LISP (Life Imitates South Park)

Even though I haven't seen every episode, I do have more than a passing interest in South Park. Indeed, South Park has got to be the most culturally insightful programming with cutting-edge satire since the MacNeil/Lehrer Report. If you, gentle readers, are familiar with South Park, then perhaps you'll recall episode 147 entitled Make Love, Not Warcraft .

I won't be a spoiler, but allow me to recap the first part of the plot.

An obsessive gamer (redundant, I know) named Jenkins has spent virtually every hour playing World of Warcraft online for almost a year and a half, reaching levels previously thought unattainable. No one can defeat Jenkins, and he summarily kills the WoW characters belonging to Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman. Yeah. Sad days in South Park.

Cartman convinces Stan, Kyle and Kenny to spend 21 hours a day for two months, simply killing boars in the forest in an attempt to gain enough experience points to eventually mount a simultaneous attack against Jenkins, and defeat him. There's no mention of the boys actually sleeping, or attending school during this period, so there's probably a subtle subtext about homeschooling. Or perhaps parental neglect. South Park is pretty deep and textured like that. I suppose that's why South Park is known as "The Brothers Karamazov of 21st century American animation"*.

After spending weeks of gaming in Cartman's basement, with no real physical activity and subsisting on a diet of Hot Pockets and energy drinks, the boys develop acne and gain considerable weight. The obvious message : too much time on the internet makes you fat and lazy. On the upside, it can expand your vocabulary as you learn words such as "pwned", "r-tard" and "predator".

Now the part of life imitating art. No, really. If this is art, South Park is art.

A 15 year old boy in Sweden recently spent 24 consecutive hours playing World of Warcraft. If he would have taken 3 hours a day for sleeping and/or homeschooling, then he probably would have just developed severe acne and morbid obesity before his precious teenage years morphed into a pathetic lonely young adulthood. Unfortunately, the 24 consecutive hours took their toll, and the teenager had a seizure due to sleep deprivation and lack of food.

According to the story, the teen's dad insists that his son's "Warcraft binging days are over". You can't help but think that this Swedish dad was probably pretty ok with his teenage son spending all those hours playing an online game at first. At least the kid wasn't out doing crack, or driving drunk, or getting some depressed emo chick preggers, or arguing with his parents about all of those things that have such profound significance when you're 15 - like the Cheryl Tiegs poster on your wall**. So after this seizure fiasco, dad had to re-think his laissez-faire parenting strategy.

I could be wrong (again), but I suspect that dad's version of putting his foot down after the seizure fiasco will amount to limiting the 15 year old to "only" 20 hours of WoW a day. He'll just need to get Hot Pockets and energy drinks when he's at the grocery store. And a bedpan.

I'm actually a teeny-weeny*** bit impressed that at least the father seems to be taking some responsible action here. Had this happened in the U.S., the righteously indignant parents would most certainly have filed suit against Blizzard Entertainment before their son's thrashing head hit the keyboard. Then they would have let him play more WoW in the intensive care unit, because they love the kid.

Just wait. It's gonna happen. Although you might see it on South Park first.


* Source : my unfinished Master's thesis.

** So what if you could see some nippling?? Seriously, she was just in a wet bikini - it's not like she was nude or anything!

** a unit of measure, often used by astrophysicists, to describe matter smaller than a quark, but larger than Paris Hilton's social consciousness