I have played video games all my life, A LOT of videogames and yes at some point in my journey in playing video games I have been confronted with graphic content as gaming has matured right up to where we are today. I have seen my fair share of blood and gore and maybe a little in the way of titilation too. But what I have not seen, are scenes of graphic rape being used as a joke in a game.

There is a line in gaming that shouldn’t really be crossed and one such game attempted to do that. That game is ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ ‘Gearbox’s update of a 90’s FPS shoot ‘em up, set in a chauvinist hero’s world. I have read many reviews on this game and most of the reviews I have read so far, have been bad, REALLY bad. (For all the delaying, the stalling, the drama surrounding the game, it's tough to say if any part of it has actually benefited from the more than a decade of development)

But what caught my eye over and over is how one such reviewer described a particular level in the game done in bad taste, and that level is the infamous ‘Alien Hive’ of which young women are raped by aliens and from the whimpering and crying you can clearly hear they are not enjoying the experience and to make matters worse you hear your character’s voice joke ‘Your F*ked’ before shooting one of them in the head.

Now I don’t know if that makes you feel bad as a gamer?, but from watching a play through of this on youtube I have to say that I know it would make me feel bad.

I had a similar feeling when playing ‘Modern Warfare 2’ in which I had to shoot innocent people in an airport to get close to a lead terrorist cell member for intel. Even that didn’t feel right. If somebody or something with a dagger or a rifle comes charging towards you to kill you in a game then it feels alright to fight back because in the game’s context your defending yourself, that’s what most FPS gaming is about, and in some cases, the overall theme of gaming in general, ‘Confrontation’.

In this game there is adult, toilet humour and then there’s humour that crosses a line. Any developer or publisher reading this article should learn lessons from this game. You don’t make a joke about rape. It’s the same as making a joke about dead babies. Or even Michael J Fox on Parkinsons disease.. It’s not funny.

So to see it in a videogame that actually ‘Thinks’ it’s funny is not even cool.
They could’ve edited that level out but they kept it in there because they thought it was funny.

It really makes you wonder where the developer’s heads were at, during the making of this game..

I agree. The fact that they can be as flippant about this kind of subject as to put it in a video game that children (God forbid)could possibly see and play is unconscionable. What kind of message does this convey to young men, the ones who will most likely play this? Not a good one, that is for sure. Whether essential to the story or not, there had to be another way to get there besides this.