Oh, hell yeah! You just KNOW I’m tivoing this shit: CSI: NY in their partner episode with Second Life.

“Log off!”
“I know what I’m doing!”
“Log off! Now!”
“I need an ambulance!”

Dear god, the trailer alone makes my brain numb. And I’m somewhat of an aficionado of idiotic media treatments of gaming.

This is already the second cop show with a Second Life twist to it – SVU earlier this year had an episode about a fictional game called “Another Youniverse”. The plot was (*spoilers*) a killer kidnaps a college girl who is also an ageplaying virtual hooker so he can lock her in his basement so she can… ageplay a 14 year old girl from him IN GAME all the time (being in college, she’s too old and busted for him IRL).

Fortunately, SVU used their cunning detective work to find her, since the kidnapper was foolish enough to shape his virtual land to have exactly the same geographic features as to where he had kidnapped another 14 year old years previously in real life. Which is good – you’d hate for the kidnap victim to have to resort to anything crazy like send a ‘tell’ command to another player. Apparently, he had never considered this possibility in his incredibly convoluted plan. Sadly, he killed her by accident before it occurred to her (and I suspect, shortly after it occurred to the writers).

Meanwhile, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but Second Life’s now typically counting 45K users simultaneously, which is roughly four times what it was about a year ago.

Original comments thread is here.