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Template:Infobox South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" is episode 1008 (#147) of Comedy Central's South Park and aired on October 4, 2006 at 10 PM EST. The episode is a parody of the popularity of the MMORPG video game, World of Warcraft, or rather, gamers themselves, and was announced by Comedy Central on September 30, 2006. It was campaigned as the first episode of season 10, even though season 10 officially began in March. The episode uses machinima with the help of Blizzard Entertainment, the company that created the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises. This is the first time South Park has ever used this genre of animation.

Plot

Template:Spoilers Someone keeps logging onto the World of Warcraft game and killing the South Park characters' in-game avatars, despite the game's rule that a character must accept a duel before fighting. This leads to everybody becoming incredibly frustrated with the game, and wanting to quit the game altogether. Cartman, along with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, gathers the other boys of South Park to combine into a team to defeat this mysterious menace. However, the renegade player nevertheless destroys them all. The makers of the game become concerned that this griefer's mindless destruction will eventually cause people to simply stop playing, effectively destroying the game's membership.

Cartman devises an idea — the four boys will spend all their time playing the game, not going on quests, but killing millions of low level boars in order to safely level up (grinding), preventing them from running into their foe; though boars raise their power level slowly, they begin to get stronger by playing constantly (approximately 20 hours per day, for seven weeks). In the process, they become grossly overweight, acne-ridden, and begin to use large amounts of Internet slang ("uber" and "pwned"). They become so lazy that Cartman speaks to his mother through an intercom, ordering Hot Pockets and a bedpan to pass diarrhea while they continuously play in his basement. The boys' characters grow so quickly that the Blizzard executives take notice, marvelling that "they must have no lives." Determined to help them slay the enemy (who is portrayed as simply being another fat, pimply geek who wears a wrist brace and eats junk food), Blizzard decides to give the four boys the "Sword of a Thousand Truths" — a weapon that was considered so powerful that it was removed from the game, though a prophecy (from a guy in accounting) says it will one day be used. However, the boys, not privy to the plan, engage the enemy early, at a level where the executives predict a 90% chance of failure.

The executives show up at Stan's house, but he is at Cartman's, fighting the enemy with the others. Randy, who is a "noob", and also obsessed with Warcraft, takes the Sword (which is stored on a flash drive) and is determined to sign onto the game to get it to Stan (the Blizzard execs don't have WoW accounts - they sanctimoniously tell Randy that they "have lives"). After running around town, trying to find a suitable computer, they finally find one at a Best Buy, and Randy manages to get the Sword to Stan before being killed (in the game), and Stan then uses it to horribly weaken the foe so the others can kill him: Kenny shoots the renegade in the chest with an arrow, then Kyle casts a fire spell on the renegade, knocking him down. With the words, "You're about to get pwned," Cartman crushes the griefer's head in a bloody explosion. Stan's character holds Randy's dying character for a moment before he passes on, and the other Warcraft players rejoice. Stan asks what they'll do now that the game is done; Cartman points out that the whole point of their seven-week long, virtually nonstop mission was so they could "play the game." They then start actually playing.

Kenny's death

Kenny's World of Warcraft character dies after being killed by the renegade character several times like everyone else (though he died first). He doesn't die in real life. But, Kyle and Stan say the lines, "Oh my god, you killed Kenny", and "You Bastards!"

Characters' Warcraft data

• No Horde players are seen in this episode.
• Token's character is the only black character in the group.

Trivia

• The sword used to defeat the ganker is graphically identical to the legendary sword The Hungering Cold, although it doesn't work like the one in this episode.

• Though he is featured many times in the show, the renegade player does not speak and it does not specify who he is or where he lives (though what appear to be palm trees can be seen through his domicile's window).

• The French phrase Cartman says during his Hitler speech is "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, Clyde?" which means "Do you want to sleep with me, Clyde?", most likely a reference to the song, Lady Marmalade.

• The characters in Blizzard's board room closely resemble their corporate executive team, with President Mike Morhaime and Vice President Rob Pardo playing the most active roles.

• Throughout the episode, references made to locations and player activities in World of Warcraft are accurate to their in-game counterparts, including the "plains of Elwynn Forest near Westfall", the Arathi Highlands, the starting quests for human characters and the presence of large numbers of boars near starting zones. Cartman correctly references an actual map from the game to plan the attack on the ganker, and the final battle takes place in the area of Goldshire. This can be explained both by quotes from the press release stating that a large number of the South Park Studios team plays the game, and the collaborative effort between South Park and Blizzard to provide the in-game rendered portions of the episode.

• Cartman's TeamSpeak commands rant parodies the popular Leeroy Jenkins video containing a similar barking of commands. Both this portion of the episode and the original Jenkins video satirize the excessive planning and elitism of so-called "nerd guilds" who specialize in raiding. Though the scene is typical of many endgame raid command rants, the wink to that video occurs most obviously when Kyle mentions not being specced to reduce his cast time and Cartman in an annoyed tone replies with "Christ....". An almost exact circumstance and response from the team leader occurs in the Leeroy Jenkins video.

• The bass guitar that Token played in Cartmans christian rock band Faith +1 can be seen sitting in the corner of his bedroom while playing World Of Warcraft.

• It has been suggested that the episode "Best Friends Forever" made a reference to World of Warcraft by setting the fictional PSP game Heaven and Hell's maximum level at 60. Ironically, in an episode centering around World of Warcraft explicitly, the South Park team chose to ignore the true leveling concept of the game.

• The distorted bassline played behind the South Park theme song was Les Claypool's "Whamola" from the Colonel Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade album Purple Onion.

• The Antonio Banderas Love Doll from "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery" can be seen in Cartman's basement.

• "Live to Win", the title track from KISS vocalist Paul Stanley's upcoming solo album, made its world debut in the episode, during the sequence where the boys are accumulating experience for their characters.

• When the boys are training for the final battle, they are seen drinking Rockstar and Red Bull while eating Hot Pockets and Cup Ramen. Their nerd opponent also drinks Rockstar, and eats Chips-a-Ho! brand cookies. The energy drink and eating ramen noodles is presumably a parody on a incident where a middle-aged Korean man drank and ate too much while playing online games for endless hours and suffered from a heart attack then passed away.

• Posters of Diablo 2, Warcraft III, and Starcraft can be seen in the background at several points in the episode.

• The fictional Sword of a Thousand Truths is stored on a 1 gigabyte USB flash drive and does 120.0 DPS, has a mana burn proc, and has a +80 Stamina enchant. Such a weapon would be incredibly powerful and unbalanced, as the Blizzard employees suggest. Imbalanced weapons and armor do in fact exist within the game that are unattainable by players.

• This episode marks the third remixing of the opening theme.

• The boy playing World of Warcraft at Best Buy is wearing a Chinpokomon cap and shirt.

• Actual World of Warcraft music is played throughout the episode.

• One of the head programmers in the Blizzard boardroom is wearing a shirt that says "Dwarf Needs FOOD!" This is a reference to the videogame Gauntlet. In the game, as a character moves through a level their HP goes down by one point for each second of play. When the player is low on health, a deep voice says "<Insert Character Type> Needs FOOD!"

• A poster displaying the Internet phrase "l337" can be seen in the background of the renegade character's desk. The term (a staple of Leetspeak) can also be seen stamped to a sticker on the player's base unit.

• Clyde is seen away from the computer, looking at a Playboy magazine.

• A plush version of the Sexual Harassment Panda is seen in Cartman's basement during the shot of Tweek.

• During the training montage, the water bottle Ike squirts in Kyle's mouth is labeled "Water Sports."

• In Stan's room during the montage you can see the poster from Mad Max 2:The Road Warrior, this poster is shown in previous episodes most recently in Smug Alert.

• When Randy, Stan's father, needs to get to a computer to give Stan the Sword, he carjacks a person in a manner similar to the way in which the protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto series of games carry out the maneuver.

• In the apartment of the renegade player there's a large widescreen-TV with tall stacks of jumbled DVDs in front of it, confirming the character's omni-nerd status.

• On top of the Widescreen TV in the renegade character's home sits a model of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and a Weta Workshop novelty statue of the Balrog from Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings".

• The apartment of the renegade player bears a striking resemblance to the first "hideout" apartment of the player in Grand Theft Auto III, combined with the palm tree setting from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which is set in a fictional interpretation of Miami, Florida.

References

1. South Park: make love, not Warcraft (update 1)

External links

• Official information on the episode
• Watch a sneak peak of the episode (requires Quicktime Player)
• Blizzard press release regarding the episode.
• Teaser
• TV.com
• watch episode here

Template:SP navigation

• South Park episodes: Season 10
• World of Warcraft