Veteran of a Thousand Warcraft Wars

David Weigel | October 5, 2006

South Park's latest block of 7 episodes kicked off last night with "Make Warcraft Not War," a parable about the dangers of online gaming that could have delighted Brent Bozell as much as it delighted any normal human being. The boys are idly playing "World of Warcraft" when they encounter a hopeless nerd's character, a maxed-out warrior who keeps killing lower-ranked players at random. Cartman convinces the rest of the boys to re-enter the game and hide out in a forest killing boars to raise their levels and take on the nerd. They eventually do it, with some help from the game's creators, and in the process become obese, acne-plagued, no-life gamers.

The "everything in moderation" message rang pretty clear, as did the "hardcore gamers are losers" message. (I assume some hardcore gamers have killed Trey Parker and Matt Stone's characters a few times. Just spitballin'.) But good satire can offend anyone, and the episode has inspired a thread on Ain't It Cool News unironically slamming the episode for... its innacurate use of "Warcraft" designs.

Randy, and Butters couldn't be in the Arathi Highlands at their level and expect to fight anything. It's like a mid-thirties leveled area. And furthermore, they'd have to run there, so they couldn't log back in, in that area, UNLESS they had a Warlock to summon them....
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Boars don't group like that, and you won't find that many in the same area anyways. And after a certain level, they will eventually give you ZERO experience points. So they couldn't level up killing Goldshire boars....
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YOU CANNOT GIVE SOMEONE A CLOAK YOU'VE ALREADY EQUIPPED ON YOURSELF!!!
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You cannot give away items that have already been equipped. So Randy could not have gave away the sword! TOTAL BULLSHIT!

Back in 2004, Kevin Park opined about the politics of video games.