Understanding the World of Warcraft Using Super Mario Brothers

You might be asking, "How can one video game help explain another?" If you are, please turn to section )*) to kiss my learning program on the ass and butthole. Everyone else, let's continue.

WoW isn't like other nerd things. You can theoretically never see Star Wars, but during your everyday life you'll pick up a basic understanding of what a Chewbacca is. However, if you never played World of Warcraft, listening to someone talk about it sounds like senseless and frightening gibberish. I think it was Kipling who described it as, "To the average man, another speaking on Warcraft sounds not unlike a rapist Chewbacca acting as his own defense attorney."

That's why my system utilizes Super Mario Brothers, the universal video game language. For those of you unfamiliar with Mario Brothers, I urge you to leave, as I'm sure the other Communists will soon be wondering why you're not harvesting the collective's potatoes.

Section One: IdiotsThe first thing you should know is that most people playing World of Warcraft are terrible at video games, especially World of Warcraft. Every Nintendo owner has encountered the following scenario: You hand over the controller to a friend and then watch them clumsily murder Mario with the same bottomless pit until he stops coming back to life. World of Warcraft is an entire society of these people.

In WoW, danger is often preceded by a lengthy warning celebration. For example: You are a HntrPhc, Beastmaster Hunter, shooting arrows into an ogre. It grunts, "I am throw a rock at you!" A dark shadow marks the area where the rock will fall, and a bar appears under the ogre's name slowly counting down a spell called, "There is a Fucking Rock Falling On Your Head." Six seconds later and you are now HntrPhc, Meat Toothpaste, a stain waiting around to make future archaeologists puke.

In SMB, taking a step in any direction in under six seconds would be considered a minor challenge, if not an insult. To a Warcraft player it's impossible for two reasons. One, flippers for hands. You can only sit in one place for so long before your DNA starts to think you're a walrus. Two, most WoW players are away from their computers, stuck at a traffic light because their reflexes don't work quickly enough to press the gas before it turns red again.

Section Two: DicksMaybe kindergarten teachers can still be nice when they're surrounded by idiots all day, but Warcraft players can't. They're dicks. Plus, even though it's a world of fantastic magic, it still counts as the Internet. Which means that social interaction is limited to typed-out temper tantrums and desperate attempts at bothering people. WoW is like Girls Gone Wild without the tits: idiots and douches taking turns doing anything to get noticed, and no one knows what a condom looks like.

Obviously, my "Learning with SMB" program has received high praise for its comparison system, but I'm not here to talk about how great you are for selecting it. That's coming up in the next sentence. You've made a brave decision, and I'm very proud of you.

Section Three: Dicks and Idiots Working TogetherWarcraft is a lot like sex in that you can't really get anything done unless you have at least five people. But let's look at the figures: A five-man group in World of Warcraft contains one to five dicks and four to five idiots. Getting a WoW group to do anything together is harder than getting a bag of chickens its SCUBA certification.

Luckily, the people who make the game have these same figures. They know your group has the military precision of drunk toddlers in a dryer, so they designed every boss monster to do only zero to one special thing. Sounds simple, right? Here's where the problem comes in. Asking a Warcraft player to do up to one thing is a 20 minute process of impossible, and there are five of you.

Say you're about to go up against the sinister Pandemonius and you tell the group, "Just beat on this boss like normal, but stop punching him when he makes a force field of evil electricity."

To any Super Mario Brother player, the proper response would be, "No shit? Don't touch the glowing death field? Because I figured I'd drop my pants and back into one of the punishing tendrils of dark energy, asshole."

To a Warcraft player, the proper response is a confused suicide against the deadly force field. If cows played World of Warcraft, there would be a pile of them dead against the electric fence.

Cow Store: "Good afternoon, Hank's Cow Store."

Farmer: "Yeah, goddamn it! You sold me bum cows! Aren't they supposed to move when the fence shocks them?"

Cow Store: "Absolutely. They didn't?"

Farmer: "No! They just leaned on it, and slowly fried themselves to death!"

Cow Store: "That's very unusu- wait. They haven't been playing World of Warcraft have they? Because Warcraft cows are fucking tards."

Section Four: Multiply Section Three By FiveWhen WoW players get together in large groups, it's called a raid. Because when you have no motor, people or communication skills, the best thing to do is glue yourself to 24 identical morons. Now that you have 25 mouths screaming different curses and 50 feet running in different directions, you have a perfect simulation of every birth defect and psychological disorder known to science, and are ready for a grand adventure.

Here's where it gets tricky. When you tell 25 people to go to The Caverns of Time, seven of them don't know what that is, two of them aren't playing anymore, one fell asleep in his pizza, two have to drive their kids to therapy, one tells you to shut the fuck up, four are rebooting their computers, one is getting kicked off by his parents, two are lost foreigners who thought this was the train station, one is pressing enter on the same Chuck Norris joke over and over, two of them tell everyone to go to three different places and one is your girlfriend bitching at you about how much this sucks.

Ninety minutes later, when you finally get everyone there, someone will explain that no one should stand in front of the demon lord Kaz'rogal. This simple concept will take 40 minutes to convey, and repeat twice. During this part, you may want to take advantage of my "Learning with Super Mario Brothers" system for Overhauling 6-Cylinder Transmissions.

Then, after your beard has grown in and your marriage has fallen apart, you give the signal to begin the battle! Within moments, 15 people are lying in various states of liquid directly in front of the demon lord Kaz'rogal. As for the other 10 people, hey, they didn't know you fuckers were starting.

Imagine you're trying to teach your son to play baseball. You teach him the rules, how to throw, how to swing and when you tell him to go for it, he throws the ball into the side of his own head, runs the wrong way and tries to sell a blowjob to an undercover cop. Warcraft players fail in directions you never thought possible.

Section Five: RewardsSay you did it. Say you all managed to work together and kill a boss. Now you get to split two or three prizes between the 25 of you. This means that you now get to add jealousy, greed and entitlement to a group dynamic built entirely around impatience, disrespect and retarded.

All that and you get nothing? To put that in Super Mario Brothers terms, it's like fighting with your little sister over the TV for three episodes of Duck Tales. Then you clear the first stage while she flails her hands in front of the screen and the game rewards you with, "Game Over. Your little sister earns 200 points. Would you like to RESTART GAME or QUIT?"

Section Six: Victory?In Super Mario Brothers, you play the part of a brick-breaking plumber working a kidnapping case. I don't want to spoil the finale, but it pays off. WoW doesn't really have that. Warcraft has an ending like a fat burglar finishes dinner in a Twinkie factory. He's kind of only done until he has the energy to open his mouth again. And speaking of, for those of you hoping to look back on your day with a real sense of accomplishment... I'd go into Twinkie burglaring before World of Warcraft. Your adult-onset diabetes might not have as big a stamina bonus as your Bloodstained Elven Battlevest, but at least it's real.

Thanks for learning with me and the Super Mario Brothers. You did great!