Spacehamster’s Blog

We Aussies are about 6 months behind when it comes to the CSI shows. The only series I avidly watch is the original, which I still consider the best of the three. CSI: Miami is far too cartoony and unrealistic by my tastes, but CSI: New York has a credible lead in Gary Sinise, and the stories are often pretty entertaining.

I often catch up on latest episodes in the US via CSIFiles. Their most recent episode and synopsis really had me riled -

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: “Urban Hellraisers” is an absurd episode. The premise is far-fetched, the villains extreme caricatures, the conclusion preposterous. A videogame mogul pays kids to go out and recreate the videogames his company makes, gives the kids real guns and pretty much sends them out to kill people? Advertising has become more…creative these days (take, for instance, the Hummer-sponsored “secret scene”), but live action videogames complete with real guns and murder? I don’t buy it for a second, which makes the entire episode problematic.

That said, the theme of teens becoming desensitized by the violence in videogames, while hardly novel, is worth exploring. Though I don’t believe that the company that makes the videogames would be behind it, I do believe it’s possible for kids to want to recreate “Grand Theft Auto” because reckless driving and stealing cars seems like it would be fun. The idea that players get points for shooting people in videogames is downright disturbing as the real-life parallel in this episode illustrates. When one of the gamers smarmily tells the CSIs that raping the girl in the bank is worth 1000 points, the point is effectively driven home. Lest that seem fictionalized to those unfamiliar with videogames, it’s popular in “Grand Theft Auto” to shoot, run over, or beat to death other drivers and prostitutes.

I bought a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when it was on special at EB Games. The driving portions of the game are plenty of fun, and the game universe itself is huge. But I found the anti-social portions of the game hugely off-putting. Sure, plenty of people play this game without any ill-effects - I’m just to sensitive to this sort of thing to ever want to play it on a daily basis. So I put GTA3 on the shelf…indefinitely.

The biggest criticism I have (based on the synopsis) is that the script writers could and should’ve put more effort into researching the gaming subculture and better integrating it into the episode. There was an episode from the previous season of CSI: Miami, which involved a game company. The upshot to that story was that a game tester murdered the developer - a reason which I find very believable considering the tension that exists within some software projects.

It’s taking an extreme situation to hammer home a not-so-obvious point with excessive force. I wish that they had taken a more measured approach, as they have in the past.