I watched the latest Southpark episode 1008 "Make love, not Warcraft" on Google video. Not providing a link, because there are already several dead links to different uploads of that particular video on both Google and YouTube. This is copyrighted material, and the admins are required to take the videos down when they find them. But of course the video being "hot news" this week, it got uploaded lots of times, so I was able to catch one version before it got deleted.
The Southpark episode is remarkable in that half of it plays in the game of World of Warcraft, and you see the familiar WoW graphics and animations, with the voices of the Southpark characters. Blizzard cooperated heavily, which explains why for example the bad guy could summon scorpions into the Arathi Highlands, an effect which would be impossible to reproduce if it was just a typical Machinima movie, filming sequences from the standard game.
The story of "Make love, not Warcraft" is of a fat and pimply bad guy who plays so much, he becomes "super-high level", stronger than the GMs. Then he starts player killing newbies, preventing everybody from doing quests, and Blizzard can't do anything to stop him. Quote: "How can you kill that which has no life?" The solution is for the Southpark quartett to become super-high level themselves. Of course that leads to them having no life anymore either, and becoming fat and pimply. But with the help of Blizzard executives bringing them a USB stick with a powerful sword on it the kids finally kill the bad guy, and Cartman (as dwarf) smashes in the head of the bad guy lying on the ground, splattering blood and brain. Another thing you can't see in the real WoW game, I was a bit surprised that Blizzard allowed that.
In any case it was brilliant product placement from Blizzard, a lot of nice things are said in the episode about the game, even Stan's father gets hooked. And Blizzard is depicted as a company that just wanted to make a game for people to quest and have fun, and got surprised by people with no life playing it all day long. Which might initially have been true, but instead of producing more content for the "we just want to quest and have fun" crowd, Blizzard added more incentives to the no-life crowd, and actually encouraged the phenomenon. It is ironical that the bad guy is a player killer, because due to the current bad design of the PvP reward system, only the people with no life get to the highest rank there. To Blizzard's credit they are going to change that. I don't know how many people watch South Park, and how many of them weren't aware of World of Warcraft yet, but this is the sort of brilliant advertising money can't buy.
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