Kevin was a slacker. Eighteen, bored of high school, he often skipped classes to hang out at the mall, just hanging out with the skaters and the goths, moping about, sometimes browsing the stores or hanging out in the food court.
As he was there so often, he knew all the stores and hangouts... or he thought he did. This dreary Friday afternoon, he came across a small curio shop, now taking up one of the units. It was dimly lit and stacked high with tables and shelves of various trinkets and widgets and doo-dads, all clearly old. It didn't fit in with all the neighbouring stores, that's for sure.
He browsed the shelves, until he found something weird. It looked like an old style typewriter, only instead of keys there was a head-shaped indent, shaped so you'd have the paper resting atop your head, oddly. Suddenly, he started and turned. A wizened old man, clearly the shop's owner, was right at his shoulder. "Ah. The Superhero Game," he creaked in an aged voice.
"What is it?" Kevin asked skeptically.
"Well, I don't rather know what everything in my shop does exactly. But apparently this was build in the 1940s as a proto-video game. One places one's head into the receptacle, and it produces a gaming experience for the user."
Kevin scoffed. "Please, it looks like a heap of junk."
The elderly man sized him up. "Well, I'll tell you what. I let you test it out, for free, and you don't hold me responsible for what it does. That way we can see who's right."
Kevin thought for a moment. "Sure. Not like it'll do anything," he said, before putting his head into the receptacle, hearing a whirring, clicking noise before suddenly it all went black.
A moment later, Kevin found himself in a void of darkness, looking at a flickering orange neon set of letters. "NEW GAME. SELECT SETTINGS. FIRST CHOICE: GENDER?"