FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

GamerGate Loved That ‘Law and Order’ GamerGate Episode

‘Law & Order: SVU’ should have listened to Ice-T.
​Image: NBC

Law & Order: SVU aired an episode inspired by GamerGate and harassment in gaming last night and it was awful.

There are so many terrible moments to choose from: Ice-T's one-liners ("game over!" he puns as he closes in on a perp); the fake games created for the show that look about 20 years old; and then there's this video of Raina Punjabi, a stand-in for Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and other women in gaming who receive death threats regularly for speaking out against sexisim, being forced to read a statement by masked kidnappers.​

Advertisement

Image: NBC

The internet is on fire with hot takes on the episode, which rightfully pick it apart for being exploit​ative, sexi​st, and crin​geworthy.

GamerGate, meanwhile, found the episode quite amusing. It was laughable, certainly, but from their perspective, it played into one of the movement's core beliefs: that gamers are being demonized by the media, an outside force that aims to destroy something it doesn't truly understand.

Here are a few hot takes from the the GamerGaters themselves, cultivated from their internet stomping grounds, or "RedChanIt," as Law & Order called it last night.

Before the episode aired, they were a little concerned.

Image: Reddit via 8chan.

After they saw it, they were elated:

Source: 8chan.

One particularly embarrassing detail is that SVU's showrunner, Warren Leight, retweeted a GamerGater who said that one of the fake games created for the show: Amazonian Warriors, which looked very fake and crappy indeed, still looked better than Briana Wu's game, Revolution 60.

Source: Twitter.

I'll give Leight the benefit of the doubt that he didn't understand what he was retweeting there, but GamerGaters see it as just another victory.

This is all especially sad because it was preventable. Ice-T, who's been into games since the Atari 2600, could have helped get the technical details right and also make a better point. According to Mashable, he did consult with the writers, but I wish he gave them a little more of the wisdom he dropped on Game Informer in 2011:

"People get too deep into the games. I have a clan on Call of Duty, and when you start telling me your kill/death ratio – I don't give a f---. You really going to pick up a b---- by telling her your kill/death ratio? That doesn't really matter. I think there's a nerd element where you can get too deep into it that no one cares. But you can get nerdy with cars; you could start telling me the cubic displacement of an engine. At any point, you can go into the nerd world if you want to go deep. One of the key things about nerds is that they like to correct you. They get off on correcting you. That's the part that we kinda fall back off of – we just want to play the games, we don't need the heavy details."

The episode spent a lot of time worrying about people who aren't able to separate games from reality instead of Ice-T's point about territorial nerd-dom that defines itself by excluding others—which is how we got GamerGate in the first place.