The ASA: as fearsome as a spaghetti broadsword

It could have been alright, you know. It could have been a lighthearted riposte to the current trend for "gritty" shooters taking themselves far too seriously. Instead, it was a bunch of disappointing set pieces stitched together by weak knob jokes. Ah well.

Remember the start of June? Steps were still blissfully unreformed, Nancy Dell’Olio was exactly where she belongs (that is, nowhere near the nation’s TV screens) and everybody was naively hoping that Duke Nukem Forever might not turn out to be a colossal disappointment of a videogame, blithely ignoring the gathering mountain of evidence that it was actually going to be about as enjoyable as scraping a PVC quoit across a crusty abcess.

Just how awful was it in the end?  Well, scroll down to the bottom of this page and see for yourself. This presented a bit of a problem for the advertising bods in charge of trussing the thing up in its shiniest rags and dragging it to market – a job that must have been akin to slapping some lippy on a decaying blobfish and desperately trying to pass it off as a supermodel. Their strategy was about as sophisticated as everything else orbiting the tattered mess of DNF, combining embarrassing attempts at blackmail (which predictably backfired harder than a howitzer stuffed with frozen turkey) with a TV spot full of – what else? – schoolgirls, explosions, and pictures of topless strippers with their sauciest areas pixellated so awkwardly that it looked like they were wearing Lego nipple tassels. One in the eye for all those “Games are art” ponces, there.

This week, the Advertising Standards Authority passed judgement on that same terrible TV ad, ruling that because its “gyrations were overly sexually explicit,” it may henceforth only be shown after 11 p.m. Pow! A slap in the face for those pesky ad-men, right? Except! It’s now a full four months after the game’s initial release, which makes it  exactly three months and twenty-seven days since the world collectively sighed “Oh, it’s rubbish,” forgot all about Duke and moved on to the next glimmering consumer bauble. The marketing campaign has long since been wound up – there’s no point in running it, now that the cat’s out of the bag and every reviewer from here to Transnistria has given the game a proper drubbing (my favourite line comes from Ben Kuchera of ArsTechnica, who said it’s “like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive—and you’re the uncle.”)

Leaving aside for now the whole issue of whether the ASA is right to make these moral judgements, or if it’s a bit odd that they freaked out over a flash of bum when the same ad showed monsters erupting into crimson showers of blood after taking a blast of shotgun pellets to the groin, there’s the bizarre fact that they’re really, really late to the party. How has it taken this long for them to get around to administering this mildest of slaps on the wrist?

And yet the ASA can do NOTHING to keep our children safe from this guy.

They’re an odd lot, the ASA. Their mission is to protect the nation from misleading material by regulating EVERY SINGLE ADVERT in the country, across TV, print and the internet (!) – but it’s a bit of a hopeless cause, given that the advertising industry has hordes of slick-suited PR agents and Brylcreemed account execs, while the ASA is just three part-timers sharing a broom cupboard (probably). Forget David and Goliath, this is like pitting a fruit fly against the Death Star.

The Authority’s regulatory powers vary wildly for no discernible reason: print seems well-covered, with sanctions ranging from trading penalties to pre-vetting, but for TV the absolute worst they can do is ask the broadcaster to stop showing the infringing advert, and maybe threaten to call in the bigger boys. Busybodies like me have been whinging about this situation for over five years now, and you can see why: verdicts such as this Duke Nukem one fail so completely to serve their supposed purpose, that it’s actually a bit embarrassing. The horse hasn’t just bolted, it’s met a nice lady horse, moved to Chigwell, started a modest import-export business and retiled the bathroom – and now the ASA decides to send out an announcement congratulating itself for shutting the stable door? If they’re going to be that rubbish, they might as well just not bother.

So, to help the poor ASA get its mojo back, here are some suggestions for new sanctions it could impose:

*Send a round-robin email to all of the advertiser’s clients, friends and family, containing a photoshopped picture of the miscreant in question stuffing Weetabix up their bum and really, really enjoying it

*Have Justin Bieber tweet about how the advert makes him “sadface”

*THUNDERDOME

*Freeze the company’s assets and don’t release them until its entire executive board can successfully make it to the third round of Ninja Warrior

*Offer “double or quits.”  The ad’s creative team have to choose to be locked inside one of two shipping crates – one containing a nice Victoria sponge and a full pardon, the other a rabid Chris de Burgh wearing a tattered loincloth and riding an enraged bull elephant (the twist is that both boxes actually contain a de Burgh)

*Death by Vanessa Feltz