skygiants

AFAIK, there isn't a mystery *series* extant with either a gaming or linguistics focus (though there was a run a decade or two back on lady English-professor sleuths). But there have been a handful of attempts to portray gamer/geek/fantasy culture in more or less straight cozy mysteries, with varying degrees of success.

The disasters:
Bimbos of the Death Sun, Sharyn McCrumb
Cat in a Kiwi Con, Carole Nelson Douglas

McCrumb gets the culture not just wrong, but disastrously wrong in her entry, in which the GoH at a fan convention (reportedly modeled on Harlan Ellison) is murdered. Worse, at least in the original edition, the copy-editor didn't know the proper spelling of Anne McCaffrey's name....

Douglas does a bit better at getting the atmosphere right, but the plot is severely muddled by middle-chapter-of-epic-serial syndrome.

The "not bad":
Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon and
We'll Always Have Parrots, Donna Andrews
Zombies of the Gene Pool, Sharyn McCrumb

Surprisingly, the sequel to Bimbos improved markedly on its predecessor, mostly by virtue of focusing on SF writers rather than fans (and, to all appearances, being far better researched).

The main focus of Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow series is on birds and animals, but the protagonist's brother runs a computer game company, and her romantic partner is an actor; these two books therefore focus respectively on game-developer culture and a faux-Xena-series convention, both drawn reasonably well. Andrews is also noteworthy for having written a second, shorter series about "Turing Hopper", a software-personality who forms a covert private-detective partnership with a pair of human sleuths. Though marketed as cozy mysteries, the exploration of AI themes is equal to anything in straight SF.

The home runs:
The Wedding Game, Susan Holzer
Murder at the War, Mary Monica Pulver

Holzer's novel postulates a murder among a circle of online correspondents (the date and tech put it in the CompuServe/AOL/GEnie era), solved entirely by online sleuthing -- in which the geek culture is totally convincing.

Pulver's is a cult classic, chronicling an imaginary murder -- and is solution -- at an equally imaginary (but utterly accurate) version of the SCA's Pennsic War, properly labeled as such. There are a couple of sequels, and all are ingeniously plotted, but the later books grow a bit past "cozy" on a psychological level.