Actually, it’s about ethics in law enforcement.
Considering that self-proclaimed GamerGaters were issuing threats to women over the Internet, it was really only a matter of time before Law & Order came to the party. And, sure enough, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a GamerGate episode in the works.
As discovered by the Mary Sue, see if this plot description for the February 11th episode, The Intimidation Game, sounds at all familiar:
Video game developer Raina Punjabi (guest star Mouzam Makkar) solidifies the launch of her first game amid a stream of online insults, intimidation and death threats from the male-dominated gaming community. When a female employee is assaulted at a gamer convention, Detective Tutuola (Ice-T) investigates the crime but Raina refuses to delay the launch, and the cops must “level up” to protect her.
I can already hear the belly-aching about #NotAllGamers or whatever, but the reality is, this is how people who aren’t gamers see GamerGate. Hell, it’s how most gamers, at this point, see GamerGate. The fact that there are, you know, coordinated harassment campaigns that are designed to try and get people killed just isn’t great public relations.
Also, considering Law & Order‘s track record with technology, not to mention an audience that probably doesn’t even play games in the first place, odds are pretty good the show’s going to paint with a rather broad brush. As in “All gamers are virgins who hate women,” even if the person engaging in the death threats inevitably turns out to be a rival developer or something.
Our only hope here is that Ice-T is a real-life gamer, so he should be able to guide the writing staff to at least a more reasonable depiction of gamers in general, separating the swatting, death-threat-issuing cowards from the majority. Even so, though, I’ve got five bucks that says there’s at least one creepy fat guy pretending to be a woman on the Internet. It’s Law & Order. They have to go there.
