Law and Order: SVU is turning its sights to the gaming world for the first time, in a "ripped from the headlines"-style episode focusing on harassment of female game developers in the community that made headlines last year.

No one in Wednesday night's episode will utter the words GamerGate, but many of its themes and trappings parallel some of gaming's biggest social issues — though the show takes it to a much darker, more dangerous place than reality.

The story follows female game developer Raina Punjabi (played by Mouzam Makkar) as she's about to release her first game, Amazonian Warriors. Punjabi describes the strategy game as something that can be played non-violently if the players prefer.

The SVU team created a fake trailer of Amazonian Warriors for the episode:

In the storyline, Punjabi's employee Sarah Kelly was assaulted at a game convention that detectives Fin Tutuola (Ice-T), Dominick Carisi (Peter Scanavino) and Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) happened to be attending. Tutuola serves as a guide to the other detectives, including Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), as they try to navigate unfamiliar territory.

In the clip below, provided exclusively to Mashable, we see Tutuola and Benson interviewing Kelly, and Tutuola "translating" some of the gaming acronyms she uses (both real and made-up.) In it, they discuss a fake first-person shooter called Kill or Be Slaughtered.

The episode's writers, Celine Robinson and Rob Cohen, said the conflicts that occurred late last year were easy to pull inspiration from, but Cohen, who plays games himself, said he had always wanted to bring gaming into SVU.

"You can live out a fantasy in a game without any consequences," Cohen said "It parallels online harassment in a way — you don't see any consequences for the words you send into the void, but the people who are victims of them do."

As the detectives try to locate Kelly's attackers, they find a trail of information leading to bigger attacks on Punjabi. Without spoiling the show — though it is an SVU episode — Punjabi's attackers take things farther than any previous incident has ever escalated, into the realm of nightmares. The crimes depicted are heinous, though showrunner Warren Leight is quick to point out the episode's villains are "small subset of a small subset of the gamer world."

"We’re not trying to tar the world of gamers at all. Some people can’t distinguish between bad apples, and saying the whole orchard is bad. These are the fringe of this world, and the most alienated. They have lost ability to tell fiction from reality," Leight said.

Though legally the writing team couldn't reach out to female game developers who have suffered public harassment, like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, the very public nature of the Internet allowed them to follow the story and draw inspiration for the episode. Forms of harassment like doxxing — releasing someone's private information online — and swatting — making a fake 911 call to send a SWAT team to someone's home in response to made-up violent crime — are both featured in the episode. There's also a parody of 8chan, the forum often credited as the main discussion hub for Gamergate supporters.

Leight said Tutuola provides balance to the episode as a reasonable video game fan and that the writing team talked to Ice-T, who is a vocal and avid gamer, for feedback on the script.

"Gaming is not a niche thing anymore. Gaming is so mainstream now that there are a variety of people who play and enjoy games," Cohen said.

"We’re telling stories that are important on SVU. I think it was important to say as a community as a whole, not just as a gaming community or a feminist community, this could go too far. This could happen if we aren't looking out for each other," Robinson said.

Law and Order: SVU's "Intimidation Game" episode airs Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET.