Weirdly, they decided to make the hooker-kicking scene an easter egg, rather than just normal gameplay. But I suppose the virtual sandbox concept of GTA is difficult to explain to an audience with little experience in modern video games. If your chief frame of reference is something like NES Mario, where the game consists of a series of levels where you run from Point A to Point B, you probably have trouble imagining what kind of game would include being able to kick hookers.

You know, the whole GTA "killing a hooker for her cash" meme came up at work the other day. And actually, it was compounded by the suggestion that you can rape women in GTA. Where did this notion come from? There's no raping in GTA. None. There's the comical implication of sex, but no rape minigame or sub-mission or anything like that.

Yes, the game includes hookers, and, like all characters in the game, they can be killed... and they will often drop cash when they die. It's interesting that people want to connect the dots and create a storyline about that ability. To wit: you use a hooker's services, then you kill her and take that money back. As if money in the game is a zero-sum system. You can kill anyone in the game and get money, that's just the way the game works. Money is cheap. And you can't kill too many pedestrians before the cops start showing up.

San Andreas lets you complete a pimping mission that rewards you by having all future hookers pay you for the privilege. I wonder if that's a direct response to the usual anti-GTA refrain about tossing around prostitutes. "See, now you don't have to kill them for their money anymore!" How stupid that "killing a hooker for her cash" has become the popular opinion talking point about the GTA games.

The SVU episode ended up holding the killers responsible for their actions (Hooray!), although the verdict mainly hinged on a separate incident that proved they knew their actions were wrong in the first place and were not wholly influenced by an "addictive, violent video game." They blew apart a weak dopamine-based attack on gaming, and covered that unbalanced people can get bad ideas from any media - and that most people simply don't carry anything out. So the defense of video games was decent.

Where the gaming industry came off the worst was in the laissez faire attitude of the game developers and programmers, who were all written as slacky, unkempt Gen Xers. You could hear a million Bible Belters clucking their tongues in derision. UNTIL THE VERDICT, HAW.

Aside from the low quality faked game sequences, the best gag for gamers was when they hooked the killer up to a brainscan to test his dopamine levels while playing Intensity. And they show him using a GameCube controller! Not bloody likely.