South Park & Video Games

So one of my favorite shows is South Park. I don't watch it because of the immature humor; I think the writers touch on many pop culture or social trends and make good observations on it. I know I wrote a blog on Guitar Hero & included South Park's take on that popular video game in their episode Guitar Queer-O, but I recently realized that South Park focuses on video games for many episodes. And it makes sense; the main characters are four fourth-graders.. what else would they do with their time?

The first reference to video games is during the Chinpokomon Episode, from Season 3. This episode came out during the Pokemon fad, and the whole episode was just great in showing how this fad affected kids. This part shows how Kyle is always one step behind: when everyone was into the Chinpokomon dolls, he never even heard of the fad. Once he got the dolls, everyone started playing the video game. The writers from South Park twisted the fad further by saying that the Japanese were using the fad to brainwash kids to bomb Pearl Harbor.. o_O

This is from Season 5, the Towelie episode. In this episode, the boys get a new video game and are excited to play it. They play for hours, and do nothing else..at all... I like this clip though because of the excuses the boys come up with to just continue to play the game.

This one's from Season 9, The Losing Edge. This episode is great because the boys are in the Little League Tournament, but none of them want to play "this boring game"; they just wanna stay home and play video games. The boys think that if they just win and finish this game, they'll finally be done with this game. They're in for a rude awakening.. Furthermore, these clips show how the parents are having a much better time at the games, but Stan's father keeps getting the urge to fight other parents.

This one's from Season 9, Best Friends Forever. This one was really good; the B-story was about how Cartman was absolutely determined to get the new Sony PSP, as shown in this opening sequence.

This one's from the same episode, showing Kenny with his PSP. I like this clip because it shows how sometimes people wind up playing video games, all the time; especially when it's a handheld.

This one's from Season 10, Make Love, Not Warcraft. One of their best episodes, and I don't even like World of Warcraft. In this episode, all the boys play World of Warcraft [and Stan's dad was complaining about how Stan is just on his computer and should socialize with his friends, but Stan is actually socializing] but keep getting killed by this one guy who has absolutely no life, and the makers are worried that this is the end of the world... of warcraft. One of the best aspects of the episode is the use of animation of the actual game.

This one's from the same episode. Here, the boys are determined to level up and beat the guy who keeps killing them. To them, they're sitting at their computers and doing something that matters. To the rest of the world, they have no lives at all.

This clip is from Season 10, Go God Go I. This episode begins with Cartman impatiently waiting for the Wii, which sets off the entire episode. The second part of the clip contains the B-story, about the theory of evolution which is irrelevant to this blog; but the opening sequence is really good so that's why I chose this one.

So these clips are the ones I remembered. There's probably ones that I forgot about, but I think these clips show a nice balance of different kinds of video games and the extremes and lengths the kids go to in order to play the games. Sometimes they extents are exaggerated, of course, but I think it reflects how many kids play video games: this generation finds video games more appealing that other forms of entertainment.