Not as seen on TV

Facebook recently put me back in touch with a friend I haven't seen or heard from since high school. When I found out she now works at Liz Claiborne with Tim Gunn, I immediately assumed that her life is some kind of hybrid of The Devil Wears Prada and Project Runway and I was consumed with jealousy.

But then it occurred to me that people think my job is insanely cool, ("Wow! Do you get to sit around and play video games all day? That must be the best job ever!") but if people base their understanding of what I do on the portrayal of video game companies on TV, they may have a warped perception of what my life is really like. Consider these works:

Law & Order: Criminal Intent, F.P.S.
There's so much wrong with this episode it's hard to know where to start but the title is a good place. FPS stands for First Person Shooter but the game "Deathmatch" is clearly an MMO. The visuals you see are all dungeon-based PvP fighting. Then there's TR Knight wandering around, mumbling about the "lighting on the wall polygons" the entire episode. If he's the head of programming and that's all they let him do, he is a really sucky programmer. But the best part comes when the detectives figure out that the murdered woman was online playing when she was attacked and they go to the game company to find out who else was online at the same time. It's the hottest online game going according to the script and on a Friday night at 10pm, there were a whole 50 other people playing! With subscription numbers like that, you would think that killing players would be the last thing they would do.

Law & Order: SVU, Game
The obligatory "GTA makes you kill hookers" episode. Bad Rockstar! Bad! It does have one unintentionally hilarious moment when the killer is getting a PET scan and the tech uses a Game Cube controller. I did not realize until I saw it that Nintendo also makes medical equipment.

X Files, First Person Shooter
Again, someone needs to explain to TV what FPS means. A VR game becomes sentient and kills a tester "known only as Retro" (I wonder what they put on his paycheck) so Mulder has to go in and fight it while the employees of the game company cower helplessly behind their keyboards. OK, maybe that's not so unrealistic. Scully and Mulder bicker endlessly about the relative worth of video games (SPOILER! Scully thinks they are pointless, Mulder is a fanboy) and in the end Scully has to become the kick ass bitch to defeat the virtual kick ass bitch.

CSI: Miami, Game Over
OK, what's with killing the poor testers? I mean come on! We get the lowest pay, the least respect, the crappiest computers and now you kill us off too?!?!? That said, this is my favorite of the Game Dev episodes. So many great suspects to choose from. Did Tony Hawk kill poor Jake because he was really doing all the work? was it the insane programmer who blamed the tester because of all the extra work he had fixing the bugs he found (hello! You coded the bugs asshole!)? was it the testers jealous wife (as IF!)? was it the other tester who was all hopped up on his cane sugar soda ordered special from Mexico? Can they figure it out from the mocap data of the actual murder? You are just going to have to watch this one to find out.

Murder She Wrote, A Virtual Murder
Again with the virtual reality game. And if one ever did get significant funding, I suspect the IP they would choose would not be written by a senior citizen from Cabot Cove, ME, no matter how good she is at solving murders. This episode involves Jessica having to do a last minute rewrite because of a glitch in one specific character and a lead programmer who is murdered while trying to steal source code. For a VR game. On a floppy disk. I'm sure you can fit a lot of VR code on a floppy. OK, I admit it. I am probably the only working game developer (well I will be working soon) who has actually seen an episode of Murder, She Wrote but I am sure my mother has and thinks we all walk around the office in power suits with huge shoulder pads, heels, and panty hose.

But if anyone really wants to know what it's like to work in a game company, all they really have to watch is Grandma's Boy. It's crude, disgusting, adolescent and totally accurate.