All entries for Friday 20 January 2006

CSI: Miami is biased, stereotyped bullsh*t

CSI: Miami has always been derivative and cliched, but it recently reached new highs with an episode called 'Urban Hellraisers'

To anyone who plays games even slightly, this episode is insulting, stereotyped, shallow and offensive. Here's the idea:

A bunch of people go into a bank and kill the blank clerks, crowing about getting '5,000 points!' for killing them. David Caruso finds out that these murders are being perpetrated by people imitating the action in a videogame after playing it. They commit murder with no forethought, laughing at the idea of raping a woman to get 1,000 points. Of course, the truly evil protagonist is the game developer – who planned the whole thing to sell more copies of the game. Bwahah. How evil gamers are. The idea is that the CSI team have to play the game through to find out the next target of these brainwashed gamers. For the love of god….

Now, I play games. I like playing games. I have a healthy social life also, and I am making a good life for myself. It therefore puzzles me that I am being stereotyped as a potential murderer by TV writers and producers. The gamers in the episode are, with no understanding of them or their backstory, being classified as individuals who cannot distinguish reality from fiction. Oh, they are also University students – if that makes it seem worse. This is probably the biggest 'Daily Mail' style cliche ever, that all people who play videogames are socially inept potential psychopaths.

But the writers are simply pandering to what the more stupid members of the public believe. That games are evil, and all violent games are repulsive conscience-free murderer-trainers. Its like a masturbatory episode written by Jack Thomson, everyone's favourite maverick anti-games zealot lawyer/fuckwit/waste of space with more money than sense and apparently a never ending determination to ban every videogame ever. To give you an idea about what the guy does, he recently tried to get The Sims 2 raised a couple of certificate ratings because of its potential as a paedophile simulator. He's that pathetic.

Back to the episode. The episode features the cool, anti-games CSI team versus the pathetic brainwashed individuals who play games such as 'Urban Hellraisers'. The gamers are insane lunatics whose lives are so insular, their discussion makes them sound like they're in the Masons ("The boys won't even look at you if you're not a gamer"). No balance, no fair presentation. Just pure, unequivocal bias. Its amazing in shows like this which generally pride themselves on being PC (pun not intended) that its still considered acceptable to classify a sub-culture in a certain way.

'Hey, it won't offend anyone important, so we can do it!'

Its appalling, and I'm frankly sick and tired of being stereotyped like this by idiots who making sweeping judgements on culture based on media hoo-hah.

: 20 Jan 2006 13:42 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem