I really like Ground Zeroes. Its streamlined stealth mechanics, its variety of infiltration options and its unforgiving post-mission reports continue to compel me to play it again weeks later. I think it’s great. But in my review of the game , I criticised its ending for being ‘unearned;’ a word that felt right at the time, but perhaps didn’t explain my position adequately to those who have subsequently asked me what writer Hideo Kojima might have done differently to ‘earn’ an ending where a girl gets a bomb shoved up either her A: vagina or B: anus.

“ The bottom line is, Kojima hasn’t become David Fincher overnight.

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“ Rape as a plot device is easy as hell to implement.

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This question tends to follow the accusation that I am against dark or boundary-pushing material in video games, and that my critique is tied up in the same tedious media hysteria that we see directed towards the medium on morning television and talkback radio. This is absolutely not true. Nor is any accusation that I think Kojima is a poor storyteller in general; I’m a long-time fan of the bizzaro Metal Gear meta-narrative and the brilliant, tortured, and occasionally roller-skating characters found within it.The bottom line is, Kojima hasn’t become David Fincher overnight, and Ground Zeroes still has a whole bunch of goofy stuff in it to remind you that you’re playing a Metal Gear Solid game. The game’s ending, a nasty little punctuation mark on a series of acts of sexual violence against the game’s only female character, felt at odds with that.It's a discordance made worse by clumsy, almost gleeful handling of the material. In one instance, rape is used as a reward in a side objective: those who are prepared to trawl through the map and collect all the hidden audio tapes will find one where they can listen to Paz being sexually assaulted before she is forced to copulate with the underage Chico. “It's like fruit,” Skull Face muses in a bad guy growl. "Does she look sweet, or sour? A man has to know these things. Time for a taste test!"Some reward.The bomb scene itself is pure horror. The camera lingers deliciously on Paz’s squelching intestines; her rescuers shoving their hands into her stomach as she screams in un-anaesthetised pain. When she sacrifices herself at the end, we are not left mourning her – there was not enough character development in Ground Zeroes for that – rather we are left in dumb shock at the information she imparted with her final words.Despite Kojima’s public desires to evolve the medium, I do wonder if the creative decisions he made when writing Ground Zeroes were born partly out of the criticisms directed at the water-logged narrative in Metal Gear Solid 4. Ground Zeroes feels very purposefully that game’s opposite; smooth, slick, lean and ridiculously replayable; it is not hard to imagine that these brutal, uncomfortably unforgettable moments were somewhat reactionary. Yet when I listened to that audio tape for the first time? Bring me Sunny and her eggs any day.Rather than interpreting my critique as the work of a feminazi (the insult du jour) or as an attempt to push some pro-censorship hysterical agenda, please keep in mind that I do not believe sexual violence should be excluded as a literary device, nor do I think that video games are the wrong platform to address it. I want boundaries pushed, and I want video games to move us and challenge us in ways that they currently do not. I do believe, however, that if you’re going to go there, you’d best be able to handle it without crassness, and absolutely without the uneasy sense of glee on display here.And hey, if you disagree with me, if you really feel like your goofy, beloved Metal Gear is better off going down this road, that’s fine too. But if we are really going to take Kojima’s desires to mature the medium seriously, then we must be willing to criticise the medium seriously. Because only in criticism can the medium truly evolve, only in the challenge to refine itself and better itself can it truly flourish.

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on IGN or Twitter.