But, on the other hand, you could choose to look for a solution that obeys the first law of timing. Here’s my solution, though you may think of another: The character comes in, and looks and acts as if there’s nothing he needs to do, to convey, or to leave. He acts as if it’s the last thing on his mind (which it is). The longer this lasts, the more the player begins to sweat and stress. Then the character leaves, not having done whatever he was supposed to do.

For a second, the player is flummoxed or in shock, and half a second later, the character returns, does what he’s supposed to in two seconds, and leaves. It slipped his mind. The effect, in the story, is so much stronger than what it would have been had you simply had the character walk in and hand it over.

While men are the majority of Kotaku’s writers (they compromise the entire daily editorial team), there are two female contributors who write occasionally for the site.  A majority of the comments on the bios of Leigh Alexander and Lisa Foiles comment on their looks, or belittle them for constantly drawing attention to the fact that they’re female.  (Interesting side note – neither woman writes the posts that deal with gender issues in gaming – these pieces are almost exclusively written by the all-male editorial team mentioned above.)  A comment on one of the women’s bios included a death threat which was visible for months before it was finally removed, and the user banned.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many options for gathering gaming news that doesn’t also include having to read through sexist drivel.  IGN, Joystiq, and Destructoid all have the same problem.  However, while a site like Destructoid makes a mockery of a petition against Duke Nukem, Kotaku asks why girl gamers don’t get respect, then retweets someone who reduces one of the female staff members to her breasts.  Oh, and the featured comment on one of the women’s latest posts was “Tits! Nice!”  Talk about a hostile work environment.

No matter what is written, no matter the topic, the focus always becomes their appearance.  On every one of Lisa Foiles’ recent posts, the majority of comments are sexually harassing, threatening, belittling, and just plain cruel.

That’s right, it’s another Duke Nukem Forever post. But I’m not really interested in discussing the content of the game itself, except briefly. Yes, it’s horrifying. That much is well established. Instead, I’d rather put the game in a certain context – a context that doesn’t justify the game or its content by any means, but does point to some disturbing trends in our culture.

One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

 I agree that giving Duke an M rating despite featuring on-screen graphic rape is incredibly dismissive of the seriousness of rape. But what disturbs me even more is the kind of games that do get an AO rating in the US. The first one that jumped to my mind was Fahrenheit, which we in the US know as Indigo Prophecy. Some content was cut from Indigo Prophecy in order to avoid its initial AO rating, and that content was… a single consensual sex scene. (Well, also the shower scene shows Carla’s nipples in the non-US version.) The ESRB’s reasoning was that the sex scene was interactive, but I don’t care how interactive it is, because it doesn’t feature murdering women who are in the process of being raped. In my mind that makes it a fair bit less “adults only” than DNF.

 It’s almost like our culture reacts more strongly to depictions of consensual sex than it does to depictions of rape! And yes, it does, because while rape scenes may be portraying violence, consensual sex scenes are portraying women with subjectivity and agency, making sexual choices for themselves, and as we all know that’s way worse.

The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.

There are next to zero moments in the game that redeem this shortcoming. This is not a problem that is limited to Dead Island but rather many games in general. It’s not as if this game tried to tell a story and failed, it’s that it strung together the barest scraps of story together necessary to push the game forward and then ignored it. The story doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t try to make sense, the game doesn’t care that it doesn’t make sense, and it’s brought out at odd places and reluctantly spouts something at you to keep you playing as if the developers hated every minute of time they had to devote to it.

The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.