game girl advance: Law & Order: Video Game Unit

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March 04, 2005

Law & Order: Video Game Unit

I'm watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. There's an episode on about a man who kills a hooker using a car and stomping method taken from a game called "Intensity," an obvious fictionalization of "Grand Theft Auto." Naturally, everyone's shocked and horrified that a video game features such violence. And who makes the revelation to the police that the hooker's death was a video game mimic? Of course, a little boy who thinks that the game is "cool."

Avoiding the already abundant argument about whether or not violent games make you violent, I have two, much less important, questions that never really seem to be asked.

1.) Why is it that whenever a television show represents a video game, it looks like an early beta build of the first “Alone in the Dark?” This episode came out a few weeks ago, and was probably produced a few months before that. It’s not like the technology wasn’t available to make a video game look like a video game. The game they show on the screen moves at about 10 frames a second, characters aren’t textured, and there is almost no character animation. There’s so much energy put into showing a dead body, but we can’t have a little bit of effort when showing what a modern, popular video game looks like?

2.) Is it me or do critics focus way too much on killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? It’s like when parents try to ban “Huckleberry Finn” because of certain colloquial. Critics are ignoring the context. I could be wrong, but I think it’s the Supreme Court case of Miller v. California (1973) in which the court ruled that you must view the medium as a whole for its artistic, literary, or scientific merits rather than judging specifics scenes. I know that applies to obscenity and pornography, but work with me here. Lawyers want to ban games based on specific scenes of violence, not the game as a whole. Therefore, critics should be trying to criticize the game in its entirety, and not what amounts to a rather minor feature of the game.

Posted by Mike at March 04, 2005 06:25 PM | TrackBack

Comments

1) I'd guess that it's partly down to the infrequency that any individual prop guy (SFX guy?) is called upon to create a game simulation, partly down to being limited by what you can show on TV in terms of simulated hooker-slaughtering, partly down to the fact that the state of the art in games keeps advancing, and maybe the SFX guy not being into playing computer games much. Maybe Alone in the Dark is the last game the director played (or saw his nephew playing), so he doesn't know any better.

2) Yeah, but how many critics will carefully consider the whole thing, then carefully dissect out the parts they don't like? Especially if they're ideologically programmed to dislike certain things? Just take it as a sign of intellectual dishonesty and ignore them.

Posted by: NelC

on March 4, 2005 07:02 PM

Money and low expectations must figure into it. I suspect they contracted that bit out to the lowest bidder. You get what you pay for and usually nothing more. The company I work for creates sites / advergames for television shows & movies, and they tend to be quite frugal.

Project Manager: "I need a flash movie that looks like that kid's game with the hookers and the fighting."

Designer: "Right on! That will be fun! I love that game! I can show the guy driving the car then he jumps th--"

Project Manager: "Whatever. I have 6 hours in the budget to get it done and tested. It will be on the show for 26 seconds. No one cares."

Posted by: Paul

on March 4, 2005 08:22 PM

Paul, while I agree with that, it should be noted that if it were to appear IN SHOW, rather than to supplement it, it would get a higher budget.

2) Because none of the critics actually play the games? The whole hooker thing has had a life on its own, becoming its own meme within anti-game punditry. It's amazing that its such a big deal considering it was pretty much a hidden easter-egg joke by the game developers. And nevermind that you can beat up anyone on the streets and not just prostitutes, if YOU CHOOSE TO.

Posted by: n0wak

on March 5, 2005 07:45 AM

I guess its just as well that nobody seems to notice that you can beat up old ladies in GTA3. If they're that sympathetic towards hookers...

Also, have you noticed how people always talk about how you get "points" for each person that you kill in GTA3? You earn money, not points, and its you get it after completing a mission. This is a total hallucination on the part of game critics.

Posted by: Casey

on March 5, 2005 01:00 PM

This isn't the first time Law and Order demonized video games. I hate the show but I slipped and accidently saw one where a kid played a lot of Doom and ended up killing someone with a sword (don't ask). They were suing the parents for not taking Doom away from him.

TV shows, like all creative media, often use their fiction as a vehicle for their own agenda. It's not much different than the left-wing propaganda (which I happen to agree with) in Boston Legal. Propaganda is propaganda.

As for making it all look like Alone in the Dark, they can't afford the rights to anything good and no producer will give them a game to demonize.

Posted by: Mike Shea

on March 5, 2005 04:20 PM

1) One word... "lawsuit" What happens if they make the game look like GTA... bam.. thers a lawsuit right there.. and L&W loses money.. cant have that.. You make the game look older and nothing like the games of today.. no one is going to be mad.. thats what I think anyways..

2) The types of critics that you are talking about here dont care about fairness. They dont care about solid arguments or worthy assesments. They care about ignorance. They care about the people who are ignorant and are willing to believe what they are told. All you ever here about GTA in the media is "hooker this" "Killing that" because the ignorant dont know any better and critics know this. Yes some of the stuff in the games is going to be offensive and yes its going to piss some people off but thats nothing new. Peopl getting pissed and offended has been happening since before video games, or even TV was invinted. If critics can find a new way to spin it so it seems like something new so you tune in and make them their $$$ then they jump all over it. It's one of the reasons I don't watch TV anymore.

As for SVU, I cant stand to watch more than one episode of that show a week, because its pretty damn disturning sometimes. I would say that yes, its a very well done show but I cant stomach it.

Posted by: MSTIRLNG

on March 5, 2005 08:11 PM

I've got nothing against Law & Order. I enjoy the show usually. And I'm sure that video games isn't the only part where they get things wrong (thousand of Russian hookers are probably calling each other saying that any episode they're involved with is bullshit).

The problem I was getting at is the suspension of belief that's shattered by the presence of an utterly shitty looking, and obviously shitty playing video game. I mean, any game that requires you to randomly mash buttons while shifting your weight from side to side in excitment must suck.

I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or not at this point in the morning.

Posted by: Mike

on March 6, 2005 05:05 AM

What's mind-boggling about this is that it's a message about how media depicting violence is harmful ... ON A TV SERIES ABOUT PEOPLE GETTING KILLED.
argh. what are peoples' criteria for blaming video games? why not blame TV, or movies, or best of all, criminals?

Posted by: MattyMatt

on March 12, 2005 10:11 AM

Okay, I'm not sure how many of you actually watched the whole show. The thing I have to say about them taking points out of context is that the show passes some sort of negative connotation on videogames seems to be wrong to me. I shall explain. Essentially for the episode it is the main characters (Detectives, DA's and the asian psychologist fellow) the characters who carry most of the favour and most of the emotional weight of the show who are saying essentially "It's not the videogames, It's the kid". I think you need to look to these characters for the message being portrayed by the show.

Posted by: Squidjerky

on March 13, 2005 01:55 AM

I saw the whole episode. That doesn't help how they portrayed the game, the game company ("we don't care what people do" and "cool violence!"), or the way that the officers actually reacted to the game itself. Just because they ultimately showed that it wasn't the game's fault, that doesn't mean the game wasn't very poorly portrayed.

The game itself was still portrayed as just a hooker killing simulation. And that's what bothered me most. It wasn't that they showed it being the kids fault. It's the fact that people who don't play games are being presented the medium of the video game as killing simulators.

Posted by: Mike

on March 13, 2005 09:11 AM