Trigger warning for sexual assault and spoilers for this evening's Law and Order: SVU episode follow.
Tonight, Law and Order: SVU tackled the harassment of women in gaming in an episode titled "Intimidation Game". It's been a hot topic in our industry since August of last year, and the SVU writers made, well, a really tonally weird episode out of it. The sympathies of the viewer always rested squarely with the women being harassed, and there were no gross false equivalencies. But the writers couldn't resist making a whole lot of cheesy lines in the process.
The eye-rollers
My god, there were a lot of horrible game-related lines in this episode. Det. Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) gets most of the best ones, because he's a big gamer, so he knows just what to say. I've decided to deliberately ignore one early line ("they leveled up"), because it was in especially poor taste with regards to sexual assault.
Here's Odafin, dispensing justice to a guy who sexually harassed a woman at a gaming convention.
And him telling the same harasser how life works:
Later on, after making threats online, a woman game developer is kidnapped and assaulted. Here's how Odafin reacted to the video the attackers left:
Odafin uncovers the winning strategy:
And in the dramatic finale, Odafin saves his fellow cop from death by gamer. He does it the stealthy way:
And has the final word: