South Park: The Stick of Truth
This is an article about South Park: The Stick of Truth. Here’s a warning though – I’m not really going to talk about the game itself very much. There are a hundred other reviews out there for you to read that cover the game in depth. If that’s what you’re looking for, go take a gander at one of them. What I’m going to cover is the reason why I like the game, which I feel goes a bit deeper than just enjoying a fun and funny rpg.
South Park: The Stick of Truth has absolutely no business being as good as it is. I’m not a person inclined to silliness or horseplay, and I often tend to take myself too seriously. By all rights I should hate everything about this game of toilet humor, childish savagery, and callous bigotry. But I literally cannot summon up any negative criticism for this game. Every time I try to apply a critical eye, I fire up the game and a huge smile breaks across my face. It took a lot of thinking for me to understand (at least I THINK) why.
Way back when I was 18, I went to a math and science boarding school, the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. The school was in the middle of nowhere Northern Maine, and entertainment options were pretty limited. Luckily for us, the internet was just beginning to boil, and our school had a T1. Towards the end of the year, a friend of mine named Prasanth came back to visit for a weekend. He’d graduated the year before and went off to undergrad, where he was hit full in the face with the burgeoning idea of the internet meme. He came back to the MSSM like a man full of secrets, and like the faithful, we gathered around the computer for him to pass on his wisdom. The first thing he showed us was “The Spirit of Christmas”.
Well, the first thing he tried to show us was “The Spirit of Christmas”. This was years before Youtube and streaming videos, so we queued up the download and then played Magic for an hour while the avi trickled down out of the intertube. When we finally got to watch it though . . . it destroyed our brains. The Jesus and Santa Claus bits of it were funny in a sacrilegious kind of way that was still a bit beyond the borders of public taste at the time, and at 18 years old we ate that up. But the thing that really hooked us about that video was that immediately afterwards we all looked at each other and said “That is EXACTLY how little kids talk.”
The Jesus vs. Santa version of “The Spirit of Christmas” was released in 1995, the same year that the movie “Kids” hit theatres. “Kids” scared the holy living fuck out of America. Before that movie came out, for the most part in the public space children fell into two categories: gang members and Pleasantville. You were either a bad seed, or you were a white-washed chip off the ol’ block. Clearly as all of adulthood needed to pass through childhood, adults KNEW that these two categories had nothing to do with what kids were actually like. But it was socially unacceptable to even approach the idea that kids might have actual lives and personalities, face difficulties, and generally behave like less socialized adults, as if the speak about the reality were to uncork some kind of genie that brought tasteless sex jokes and cocaine instead of wishes. So, a lot like Robin Williams, I guess.
“The Spirit of Christmas” captured a lot of the same “busting open a conversation” energy that “Kids” did. However, because “Kids” was scripted to purposefully bring that conversation to bear, there was an element that rang false to actual kids of that time period. While our parents were terrified we were having an AIDS orgy, we watched the movie and mostly said “Man, those kids are fucked up.” Because “The Spirit of Christmas” was essentially two guys just screwing around, they were able to come across with more honesty than Hollywood (go figure). They just said “Little kids are terrible people, and that’s actually pretty funny.” That honesty is what I recognized in the short, and I think that’s what made it so shareable. “The Spirit of Christmas” was one of the first real internet memes. It was years before Hamster Dance, before All Your Base, even before that god damn dancing baby. It was what netted Stone and Parker the show that’s been going on for seventeen seasons.
Watching back over that original short, almost all of the pieces that have shaped South Park were in place. The lingo, the characters, the town . . .hell, they even kill Kenny and have him get eaten by rats. The show has remained successful because Stone and Parker are essentially comedian workaholics that produce each show close enough to deadline that they are able to remain extremely topical. South Park talks about what is going on NOW, the things we are currently reading about or running around like chickens with our heads cut off about. It has become the modern age’s fucked up Will Rogers, showing us witty sketches that blow up real issues so we can examine them, and ourselves, a little better.
South Park: Stick of Truth uses both of these elements of the show to make it the fantastic game that it is. The original truth, no pun intended, of “The Spirit of Christmas” provides the framework of the game. You’re one of a group of nine year olds playing in a great neighborhood game of make believe, with all of its rule changes and kids getting hurt and walking home quietly after dark, so that you can go to bed and get up again tomorrow to play once more. The topical nature provides the medium for them to work with. Seventeen seasons of in-jokes and slowly building ridiculousness gave the makes of the game a huge cabbage patch from which to pull material. Quests for Mr. Hankey, exploding cows, Manbearpig, even Scuzzlebutt all make prominent appearances.
There are some instances where things ring false in the game, I won’t lie. Some of the in-jokes the show has created to showcase problems with race, religion, sexuality, and any other possible “-ism”, at this point when robbed of the context of their original episode framework, just ring out as bad hipster racism. There was a scene with the underpants gnomes that simultaneously goes down as one of the best boss fights of all time and one of the most scarring experiences of my entire life. Sometimes the rpg system is a little (a LOT) too easy. The game is still buggy as hell – I had to reinstall it to get cutscenes to work at all.
But all of this pales in comparison to the reason why I like the game so much: it makes me a nine-year-old boy again. They so perfectly captured the immersion of pulling you into an episode of South Park that I feel like I’m playing along with Cartman, Butters, Stan, Kenny, and Kyle. I can feel the broomhandle in my hand and smell the cardboard of my armor. Playing the game makes me feel raw again – uncertain about the world and how I fit into it, confused about the meanings of the simplest shit. Or rather, it forces me to recognize that the rawness of my childhood is still there inside of me. Everytime I get frightened or angry because I don’t understand something, that’s me screaming like Cartman. Everytime I unconsciously succeed because I don’t understand the limits that should be put on me, Butters is casting a spell. I respond to the South Park game because it takes that veil of illusion called being an adult and just rips it to fucking shreds. We’re all running around a big neighborhood playing a big game called pretend, trading little green pieces of paper with each other and sometimes hitting each other with sticks. We regularly go on quests for our High Wizard Bosses, and restore our hp with an afternoon trip to Starbucks. And we all still have that energy of creation and wonder sleeping inside of us, waiting for a chance to wake back up. For me, Stick of Truth rings that alarm clock loud and clear.
