make love, not warcraft
Trey Parker and Matt Stone did something fantastically nerdy and extraordinary this week. They made machinima (the art of creating videos by using in-game avatars as actors) mainstream by dedicating the first episode of this season’s South Park to World of Warcraft addiction, and brilliantly acting out all of the main character in-game. As you know, I have had my battles with addiction to this game, and this blog has suffered for it repeatedly. (I’m off it cold turkey for over 46 days now…) Cartman, as usual, is the best.
The genius of this episode is they have perfectly captured the frustration of newbism, the physical ill-effects of playing, AND with the shear douchebaggery of some of the elite (1337) high level players. The role the Cartman plays in his WOW party is absolutely perfectly accurate. This is how many of the players play.
In addition, they really, absolutely, truly did their “homework” on this. Every spell, buff, spell, weapon, jargon, every everything is flawless to the point that only real WOW players will know. Yet the episode should be just as funny to people who have never played. (Of course there is one major technical flaw, but I won’t go into it here…)
As you might expect, the episode is now everywhere online, but wowsouthpark.com seems to be the easiest place to catch the whole episode. For World of Warcraft players, do not miss this. For the other newbs, well, you’ll probably like it too, who cares about you, really.
Saw this last night, and the entire time I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘Oh man. I really have to tell Chris about this.’
Glad to see you’re back on the up and up.
I loved it, I laughed so hard. But you gotta wonder if Blizzard put up any dough to have this episode created. I mean it generated great press for World of Warcraft.