I hadn’t heard of the episode until the night that it aired. Even then I only noticed it whilst browsing Wednesday’s TV Guide: an episode of Law & Order SVU involving gaming, and, more specifically, violence against women in the gaming industry. My eyebrow was metaphorically raised in interest, but some skepticism kept me from tuning in to watch the premier (that and for the sake of maintaining TV-control harmony with my roommate). Although I knew, given the typical content of Law & Order SVU, what was bound to happen, I held some hope that maybe the episode would draw some attention to the real threat some women in gaming face on a daily basis. So did it? Well… that’s a complicated question. Trigger Warning: as it occurs in the episode, there is some mention of physical and sexual assault below.
Essentially, this episode is a mish-mash of the stories of Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian all rolled into one. It opens with everyone’s favorite SVU detectives attending some kind of gaming convention. The highlight of a show is a game called Kill or Be Slaughtered (that name initiated the first of a great many series of eye rolls), which has all of the male gamer attendees acting “like rough n’ rowdy boys” with the female police officer failing to comprehend this strange gaming thing. Nearby, two trolls come to a booth of Amazonian Warriors, a game created by a female developer and begin to tell the “gamer girl” working the event to “go home” and make it clear that silly girls aren’t wanted in the industry. Later the two follow said “gamer girl” into the bathroom and proceed to assault her physically and sexually, making it clear she’s not welcome. It’s not pretty. But when the police rush to her side and offer assistance, she basically shrugs and, after being asked what the two men did to her, says a line that continues to bother me even now, hours later (but I’ll get to that in a minute): “They leveled up.” (I mean, what? Seriously? Seriously?)
The show then shifts to the developer of Amazonian Warriors, Raina Punjabi, who is too busy preparing for the game’s launch to worry about any of the numerous threats being made to her person. After doing some research on the sexism and personal attacks directed towards Raina online, the police and the SVU team both urge her to take as much precaution as possible. But she ignores it. So, in true SVU fashion, a group of particularly angry male gamers go after Raina during her game’s press conference and succeed to abduct her. They post videos of her being assaulted, beaten, groped, and worse online. In the end, when the SVU team rescues her, her face is covered in bruises, she’s clearly been sexually assaulted, and she’s broken. In the end, she says “Women in gaming, what did I expect? I’m out” and quits. And besides some banter that involves the main female lead both hoping her son wont turn into one of those gamers and thinking that maybe not all games are bad, that’s it, that’s the end.
There’s so much that can be said about this episode. We on the NYMG team who have seen the episode have even debated tackling the episode in segments due to the sheer amount of content to discuss. But I’ll try to be as succinct yet efficient as thoroughly possible. Overall, it’s important to note that this episode was as perplexing as it was offensive, managing to anger not only GamerGate victims but the ones who’re attacking them as well. But while I will admit that the way they cast the gaming community overall as particularly villainous and violent video games as gateways to real-life violence and crime were rather extreme over-generalizations, the real offense was how it treated the real experiences women, particularly like outspoken women like Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian, have lived through and continue to live through.
First, the episode was set up in a way that practically refused to let the audience take its content matter seriously. Between the over-explanation of “gaming related” terms like noob, dox, FPS, the corny jokes, the way the show shifted into first person perspective when it arrived at the “final showdown” to simulate a first person shooter, to the really inappropriate comment about the two men “leveling up” after presumably sexually assaulting or raping the woman, the show was morbidly laughable. Since the show is set up in a way that it makes it incredibly difficult to take it seriously and is practically written in a way that promotes scoffing, it negates any semblance of a meaning or deeper message it might have been trying to convey.
Furthermore, the women with, perhaps, the exception of the two actually in the industry, are all distinctly presented as “outsiders” when it comes to gaming and just generally disinterested in it altogether. They approach the episode’s case (and, in all honesty, conclude it in the same way) in a very much “games are so foreign to us women” and “Why do men enjoy games?” sort of manner. Men must explain all the gaming-related references and bring the women “up to speed.” The female lead assumes that men must enjoy games because they’re addicted, failing to see any benefit to playing games. In addition, the women, given the way they discuss video games and the way they lump games as a faceless, almost malevolent entity, make it seem as though its normal for women to see gaming as some odd culture that they’re not privy to. This is particularly evident in the one male suspect’s mother’s dialogue, where she describes how her son’s gaming buddies must have corrupted him. These, culminating in designer Raina expressing doubt that she – and women in general – should be in the gaming community or industry to begin with seems to convey that we don’t really belong in gaming and that, perhaps, we’re better off staying away.
About the only thing the episode did get right was the overwhelming presence of sexist, inflammatory, and threatening online comments. But even while the show stresses just how much these are inappropriate and dangerous throughout much of the show, it undermines it all in basically one scene. When the SVU team reassures both the one male suspect’s mother and even some of the guilty suspects that they were dragged in by those few extreme and “out of balance” players and that these few “couldn’t tell what was real or what was a game,” they indicate that only a certain sect of male gamers exhibit this kind of behavior. And while I’m by no means implying that all male gamers act this way, I felt that the show was underestimating how common and pervasive this behavior is.
Finally, we have the way the women themselves acted when faced with the possibility of violence as a result of their involvement in the gaming industry, the way they responded to it when they did experience it, and the way the police and detectives reacted to it. It makes a mockery of the real experiences of Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian. The women in this episode were not worried about the all too real threats made against them. They shrugged it off, made jokes, saw it as no big deal. In fact, the police and the SVU team were the ones taking action on behalf of the women, specifically Raina, who wasn’t interested in taking any action against the men who were threatening her. This is perhaps the biggest slap in the face. After all, after campaigning extensively to even get police to look at the massive amounts of threats they’ve received both online and offline and to take them with the seriousness they deserve, having a television show that depicts the police as more concerned than the victims themselves is a huge transgression and insult.
In the end, Raina quits, surrendering to those who sought to drive her out. Her attackers and all the people who harassed her online “win the game.” She stresses that perhaps she never really belonged in the gaming community to begin with; perhaps women shouldn’t even try to belong. What kind of message does this send? That it’s not worth the effort to be a gamer? That we’re in for more trouble than it’s worth? As this episode of Law & Order SVU‘s credits began to roll, I couldn’t help but think that in their attempt to use Gamer Gate and sexism in the industry to make whatever message they were trying to convey, they made tensions all that much worse.
