A Guide To World of Warcraft Classes

I'm sure you've at least thought of giving World of Warcraft a try. And why not?? It's awesome. However, you will have a not so awesome time if you create a character with a class that doesn't suit you. Allow me to give you an expert's description of each and guide your decision to the right answer.
Class: Rogue
Real Life Analogue: Assassins and Cat Burglars
What's It Play Like??: Playing a Rogue in WoW is more or less like playing Ninjas, Thieves, and Assassins all rolled up into one. To put it simply, you can do a fuckton of melee damage but you have no armor so you will also die easily if confronted face to face. Though you get all kinds of neat things like poisons, lockpicking, and the ability to stun enemies, you will spend the majority of the game going into stealth mode and slowly walking toward enemies and then killing them quickly. If spotted or confronted by more than one enemy, you die quickly. Basically, playing a Rogue is like playing the PC game Thief (or any stealth action game on consoles) in a MMORPG. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.

Class: Shaman
Real Life Analogue: Medicine Man
What's It Play Like??: Much has been made of the fact that the Shaman is the jack-of-all-trades class in WoW. They can fight, heal, cast buff/debuff spells, cast offensive spells, and take damage without dying quickly. However, what this really means is that they suck at everything. You'll never be as good at anything as any other class and you'll have to juggle so many different skills and spells that your screen will become a clogged mess akin to a hardcore PC strategy game. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.
Class: Warlock
Real Life Analogue: Goths and the guy in the second Indiana Jones movie who can take people's hearts out of their chests by chanting
What's It Play Like??: Warlocks are often considered the power class of WoW that super hardcore people can do sickening damage with. Things couldn't be further from the truth. Sure, they have almost bottomless health and magic, can call upon demons for aid, can cast magic that either hurts or hurts a lot over more time, can create items that heal or summon other characters, get their mounts for free, and look pretty damn cool...but they're pussies. Everyone makes fun of Warlocks behind their backs. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.
Class: Warrior
Real Life Analogue: Those big dudes who do the Strong Man competitions where they have to throw giant logs and carry progressively heavier/larger metal balls and place them on top of pedestals
What's It Play Like??: If you have absolutely no imagination or skill, then Warriors are for you. They are quite possibly the most boring and easy class in the game. Imagine a Final Fantasy where all you could do is select 'Fight' over and over. That's Warriors. So, they suck. Don't use them. They're for noobs.
Class: Druid
Real Life Analogue: Furries and/or Hippies
What's It Play Life??: Druids are kind of like Shamans in that they can do everything but they can't do anything well. However, in order to do badly what other classes do well, Druids have to shapeshift into various animal forms. They are also vegetarians and probably enjoy a good drum circle, if you catch my drift. You know how Druids were secretly one of the best classes in the BioWare/Black Isle PC RPGs?? Well, in World of Warcraft they're not-so-secretly among the worst. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.
Class: Hunter
Real Life Analogue: Uhm, Hunters. Also, Zookeepers
What's It Play Like??: Playing a Hunter in WoW is really hard. Yes, they do lots of damage from a distance and can choose a pet from among most of the game's enemies, and they can use 'traps' to disable or hurt foes, but they're difficult to control. Your pets are guaranteed to do idiotic things, your traps often fail or are triggered by the wrong thing, your gun jams or your arrows get woodrot...Yeah, Hunters are like WoW on hard mode. The only people who play as Hunters are NRA fanatics and disgruntled zoo employees. You know, there's a good reason so many people play as Hunters in WoW: most people are stupid. And that, combined with the shittiness of the class, is why you never see anyone trying to find Hunters for groups or dungeon raids. So, they suck. Don't play as them. Only noobs play as them.
Class: Mage
Real Life Analogue: The Amazing Jonathon
What's It Play Like??: At first glance, Mages are awesome. They get the sort of big, impressive spells that get all of us RPG fans of all stripes hot and bothered. Unfortunately, the truth about Mages in WoW is that they're garbage. Playing a Mage is like playing a suicide bomber: you can dish out tons of damage, but you usually die in the process. Even high level Mages will die in one hit from level 1 squirrels. If you ever want to die over and over in a dungeon, have a Mage in your party. They're sure to fling out a bunch of spells that anger every creature in a ten block radius and get you all killed. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.
Class: Paladin
Real Life Analogue: Medieval Christian Crusaders and those pompous, I-went-a-private-school types in your college classes that always have to bring their religion into everything
What's It Play Like??: I used to wonder why almost all of the Crusades were failures, but then I tried a Paladin in WoW and I instantly got it: Crusaders are walking cans of green beans waiting for a Muslim sword to open them. Within the context of WoW, Paladins are a hybrid of Warriors and Priests. And you know what that means: they don't do as much damage as Warriors so they're even more boring to play as, with the added "benefit" of limp healing/buff spells that couldn't save anyone from dying from even the weakest of attacks. Like a splinter. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.
Class: Priest
Real Life Analogue: Priests, Carebear fans, and crybabies
What's It Play Like: Forgive me for implying that the Paladin was WoW's most boring class. That dubious honor goes to the Priest, who can heal people...and that's it. They will die as fast as Mages without any of the cool looking attack spells. They can't fight hand to hand, immediately outclassed by level 1 snakes. They don't get pets like Hunters or Warlocks. The coolest thing they get is a magic shield that prevents a certain amount of damage for a set amount of time, which was the game designer's way of saying "we know this class is utter shit, so here's a cheat code built into the game." I can hear the experts out there yelling that most people level up their Priests under the Shadow skill path so they have actual offensive capabilities, but all that really does is turn your Priest into a bad healer and a mediocre wannabe Mage/Warlock rolled up into one. No matter how you slice it, Priests are weaksauce. If you see a Priest in the game, you can bet that everyone else is laughing at them, and you should, too. So, they suck. Don't play as them. They're for noobs.

Class: Zergling
Real Life Analogue: When you see a million ants attacking and killing a larger bug
What's It Play Like??: Zerglings are the only real class in the game, as far as the expert players are concerned. They're kind of like Warriors in that they're physical fighters, but they can summon hundreds of copies of themselves, so I guess they're sorta like Hunter or Warlock pets. Some would argue that this takes all the fun out of the game, because all you have to do is Zerg rush everything and you can power level to 70 in 1/20th of the time it would take other classes to reach there...but these people are morons and noobs. The only fun part about WoW is getting to 70 and then running the same instance over and over to get an item that drops once every presidential election. Zerglings will have you doing this tedious, unrewarding...oops, I mean, awesome and hardcore gameplay style in no time!! So, they rock. Play as them. Only noobs don't play as them.

Destroyer- Trouble In Dreams

Most people like to divide Destroyer's work into the delicious and immediate songs for the New Pornographers and the intricate and studious for his own project. I've always had a problem with this inclination--for starters it forgets his Swan Lake project--because it means he consciously handpicks certain songs for each and I've never got the feeling he is that self aware. This, despite what almost every other critic constantly says about him: that he's becoming a self parody, all an act, wordy and poetic but doesn't mean anything he says, etc.

Me, I've always got the impression that he tries to make the best record he can each time out, and if the results vary, well, that's as much a matter of inspiration not striking as it is the methods and players he chose at the time. Interesting, then, that the players and methods for Trouble In Dreams have been carried over wholesale from his last album, 2006's much loved Destroyer's Rubies. The phrase "diminishing returns" may come to mind, and it's spot on. Trouble In Dreams is not a bad album, but it can't help but feel like an inferior version of Destroyer's Rubies.

I will give the album credit for at least restoring my faith in Dan Bejar as a songwriter. After the release of Destroyer's Rubies he went on to work on the Swan Lake collaboration with Carey Mercer and Spencer Krug. The resulting album, Beast Moans, almost wholly belongs to those two, with Bejar's contributions either subtle or lackluster. Then there's the last New Pornographers album, Mass Romantic, which is their weakest to date. Not coincidentally, it contains Bejar's weakest songs for the band where normally his songs were among the best. So I found myself looking forward to his next Destroyer release with some trepidation, and hallelujah, it's actually good. Career highlights abound on the album, like the drunken and thrashing 'The State', long psych-rock epic 'Shooting Rockets (From The Desk of Night's Ape)' (a remake of a song from the Swan Lake album), nuanced and delicate 'Introducing Angels', and coy Dylan-esque piano driven 'Rivers.' If every song is not a homerun, there are at least enough moments where the bases are loaded to warrant a listen.

Yet I don't want to praise Trouble In Dreams too much. It virtually defines the phrase "more of the same, but not as good." 'Dark Leaves From A Thread' sounds like a warmed over Destroyer's Rubies outtake, all frantic changes and melodious-but-flaccid lead guitar. Then there's the needlessly long 'My Favorite Year', with its momentum killing and impossible to understand "you reside in" refrain and pointless, wordless vocals. And while this may definitely sound like splitting hairs and wanting this album to be something it's not, Trouble In Dreams begins and ends weakly: 'Blue Flower/Blue Flame' is too mellow for an opener, while 'Libby's First Sunrise' runs off inconsequentially and gives one no sense of satisfaction. Compare this to Destroyer's Rubies which opens with the epic and dramatic 'Rubies' and ends with the energetic and playful guitar rock of 'Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever.'

All in all, one hopes that Destroyer does the impossible and produces something both new and better with his next release. My feelings for Trouble In Dreams are mixed and muddled. Taken on its own, it's a very good album. However, nothing exists in a vacuum, so it's also an inferior version of Destroyer's Rubies, though still not bad by any means. Fans are advised to pick this up immediately, but everyone else should seek out his other, more different work first.

The Videogame Solipsist: Playstation

If the NES made strides toward turning videogames into a mainstream form of entertainment, and the Genesis tried to make videogames cool, then the Playstation was the system that combined these goals and succeeded at doing both. This success was due as much to the actions of Sony as it was the botched handling of the Saturn and the failure of Nintendo to see the future (or, given their continued reticence in the online arena, a failure to do anything about the future).

It's easy to forget that the dominance of the Playstation was neither assured nor rapid. Launched in the fall of 1995, the system really didn't start to see any great games until 1997, by which point it was more than a bit sobering to compare its game lists and upcoming releases to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn. However, I don't think anyone was really 100% sure about the Playstation until that time. Though it had the massive Sony corporation backing it, almost everyone assumed that Nintendo would clean up in that generation just as they had before. As kids and/or young adults, we didn't have any idea of the background to what was happening: the expense of producing carts vs. the inexpensive Playstation CD format; the arrogance and unfriendliness of Nintendo to third party developers vs. Sony's open arms; the generally crap N64 hardware vs. the easy to program for and great design of the Playstation. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we could be forgiven for blindly believing Nintendo's promises and being suspicious of Sony. As some have pointed out, this was the era of failed CD systems like 3DO and Sega CD, and the Playstation felt like more of the same.

By 1997, though, we all knew that the N64 was going to be Nintendo's ballgame and the Playstation had everything else you could possibly want. Everyone kept their N64 around for those--admittedly--brilliant first party Nintendo titles twice a year and spent the rest of the time focused on the Playstation. Which, as I just said, had everything else you could possibly want, including 'cool' mature titles like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy VII. It even had things you never knew you wanted, like the cult classic Parappa the Rapper, a rhythm game that, one could argue, helped pave the way for the success of Guitar Hero in the U.S. Of course, the Playstation also had all the best racing games, sports games, action games, practically every RPG of that generation (if you didn't import Saturn titles, anyway), fighting games, stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, hello), and even some shoot-em-ups.

Bizarrely enough, all of my friends continued to drink the Nintendo cult Kool Aid during this era. I guess their own biological clock interest in videogames coincided with Nintendo, so they only needed two or three games a year. As for me, I jumped unto the Sony ship in the winter of 1998. After being unable to obtain a copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time--the one and only game that I felt could satisfy what I wanted on the N64--I wandered over to the Playstation case in Target and I couldn't lie to myself anymore. I wanted a Playstation. Funnily enough, I didn't end up playing through Ocarina of Time until just before the release of Wind Waker on Gamecube, and I know that if I had managed to get a copy of Ocarina of Time, it would only have delayed my Playstation purchase for so long.

There are a handful of factors that made me want a Playstation--the cool factor, the relatively cheap(er) game prices, the variety of titles, the novelty of new gameplay experiences like Parappa or Metal Gear Solid--but the main one was RPGs. Though it runs neck and neck in my heart with the SNES for having both the most and best RPGs, there's no denying how much the Playstation did for popularizing and expanding the RPG market in the U.S. This is largely due to the success of Final Fantasy VII, but since the install base of the Playstation grew so large, companies like Atlus and Working Designs were willing to risk bringing obscure RPGs over because they could probably turn a profit. I know that I bought at least a few RPGs for each year the Playstation was active, and not all of those were Square titles. So it became a positive Catch 22: more people were buying RPGs because more RPGs were being released, and more RPGs were being released because more people were buying them.

Life during the Playstation era was good, but we all still had eyes out for the next batch of consoles. During 1998, we began to hear about Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, which would be released in the U.S. on Sept. 9, 1999. A little over a year later, the Playstation 2 was released, and about a year after that, the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube would both hit shelves. Though the Playstation 1 era wasn't officially over until 2003, when Final Fantasy Origins (the last significant release by my reckoning) was released in the U.S., it only truly had us for a full 4 years (I'm counting 1997-2001 as the height of the PS1 era) before we started to move on. I kept buying and playing Playstation games, but in the holiday season of 2000 I got a Dreamcast, and a bit over a year later, I got a Playstation 2, at which point I traded in my Playstation due to the PS2's backwards compatibility.

In the end, one could just as easily make the argument that the original Playstation was the most significant console ever released as they could that the NES was. I still tend to bow to the NES, but I do have a lot of nostalgia and rose tinted memories of the Playstation. Though history has been continually less kind to the Nintendo 64 and its games (and the less said of Saturn in the U.S., the better), I would argue that the majority of PS1 games still hold up, and that's saying quite a lot in an industry that moves as fast as videogames.

Album of the Week: Stephen Malkmus: Real Emotional Trash

The last time I saw Stephen Malkmus, he was playing solo and acoustic at the Pitchfork Music Festival last summer. He seemed very relaxed and sloppy, which are two things I normally associate with both his solo albums as well as his much celebrated, loved, and (sometimes) hated former band, Pavement. However, his performance was also brilliant in its way: his between song was banter clever, funny, and self deprecating, but his acoustic playing seemed frustrated and at times awkward. It occurred to me then that Stephen Malkmus was, has, and always will be an electric kind of guy, and I couldn't wait to hear what his next album would turn out like.

One of the standard cards that music critics can play is the "band album." I realize that this may not be as 'common knowledge' as I assume it is, so let me explain. When a band or solo artists releases a "band album", it typically means that the album is tightly played but jammy, as if the band had played the songs for awhile and were familiar enough with them to stretch them to their breaking points and/or add new little emphases or accents here and there. Real Emotional Trash is all of these things: it's played extremely well, but it stretches out and has many little bits and pieces that feel thrown in because the band were a bit bored and needed to spice things up.

Anyone who follows Stephen Malkmus had to see this coming. Not only did Pig Lib point the way to this kind of prog rock/jam bandy/classic rocky music, but tracks from other solo works ('No More Shoes' says hello) did too. Hell, you could trace his particular inclination for this kind of thing back to 'Fillmore Jive' off Pavement's second album if you wanted to. Anyway, indie rock and extended guitar soloing are not mutually exclusive. For starters, Dinosaur Jr. and Built To Spill would have something to say on the matter, and then there's My Morning Jacket, who skirt the line between jam band and indie rock pretty finely. But I digress.

The real story behind Real Emotional Trash is that it is Malkmus's coming out party as a guitar hero as well as his tip-of-the-hat to his sometimes credited band, the Jicks. Though indie rock has its stalwart guitar heroes--from the noise masters Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth to Neil Youngish J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. to good-at-everything Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline of Wilco--it's only now that we can truly say Stephen Malkmus has made a point of foregrounding his chops. It will take a live album to really see if he stands up to the old masters of classic rock and beyond but, for a studio album, it's easily his most guitar centric. At the same time, it's the first one that really gives any kind of credit to the Jicks, his backing band. Though their lineup has shuffled over the past 4 releases, in ex-Sleater Kinney drummer Janet Weiss he has found a sympathetic musical foil not known since the early Pavement/Gary Young or mid-to-late Pavement Steve West days. That's not to discredit the other Jicks, who offer solid-but-unremarkable bass and brilliant-but-understated keyboards.

Anyway, let's cut to the chase. The title track is a flat out epic, building steam and segueing into a rocking second half--I'm almost tempted to let Malkmus know that he's not in a jam band and he isn't supposed to do this kind of thing (especially on a studio album) but the result is so visceral and, frankly, awesome that I keep my mouth shut. 'Baltimore' is a 6+ minute Malkmus showcase, with guitars stacking on top of guitars to continually keep the rock going. Meanwhile, the less indulgent side of Malkmus shows up in the short, pop-ish 'Gardenia' with its female backing vocals that recall the brilliant 'Us' from Pig Lib (and make one wish he'd contrast his voice with others more often) and the early album ballady 'Cold Son.' Finally, there's 'Elmo Delmo', which combines Malkmus's love for absurdist/poetic wordplay with whip sharp music acrobatics, effectively combining his two artistic spheres (jammy guitar hero and weird indie rock poet) in one of the album's best decadent treats.

At this point, if you're a Stephen Malkmus fan, I feel like you've either accepted the aforementioned sides of his musical spheres or you prefer one over the other. If you can't stand his instrumental grandstanding, then Real Emotional Trash represents his nadir in the same way that Face The Truth felt like his best album since Pavement's Wowee Zowee. For the rest of us, Real Emotional Trash is just another great solo album that expands the Malkmus book and expounds upon the jammy/guitar hero ploy that Pig Lib only hinted at.

Video: My Bloody Valentine- Only Shallow

I can go either way on performance videos. It's cool to see the band playing the song--or at least miming along to it--but it also feels kind of lazy to me. I mean, if you're going to make an official video, why not have some kind of concept or conceit??

Well, at least in My Bloody Valentine's case, they added a bunch of filters and film noise to approximate, visually, the sound of the album. As novel as it is to see the normally faceless band, it's slightly more interesting that they chose to make a performance video with art film overtones. "We'll let you see us, but only through a haze, because what we look like isn't important here--it's the haze."

I also remember reading somewhere that the iconic cover image for Loveless comes from a still of Kevin Shields' guitar from either this video or the one for 'Soon.' So, there's that.

Album of the Week: Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Though we've all probably experienced deja vu, there are actually three types of deja vu. One of which is called deja vecu, which is, apparently, what most people mean when they say "woah, deja vu!!": that feeling that you've experienced or done something before, and possibly, too, that you know exactly what you're supposed to say or do next.

Sometimes, while listening to albums for the first time, I feel that sense of deja vu. It's as if I have listened to it before, somehow, because it seems so familiar and yet there's no way it should be--I don't mean music that is predictable or trite, I mean new music I've never heard before, or heard anything like it. I can practically 'feel' or 'guess' what the next song or line will be like; it's strange and surreal at the same time. How appropriate, then, that one of the first times I remember having musical deja vecu was when I listened to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea for the first time.

Revisionists have been quick to declare the album an instant classic and a landmark piece of music, but the truth is it wasn't reviewed as such on its release. Even the now overly enthusiastic Pitchfork Media originally gave it a 8.7 out of 10: not a bad score by any means, but not exactly perfect, either. However, I do remember hearing about the album a year or two after its release. Someone mentioned that The Glow pt. 2 by the Microphones sounded a bit like it, and so I found myself in a record store trying to decide between the two. I went with the Microphones album, and had mostly forgotten about Neutral Milk Hotel until college, when a girlfriend had it in her collection and insisted I had to listen to it.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has that peculiar ability to sound familiar and yet totally foreign. It's the same way that Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and The White Album have a unique and odd feeling to them, at once familiar and totally foreign. In short, "uncanny" in the literal sense of the word. They sound eerie and strange, created by people who's work you're familiar with, and yet there's some intangible element at play that seems to go beyond known scientific, logical reality. To me, albums like these are complete masterpieces that somehow transcend both the people who recorded them and their intentions for the finished product.

This album has always been particularly uncanny to me both for the way it sounds and the way it keeps popping up in my life. Though the album is, at its basic level, a singer/songwriter/folk concept piece vaguely based on the emotional response Jeff Magnum had to reading about Anne Frank, it has an unique mix of instruments and Magnum's bizarre voice to put a wholly original spin on things. Utilizing such odd instruments as shortwave radio, singing saw, bowed banjo, accordion, zanzithophone, and bagpipes, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has a vaguely Eastern European ethnic world music sound mixed with American indie rock lo-fi folk. Then there's Magnum's voice, which you'll either love or hate--nasally, always stretching for notes, strangled, pained, and ultimately, as transcendent and beautiful as the music itself. David Berman of the Silver Jews once sang "all my favorite singers couldn't sing", and that about sums it up.

Strangest of all is the way the album keeps recurring in my life. After first reading about it, and hearing the comparison to The Glow pt. 2, I would occasionally see it mentioned on message boards by people who said it was a must hear album. Then, after hearing it via my girlfriend, I was at a party once and happened to hear something familiar playing in one of the apartment's bedrooms. It's one of those times where your body physically notices some familiar thing before you consciously do--you stop and look around and think to yourself "wait, I know this song...it's....it's..." Sure enough, one of the girls who lived there had her iTunes on shuffle and 'Two-Headed Boy' was playing. About a year later, I heard a song from the album playing on the college's radio station after I broke up with the girlfriend who introduced me to it. Just recently, someone sent me a mix CD with a non-Aeroplane Neutral Milk Hotel song on it.

As for the music itself, well, it's amazing. Though build upon Jeff Magnum's rock solid acoustic guitar strumming, the songs take on all sorts of weird sounds and textures--witness the title track, which adds booming bass, light handed drumming, a flugelhorn solo, wailing siren somethings, and I don't even know what else. Similarly, the lyrics are as unhinged and skewed as the music and famous album cover. I'm sure that most people who listen to the album think the lyrics are nonsense garbage, but they do something to me that I can't put into words; in short, they're as uncanny and familiar/foreign as the music. The lyrics are highly poetic and very bodily oriented: there are all sorts of mentions of the body and its processes, and somehow even as odd as it all is, it captures what it's like to be human and, actually, to be in love. The final track, 'Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two' has always been particularly gripping to me, the way it harkens back to the first 'Two-Headed Boy' and wraps up the album on a devastatingly bittersweet note:

"And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
God is a place you will wait the rest of your life
Two headed boy she is all you could need
she will feed you tomatoes and radio wires
and retire to sheets safe and clean
but don't hate her when she gets up to leave"

Sometimes I wonder if people get bogged down in all the minutiae of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I do find myself wondering if everyone would feel the same about the album if Jeff Magnum had released anything in the past 10 years. I mean, what if OK Computer was Radiohead's second album and they had disappeared for 10 years: would that effect your opinion and love for that album any?? I'd like to think not. Many bands have released albums after their masterpiece but we all still rate those masterpieces as their best...but, you never know. I mean, where could you really go from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea?? But I digress. Don't read about this album anymore. Don't dissect it, figure out exactly what every song means, what every sound you hear is played by, and so forth. Just get a copy, listen to it, and let one of the most spellbinding and brilliant albums of the 90s wash over you.

Video: Pixies- Dig For Fire/Allison

I'm sure that somebody will immediately come out and prove me wrong, but off the top of my head, the only time I can think that a band directly linked two videos was the Pixies with 'Dig For Fire' and 'Allison.' Before I had even heard or heard of the Pixies, I happened upon this video late night on MTV once while in junior high. I didn't so much like the songs, but something about the juxtaposition of the two songs and the way the two videos were tied together worked for me.

In 'Dig For Fire' we see the band suiting up in leather, then jumping on motorcycles for a psychedelic/dreamy travel sequence. They arrive at their destination, putting in earplugs and going into a stadium looking building...



..only to reveal that, yes, this is a stadium, and they're here to perform 'Allison' in the empty middle of the field.

Personally, I prefer the video (and song) for 'Here Comes Your Man', but I like the concept behind these two paired videos better. I often find myself wondering what happens to the characters after a music video/novel/videogame ends, and in the case of these videos, you get to find out where they're going.