin with.




Article: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ingame/world-warcraft-playing-candidate-im-real-person-1C6303203