At some point, my dearly beloved fiancee got addicted to procedural crime shows like CSI, and as a result, I watch a lot of them too. The only one that’s really actually good is CSI:Original Vegas Flava – during the rest of them, I tend to play Magic: Online or otherwise surf around for blogworthy material.

In the last couple of years, a veritable subgenre of the crime procedural has arisen, where Killer Gamers are the culprits! Virtually all of the shows have done one, and virtually all of them show no awareness for gamers, gaming or the game industry. SVU had kids reenacting Grand Theft Auto scenes. Criminal Intent had people programming bots to play a game to provide them an alibi. CSI: New York had possibly the best one, involving an overworked game designer going nuts and killing someone in an episode that looked to be inspired more by ea_spouse than Jack Thompson. Even Killer Instinct, a show so bad it will be lucky to hit 10 episodes, has already managed to sneak a gaming episode in.

CSI: Miami took this trend to new lows last night, suggesting all gamers as being uncontrollable automatons. Voodoo Extreme has a screen-grab summary. Go read it now. Of particular note:

  • Kids rob a bank that they know a cop is in, and attempt to rape a bank teller during the crime – because the game teaches them to be stupid!
  • They find one kid who OD’ed on gaming after 70 hours of gameplay. Note, right after they said “he played for 70 hours”, they cut to a flashback of the kid playing, with a voice saying ‘level 2′. 2 levels in 70 hours – maybe the learning curve on this game is a tad steep!
  • They talk to the guy who coded the game (who conveniently lives in Miami, which everyone knows is a hub of game development). The first two levels were reenacted faithfully as crimes, so the CSIs ask what the third level is. “Oh, that’s proprietary” he responds. Note: if this happened in real life, the producer would hand over every design document ever written while simultaneously crapping his pants.
  • Since the producer won’t tell them, they task a CSI employee (the young, rad one) with playing the game to get to Level 3 to find out. Apparently, no one in Miami has ever heard of GameFaqs. *gasp* Level 3 is a raid on CSI headquarters!
  • Turns out the game developers are in on the whole thing – they run the guns to the bank robber kids to start a crime wave to boost sales. And you thought Acclaim’s marketing was outrageous!
  • The last bank robber they capture is a girl – turns out she’s the one who actually does the shooting. She did it because she felt enormous pressure to fit in with gamers that game ‘24/7′.

This is the worst gaming-related entertainment I’ve seen since How to Make a Monster, a craptacular movie you can still occasionally catch on HBO (in that fine film, a MoCap suit is struck by lightning, comes alive and starts killing people). Definitely inspires hilarity, though.

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