Law&Order SVU (games in mass media, aka GTA hooker syndr

[bmp]

Wasn't sure what forum to put this to, so I'll try and balance the "god this is a bad show" and "god video games are maligned in all forms of press and entertainment" thoughts.

A little background as to why I was watching Law and ORder SVU last night. I'm in the period of gaming (happened 2 years ago with EQ) where I will turn on Fox at 7pm to have the simpsons and seinfeld in the background, and will not turn the TV off until I have finished my Wow for the night. This year, it's complicated because the tivo will change channels now and then, so I'm not always watching Fox. Last night was one of those nights.

Basically, from what I gathered as I was slaying blackrock champions, was that an escort was "employed" and then dragged out of the car, beaten to death and robbed. And of course this was motivated by a video game, I forget what it was called, "adrenaline" or something. I know this treatment is nothing new, but it just made me ill. Especially because they kept showing the "game" which was some thug beating and killing and cursing at prostitutes over and over. I think every 10 hookers you killed you got access to a new boot or swear word.

The robbing and killing of hookers was described by the game's lead as "an easter egg" and there were people learning about acronyms, and the classic "all we have is a screenname" "can you trace it?" and the next scene is them busting in some nerd's apartment.

Pretty much standard fare, and not really worth me wasting breath, but it does lead me into the tv forum argument where this is such a terrible show and does such and obvious and awful treatment of "lol we're talking about grand theft auto" so long after such a thing is relevant. The last episode I saw (murlocs in Wetlands) was about a "shock jock" who talked about how a tara reidish celebrity needed a good "banging" and "lol we're talking about howard stern"

I long for the days when video games were used in film in a positive and reverential way, like the wizard. that was amazing.

[Dean]

Remember when Sandra Bullock (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/) could be a freelance beta tester, find the bugs in Doom (or was it Wolf3D?) and fix them herself?

That was before her identity was stolen and all hell broke loose.

God, movies about video games were so much better then.

[hanji]

Remember when Sandra Bullock (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/) could be a freelance beta tester, find the bugs in Doom (or was it Wolf3D?) and fix them herself?

That was before her identity was stolen and all hell broke loose.

God, movies about video games were so much better then.

Wolf3D. My buddies and I were laughing about how out of date it was at the time. It was probably the best part in the movie though.

[Damien Falgoust]

I was bitching about this as it aired on #qt3 last night. It was essentially an hour-long screed against the GTA3s of the world. They even cited to David Grossman at one point.

Oh, and a slightly new touch -- the sequence in question that "led" to the murder was created by a modder, not the game company itself. So now modders are the true evil, I guess.

It was kind of fun to see Ice-T explain what "LMAO" meant, though. And the evil killer gamer kid had a magnetic coil running around the doorframe of his apartment so the cops wiped his hard drive when they removed it. Don't know if that would actually work, but it was kind of a cool idea.

[Marcin]

And the evil killer gamer kid had a magnetic coil running around the doorframe of his apartment so the cops wiped his hard drive when they removed it. Don't know if that would actually work, but it was kind of a cool idea.

Heh. I just finished reading Cryptonomicon, where a safe-data-house was setup the exact same way... this all sounds very fishy.

[Jazar]

Umm... did anyone of you guys actually *watch* that episode? The whole point of the ep was to show that the blame lies not on the game or the developers but the actual killers. I thought the topic was handled well.

The game was called Inten City or something similar.

[Brian Rucker]

Yeah, I only caught the very end of it.

It's pretty clear that 'videogames' weren't the badguys here. It was these screwed up kids. The DA even delivered a decent speech about, "Yes, the videogame gave these kids ideas. We get ideas all the time from books, movies, friends and family but we have enough restraint not to act on them." And she acted with extreme incredulity when he insisted he was trapped in imagining himself still playing the game. She wasn't buying it. The kid was such a conman and a scumbag. The videogame wasn't the villian here.

At the end was a very interesting epilog. One of the cops is watching his kid playing some handheld game and interrupts to ask if he has to play that all the time. The kid shrugs it off, says he likes playing his game but what'd his dad have in mind? So the father suggests cards or, perhaps, just talking. Kid shrugs. Sure, what do you want to talk about? And that expression on the actor's face, playing the father, went from "It's just that easy?" to "Umm, crap, now what do we talk about?" with such nuance it was awesome. And it pretty much captures the crux of the problem. Parents aren't paying all that much attention and, frankly, wouldn't know what to do if they didn't have games and TVs to keep their kids busy.

[Derek Meister]

http://meisterplanet.com/images/quartertothree/indiana_jones_boulder.jpg

It all started when Raiders of the Lost Ark was used as a commentary on the cartoony violence of Katamari Damacy

[Greg Kasavin]

Sure, what do you want to talk about? And that expression on the actor's face, playing the father, went from "It's just that easy?" to "Umm, crap, now what do we talk about?" with such nuance it was awesome. And it pretty much captures the crux of the problem. Parents aren't paying all that much attention and, frankly, wouldn't know what to do if they didn't have games and TVs to keep their kids busy.

I caught most of the episode, just missed the beginning. I had the same reaction to the ending. Thought it was very smartly done, especially since the rest of the episode had already been complex enough without throwing parenting into the equation.

[Jay Adan]

I hate to admit it, but I like Law & Order in most of its incarnations. Does that make me a bad person?

[Andrew Mayer]

I hate to admit it, but I like Law & Order in most of its incarnations. Does that make me a bad person?

Perhaps just a potential murderer...

[RedTide]

Better call pre-crime.

[Silverlight]

I hate to admit it, but I like Law & Order in most of its incarnations. Does that make me a bad person?
No, it just means you have an extremely strong stomach for seeing the same essential plot recycled four times in five seasons.

[RedTide]

It's called ADD.

[Damien Falgoust]

Umm... did anyone of you guys actually *watch* that episode? The whole point of the ep was to show that the blame lies not on the game or the developers but the actual killers. I thought the topic was handled well.
I still got the sense that they were blaming the videogame somewhat. Like, you can't offload all the blame onto the game, but the game is stil somehow complicit.

[Silverlight]

It hardly matters whether the script blames games or not. The actual picture painted is that gaming is about letting teenagers simulate vastly illegal and brutal acts in an extremely negative moral context. And what's more, this is at least the third such Law & Order episode in the past three years. I know, because I had the patience to wince my way through all of them. For whatever reason, Dick Wolf wants to paint gaming as being solely a matter of playing GTA as sadistically as possible.

[Brian Rucker]

Jesus, man. It's a show about crime. Any topic that makes the papers gets turned into the fulcrum for a storyline. Well, hello. We're it again. Flavor of the week. Tonight's Law & Order is a riff on O'Reilly's escapades. I don't think the point is that all conservative talk show hosts are sexual predators or that all women are killers. It's just "pulled from the headlines" with a twist that involves somebody ending up dead.

[Jay Adan]

I hate to admit it, but I like Law & Order in most of its incarnations. Does that make me a bad person?
No, it just means you have an extremely strong stomach for seeing the same essential plot recycled four times in five seasons.

Yeah... I think of it more like "entertainment lite". Turn the brain off and go. There's something soothing about knowing that they're going to follow that formula to the letter and just waiting for the specific moments where for example, the obvious suspect is dumped in favor of the not so obvious one. Or the last minute witness or piece of evidence that turns the case on its head...

[sluggo]

Like most L&O episodes, it would be easy to poke fun at several things in the episode (the graphics for their made-up game, "Intensity," looked like a sloppy PS1 product), but I did like the angle with the cop's kid being intimately familar with the game, and the dad's somewhat stunned reaction watching his 11-year-old kid run over hookers and beat them up as matter-of-factly as eating a sandwich. In the episode, it served as a wake-up call to the dad, that his kid was growing up a lot faster than he thought, and that he needed to pay more attention. Not the worst message in the world.