As with so many things, it's all SEGA's fault.

“Britain” is quite a nice name for a country, when you think about it: it’s better than “Paraguay” (which is hard to spell), and “Liberia” (which sounds like a type of food poisoning), or “Bumholezania” (which isn’t real). The problem with “Britain”, though, is that it alliterates with certain words or phrases which appeal so much to salivating newspaper editors that they can sometimes get carried away with the simple joy to be had in sticking them together, without thinking too hard about whether it’s appropriate.

These are the sorts of words which really appeal to the part of us that, as life’s wheelbarrow trundles us inevitably closer towards being tipped onto death’s compost heap, begins to insist that everything was better in the good old days and the modern world as we know it is all going to hell in a grime-smeared, rickety pushchair. You know: words like “Broken” or “Bankrupt” – or “Big Brother”.

Ah, yes. Him. ‘Big Brother Britain’ has been splashing about in the tabloid paddling pool for a good few years now, and was out in force last week with the revelations of Oxford council’s plans to stuff cameras in the back of all its taxis, which would record everybody’s conversations as they pootle about the town.

The problem with these sorts of stories is that they always spin out the same way, as a tale of good honest everyday Britons having their privacy shattered by a legion of interfering, self-centred and downright evil council types following their crazed agenda to SPY on EVERYBODY and THEIR BINS. Now, there are plenty of things worth getting upset about with this Oxford scheme – but this isn’t one of them.  The council had an increase in taxi-related crimes to deal with, and the way that councils are structured and assessed means that they need to handle things in a certain way. Let’s think about that a bit more: they have precise budgets for specific projects which must be closely monitored. They prefer a visible, immediate solution, because that makes them look more pro-active in the eyes of both the public and their central government superiors. They probably have specific, quantified targets to reach, which mean they need something that they can easily talk about in numerical terms. Preferably, it should also be something a lot of other councils have done before, so that it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work. If it comes from a massive company, all the better – they have sophisticated accounting systems that make life easier, and a track record long enough that nobody can accuse you of picking a dud supplier (in theory, anyway).

So, you’re Oxford council, and you need to sort out the rising number of wrong’uns being naughty all over your Hackney carriages. What do you do? Increase police presence at taxi ranks? Enormously expensive, and likely a waste of highly-trained officers. An awareness campaign? Fiddly to design and a little bit, well, wet. CCTV, though, now there’s an idea! It’s (relatively) cheap, it can cover every taxi, and we can stick in there just as quickly as we can buy the equipment. Back of the net!

Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that it’s questionable whether CCTV really does reduce crime, and that the cameras themselves often break down because nobody’s bothered to maintain them. But these don’t matter really, because the CCTV industry has long been able to adapt itself to the way councils work, smoothing the wrinkles out of the difficult commissioning process and promising a great result, at a low price, fast and in a way that everyone will see. An all-in-one-box solution that’s easy to put on a balance sheet, and immediately lets you wheel out impressive numbers in sentences such as “We have just commissioned six thousand CCTV cameras to combat the nefarious whistling epidemic sweeping the town’s libraries.”

Council workers aren’t evil, then – they might be a tad naive or lazy, but generally they’re not actively malicious. They’re just people after all: dull, ordinary people like you and me, and just as susceptible as we are to the slick sales and the glamour of technology.

Is this really the product of evil masterminds, or could it just be a rather more pedestrian bout of human fallibility?

Where, then, does all this acidic vitriol come from? Time and time again, an organisation called Big Brother Watch pops up prominently in these stories: like here, for example, or here. Nobody seems to have pointed out to them the irony of putting the word “Watch” in the name of a supposedly anti-surveillance organisation, but we’ll skip that for now. BBW – as I’m going to enjoy calling it from now on – is a spin-off from The Taxpayer’s Alliance, which supposedly campaigns against government waste and was a bit of a media darling itself, back in the day, until people started to suspect that it might not be all it seemed. Indeed, it turned out that behind this supposedly populist, grassroots crusade on behalf of everyday Joe Taxpayer, lurked a large bivouac’s worth of people linked to higher-ups in the Conservative party – specifically, the sort of Conservatives who were upset with all this centrist coalition nonsense and wanted to send things further right again. So, rather sneakily, they began lobbying furiously for lower taxes, ignoring all other options for reforming the treasury and disguising this very specific agenda, dreamed up by a small group of elite ideologues for their own particular benefit, as something else entirely – a well-meaning, friendly campaign group, the result of a spontaneous upswell of public concern and discontent.

The same is true of Big Brother Watch – the Dannii Minogue to the Alliance’s Kylie. The two organisations share the same Executive Director, and BBW’s other staff have previously worked for Conservative Home, the No to AV Campaign and David Cameron. When they come up with an incendiary soundbite like, say, this one: “Councils are waiting until the public aren’t watching to begin surveillance on our waste habits, intruding into people’s private lives and introducing punitive taxes on what we throw away” – they’re not trying to defend your privacy, so much as convince you that councils are bad because they want you to start resenting the tax that you pay to them. Because they hate tax. They loathe it. Tax killed their parents – no, tax ate their parents, and shat them out all over the beloved family spaniel. Let’s beat up the council with sticks and never pay them a penny again!

Whether these are good politics/economics or not isn’t the issue here. There’s nothing wrong with a campaign group being driven by an ideology –hey, they all are – it’s just the deception that doesn’t sit right, the romantic pretence that it’s all just a bunch of upstanding working folk banding together to defend against injustice. It’s not – it’s a lobby group, arguing in favour of a very narrow, specific set of interests.

Normally, when they’re quoting a lobby group, the media wraps it safely in disclaimers by making its leanings clear – as in “the left-wing IPPR” or “Policy Exchange, a think tank close to David Cameron.” They tread carefully. But BBW gets away with being labelled as a “privacy campaign” – continuing the myth that it’s a politically neutral assembly of the righteously upset – and, what’s more, like the TaxPayer’s Alliance before it, BBW knows how to get itself into print. It churns out good press releases that can be turned into copy with minimum effort. It supplies ready-made soundbites from its directors so journalists don’t have to bother going out to find them. In other words, it sells itself to the media in the same way that CCTV sells itself to councils: by offering the path of least resistance.

And it’s infuriating, because it means that every time something like this Oxford taxi kerfuffle comes around, we can’t use it as a starting point for bigger debates about privacy rights or the problems with government IT procurement because it’s all drowned out by the noise of BBW shrieking “COUNCIL SWINE SMASH THEM SMASH THEM” until they turn a funny shade of maroon and have to lie down in the park for a bit.

It’s not healthy, you know, all that sustained artificial rage. They’ll give themselves a hernia one of these days.

"BALL BALL BALL, FOOTIE FOOTIE FOOTIE!"

Ah ha ha, this is brilliant. Look at all those sadcases, sat there gormlessly whooping because a bloke in a snood booted a chunk of leather around a graffiti-ridden lawn. What’s so special about that then, you crimson-faced dribblesacks? I’m amazed that they have the brain power to rearrange their pudgy faces into such expressions of mindless, drooling glee. Some of them were even sad enough to catch a train to be there, can you believe it? And, as for the ones with the adorably pitiable scarves, I…ah…ah ha ha! Ah ha ha, oh wow…I just need a minute here to…ooh hee hee! Ho ho! Sorry, it’s just that these guys are such, such…

…such nerds.

Except they’re not, because football is one of the few things you’re still actually allowed to give a toss about these days. Still, if you’re reading this and you happen to rather like football – which statistically speaking, you probably do – then you might be a bit upset by all that hoo-hah up there. Why wouldn’t you be? It’s plain wrong. Football’s great, what with its emotional highs and colourful history and father-son bonding. And, er, organised violence, but we’ll skip over that. Still, if you bear with me on this, those guys up there really aren’t any different from these guys down here…

"CLICK CLICK CLICK, MOUSIE MOUSIE MOUSIE!"

….apart from that they chose different games to attach themselves to. Yet it’s perfectly fine to treat the Warcraft fans with hoots of derision, snorting with such violence that your nostrils invert. Why is this the case? Well, football’s undeniably far more popular. It’s been around long enough for everyone to consider it a normal activity rather than some bizarre modern aberration. And there’s a commercial imperative to encourage people to be football fans – not only will they buy team kit and coloured bobble hats, they can also be sold all kinds of utterly unrelated tat ranging from shaving gel to corporate IT. Lazy advertisers know they can use football as a simple shortcut to emotion, to ideals of speed and victory and discipline and all sorts of other words which should never, ever be associated with shaving. So football is cool, and comparatively, even such an outrageously lucrative creation as Warcraft is still small fry and, therefore, nerdalicious. (This commercial effect may also explain why it’s cool to like Apple, with their sleek designs and eye-watering prices, but it’s unspeakably nerdy to like Linux, which costs nothing and has lofty political ideals, even though the two have a lot in common.)

Recently, I had the pleasure of knocking around the GameCity festival in Nottingham, a unique event which celebrates videogame culture – rather than the actual games themselves – with madly inventive activities like molecular-gastronomic dinners, art classes, giant singalongs and treasure hunts. If you even slightly think that videogames are of any cultural importance, and you want to be in an environment full of people who strive to invite the entire public to share in that view by giving them a programme of inclusive, brilliant, free events, then there really is no better place to go. Whereas sweaty expos like E3 only want you to buy things, GameCity just wants you to have a good time – rather than the forced smiles of PR reps, GameCity offers a genuinely warm and friendly welcoming hand, extended by a hardworking volunteer, and often accompanied by a slice of tasty cake.

I am such a nerd for GameCity.

Anyway, before I veered off into all that doting nonsense like a doe-eyed tweenager having a bit of a funny turn following exposure to the Robert Pattinson calendar, I was trying to go somewhere with this. And here I am! On the last day of the festival, there was a big all day knees-up to celebrate the Legend of Zelda games – see here for why they deserve to be so lauded – and the atmosphere was, in the GameCity style, tremendously jolly: somewhere between a village fair and a really good children’s birthday party. IGN captured a rather nice video of the whole shebang…and it’s here that things start to get a bit nasty. The bile bubbled up from – where else? – the anonymous comments:

“Seriously all of you need a life…

u can get one easily but for you people you gonna need to die first!!”

“Wow people are this gay?”

“Looks like a Zelda orgy of nerds… lol but I would probs still go”

To be clear – these are people who are members of a website dedicated to videogames, making fun of people for, er, liking a videogame. Also, for the sake of veracity I should point out that for every one of those above, there are ten more in disagreement. Nevertheless, comments like that last one are just phenomenally despressing – acknowledging that you actually think it would be pretty good fun, but also trying to distance yourself from it all? For the sake of what, exactly? Who is this this guy trying to impress? Bereft of the confident self-belief in which sports fans can gently luxuriate, gamers often seem to face some sort of identity crisis whereby they suddenly flip out harder than a flubber tiddlywink, twisting their knickers around so far that they have to sit on a corkscrew for four minutes prior to every toilet visit. They turn on their fellows like snotty schoolchildren trying to score points with the older kids, hoping to claw themselves some respect and acceptance – but from where? And why?

The saddest thing I ever saw was a few years ago, in the midst of a big Warhammer event (I have, in the past, flirted with the world of plastic rulers, tiny soldiers and flabbergastingly-priced paint pots). A man of about 35 was stood there, glumly mumbling to nobody in particular, “I don’t know why I’m here, this place is just full of nerds.” I grabbed him by the lapels, my lips quivering as I bellowed – “What were you expecting? It’s a Warhammer event, in the middle of Warhammer HQ! Of course it’s full of flipping nerds – and you’re one of them, or else you wouldn’t have got this far! But you’re such an absurdly tragic figure that even here, in this place at this time, surrounded by people who love Warhammer, like you clearly do, and are looking for other people to share in that love, you still can’t let go of your childish anxieties and allow yourself to actually enjoy it? You’re a fool, man! Pull yourself together, unpack your little figurines and stop being such a bell-end!”

Well, at least that what’s I did in my head. Out loud I just very quietly mumbled “tsk, shame” and carried on enjoying myself. Still, the thing is, when people point at other people and call them names like nerd or gaylord or spoddy-spoddy-spodpants, all they’re really saying is “you’re enthusiastic about something, and for reasons best known to myself and the hardworking staff at the Institute for Dickhead Studies, I have a problem with that.” Pfff. Life’s too short for that nonsense. I don’t know why people have such an ingrained need to become passionate about something, develop a tribal identity around it, and then attack everyone who’s developed that passion around something else, but surely we as a species can rise above it. We’re all nerds of one colour or another: Aston Villa nerds, model shipbuilding nerds, X-Factor nerds, upholstery nerds, celebrity gossip nerds, word nerds, bird nerds and curd nerds.

From our first tentative forays into the social punji pits of the school classroom, we learn that effort isn’t cool, achievement is an unconscionable sin and enthusiasm is beyond the pale. However, the people least hung up on these petty reservations inevitably end up doing really well for themselves. I’ve recently been enjoying magnificent radio show called One Life Left, all about (of course) videogames, and it’s absolutely chuffing hilarious: I listened to the podcast with my breakfast once, and I’m still scraping bits of cornflake out from the corners of my mousepad. You can bet that its presenters didn’t get a radio gig by worrying to themselves about how nerdy they are. James Dyson was a massive nerd, for vacuum cleaners of all things, and look where it got him in the end.

So whether you’re into Arsenal or androids, sperlunking or stamp collecting, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Don’t be ashamed, and don’t try to sell your fellow fans down the river for the sake of illusory cool points. Cherish your nerdiness, nourish it and let your passion flourish. Go to the meetings and conventions and festivals and matches, and have a good time doing it, because nobody ever got anywhere by not giving a toot about something.

For more reasons to love GameCity, look here (thanks, Simon Parkin!) and here (thanks, Rich Keith!)

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

Don't panic, everyone!

As someone who likes to think of himself as fairly up-to-date on technological matters, as I settled down in front of the TV on Tuesday morning for my daily intake of Weetabix and BBC News it came as something of a shock to hear their tech correspondent, the resplendent Rory Cellan-Jones, casually describing how ISPs across the land were suddenly going to start blocking off “adult content.” Immediately, there arose a stirring, unanimous cry of “WHAAAAT?!” from all present (that is, three blokes all under the age of 25), suddenly panicked by the potential implications of such a move – such was my surprise, I nearly choked trying to stop myself from spraying little gobbets of brown cereal gunk all over the rug. Fortunately, the shock subsided almost as quickly as it arrived, as we heard that it was only for new customers, and all that would happen was that they’d be asked to opt-in to the blocking system when they opened an account. Phew! Rory had the situation well in hand – he went on to describe how the system would, as well as choking off the smut pipeline, also block harmless things like the Wikipedia page on Al Qaida, and as he did so you could swear there was a little cheeky glint in his eye, as if to say “Don’t worry, Dads and husbands, I’ve got this one covered. Here’s your golden excuse.”

My reaction seems to have been about the same as everyone else’s – although most other folk managed to avoid having a near-death experience as a result of inhaled wheat products. The pattern was identical: surprise, a brief soupçon of outrage, then a quick deflation as you realise that it’s not that big a deal. In fact, there’s been a fair bit of confusion around the whole thing, with our man Rory insisting that it will be something that you have to choose to switch on, while The Mail and The Guardian claimed the exact opposite: you’ll have to tell someone to turn it off. So what actually is it? James Firth, of the SRoC blog, suggests that the ISPs have agreed to no such thing, and are privately furious at the suggestion that they’re about to surround the web’s naughty bits with an iron curtain of tank traps and sniper towers, that you can only get through if you snap your heels together and ask nicely. They have committed to help raise awareness of ways that parents can block such sites, and make these tools available, but they’re each doing it in different ways: as the Guardian went on to report,  TalkTalk will continue to use the network-level filtering that they already offer, while BT will be providing a software package for users to manage themselves. Neither of these will be in any way compulsory.

So how, then, did this particular storm find its way into the news agenda’s teacup and start sloshing all over the saucer? It seems to have all stemmed from Mother’s Union, the charity (motto: “Christian Care for Families”) whose chief exec, Reg Bailey, wrote the original Bailey Report  earlier this year (title: “Letting Children be Children”) which was chock-full of headline-friendly proposals for action on things like padded bras, stripper poles, jazz mags and the like. Early Tuesday morning, in advance of a meeting with the Prime Minister, they sent out a slightly weird, typo-laden press release trumpeting “the news that major internet providers will now require customers to actively opt in to receive adult content, rather than the less effective opt out control that currently exists.” This was the line that everybody ran with before things cleared up, and seems to be a result of the Mother’s Union press office having a bit of an itchy trigger finger (I’m assuming that their press releases are shot out of a cannon) but not quite understanding what was actually discussed between ISPs and government.

This is how PR works, right?

This is a bit odd, but surely a relief to everyone who was worrying that the internet was about to be censored – it isn’t. At least, no more than it already is, thanks to the oddly-secret-if-not-actually-malicious machinations of the Internet Watch Foundation’s blocklist, which is adhered to by over 95 percent of UK connections and is supposed to keep out kiddie porn, but can occasionally misfire and shut down Wikipedia. What is it that these filters have against those guys?

This whole brouhaha has, however, revealed just how tricky it is for people to agree on what the internet actually is: ISPs seem adamant that they’re just delivery men, ferrying boxes of data to and from your computer with no regard for what’s actually inside. From a technical point of view, this is completely accurate. However, most people don’t see the web in technical terms, as a service, but in semantic terms: it’s a place, a sort of humongous public square with a respectable university and family-friendly funfair at one end, and a load of dodgy folks in trenchcoats at the other. The ISP is like a personal driver who’s supposed to take you on a tour of this wonderful new place, steering you away from the mucky and disreputable bits. This is a flawed viewpoint – unlike real life, there’s no public space online, everything is owned by someone and it’s that person alone who decides what’s going to feature on their particular patch – but it’s a popular and not entirely unreasonable one.

The struggle for ISPs, then, is that there’s plenty of demand for both models: lots of us want to simply manage our own access, but lots us don’t, and this new system – which is just a code of practice, at the end of the day – seems a like a fair crack at juggling these difficultly opposed demands. Yes, it is a bit scary, and yes, it would be better if parents just MTFU, learn a bit more about the internet and actually engage with their howling offspring themselves rather than foisting responsibility onto some corporate third party, but hey – it could be worse. After all, at least we’re not Australian.

HEY, LISTEN!

Previously, I’ve banged on about the many complicated ways that videogames can influence children and how we gaming types shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand over the issue or, worse, wheeze up a massive fuss and make ourselves look like we deserve to be the main window display in “Ye Olde Snivelling Dickhead Shoppe.” Today, though, to add a more personal perspective to this whole messy business, I’d like to share some thoughts on my own childhood gaming experiences.

Specifically, this means Zelda. My first Zelda experience came at the tender age of twelve, when my brand-new Nintendo 64 was placed proudly atop my fourteen-inch TV like a chunky plastic monarch, regally surveying the few square metres of tattered bedroom that would be its new kingdom. Not having had much gaming experience beyond the odd prod at a Gameboy, my N64 – alongside its most famous game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – was a revelation. The colours! The sounds! The wide open vistas! It was the first time I’d seen how art, music, characters and story can all come together to give a game a real atmosphere, a soul all of its own, and I was hooked.

I’ve played through six different Zelda titles – my very favourites, Ocarina and the even better Majora’s Mask, have had eight or nine plays each, so my total Zelda time must easily run to a few hundred hours: this may sound weird, but it’s really not so bad in context.  All the games follow the same basic formula: something most heinous, often the evil Ganon, is threatening the mystical land of Hyrule and it’s up to Link, a sprightly kid in a green nightcap who’s usually between ten and nineteen years old, to make his way across the land defeating Ganon’s assorted flunkeys until getting to the big bad boss himself and taking him down mano-a-mano. Along the way, you explore Hyrule’s towns and villages, which contain their fair share of oddballs and troubled souls who can help you along your way.

Is it violent? Absolutely. Link’s always waving his sword about, slicing some monstrous spider into gooey leg soup or lobbing flaming arrows at evil bats. A lot of the fun lies in using a mix of skills and tactics to overcome your obstacles and escape mortal peril – without combat, there wouldn’t be any real game mechanic. Nevertheless, it’s still a far cry from stabbing Arabs in the face amidst some grimy HONESTLY-IT’S-NOT-AFGHANISTAN-IT-JUST-LOOKS-VERY-SIMILAR near-future warzone – no, this is just simple, old-fashioned fantasy. In the dark ages before the invention of television finally made it blissfully simple to figure out where all your furniture should be pointing, kids would be reading about or acting out their own Zelda-like adventures, with courageous champions slapping down naughty monsters. You know: the Hero’s Journey, and all that. In fact, Zelda draws on a rich heritage of folklore from its native Japan – a heritage that goes back centuries, and is translated into the game as one simple message:

Whenever it’s possible to help someone, you should.

For much of Ocarina, for example, it’s impossible to progress without lending a hand to folk. You have to help the lovable Gorons find a new source of their favourite food (rocks), and chase angry parasites from the belly of the giant fish Jabu-Jabu.  Yet there are plenty of things you aren’t obliged to do, but can if you feel like it: rescue lost dogs, round up chickens, help a family escape a creepy spider-curse. These always result in some tangible reward for the player, usually a nice bit of equipment, and you can always clearly see the positive difference you’ve just made to someone’s life. They don’t just slink off moodily, but actively parade their newfound happiness about the place and always, always – in accordance with Japanese customs – offer a hearty “Thankyou!”

Hang on Anju, we're gonna fix this!

Throughout Japanese fairytales, especially stories like “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow” and “Momotaro,” there’s a recurring theme  - the protagonist offers some small help to his fellows, and later on finds this good deed repaid many times over, often when he or she needs it most. It’s easy to see why Japanese society, for all its faults, is one of the most cohesive in the world. The game’s designers cite one story in particular – the “straw millionaire” – as the direct inspiration for Zelda’s famous trading quests, which have Link running around the whole of Hyrule, swapping items with various strangers to solve their problems, before finally receiving some sort of reward. In Ocarina, you have to make nine such swaps before you can finally get the eyedrops you need to help out your mate Biggoron, who’s promised to make you a wicked tasty sword if you can help him reclaim his sight.

It might sound like all this helpfulness stems from selfish greed for shiny new toys, but that’s not necessarily true: in Majora’s Mask, the darkest but most brilliant of the series, Link has only three days to save a town from being crushed by the falling moon. He does this by constantly travelling back in time, reliving those same three days over and over until he can finally sort it all out. This means that, after you’ve put all your effort into, say, saving the marriage of two tragically cursed lovers,  you only end up having to warp back to the past and see all that good work undone. Even though you get to keep whatever baubles you received for your efforts, they don’t make up for how absolutely heartbreaking it is to see these characters, those lovely, endearing people for whom you feel genuine empathy and worked so hard to help, sent straight back into misery.

Even though a lot of stories on the subject are obviously nonsense, it’s still true that games can have a negative impact on children’s learning and behaviour. Yet, as someone who’s been a committed Zelda fan since he was a wee sprout of a lad, I think it’s still worth remembering that these titles, in tribute to those classic folktales, carry a strongly prosocial message and prove that it’s possible to have a hugely successful, multi-million selling series of games that aren’t just artistically brilliant and great fun to play, but can also teach you to be a better person.

Breaking news isn’t really the Thursday Bucket’s forte – it was deliberately chosen to be a one-day-a-week job because I spend the rest of my time oscillating between downing enough gin to fill a bathtub, and building glittering little forts out of the empties. Nevertheless, sometimes an absolute whopper of a story just falls into your lap, as juicy and irresistible as a chunk of prime ribeye, demanding so much attention that it’s enough to distract from uniboobs and ladies’ luggage and whatever else is crusting up the pipes over at Britain’s favourite newspaper site.

The news, currently doing the rounds of the blogs but likely to emerge on the big sites fairly soon, is that an ITV documentary on Gaddafi’s relationship with the IRA features one particularly poorly-chosen segment of footage. It purports to show the actual real-life IRA shooting actual real-life bullets at an actual real-life helicopter which then chucks out great heaving gobbets of smoke and plummets into the actual real-life ground. However! That footage is quite obviously fake, and was in fact created using the videogame ArmA 2: a “lifelike combat simulation” created by Bohemia Interactive.  You can watch it yourself on ITV Player here (the offending segment starts at 28:20). EDIT: it looks like ITV have just this minute taken the video down from their site, but not before a kind soul managed to lift out the evidence (which now headlines this piece) and preserve it in Youtube aspic for future generations. This vid from the wonderful jordan8445 also helpfully includes the full, uncut footage in which its gamey origins are plain to see – look at the wibbly fires, the flatpack trees!

The original fan-made video apparently came from this odd channel, NOTICIATUBE, which seems to specialise in showing wartime reconstructions – here, ancient film of knackered Equity members in Napoleonic gear rubs shoulders uncomfortably with newer incidents mocked up in ArmA 2, in the same trademark style of “wobbly camera, terrible sound”. Indeed, their latest effort is an old conspiracy theorists’ favourite – that HMS Invincible was sunk during the Falklands War, but it was all covered up by the British government. This definitely didn’t happen, but NOTICIATUBE seem to have no problem knocking together a simulation in ArmA 2 and presenting it as fact – or, as they put it, “BREAKING TV NEWS”.

They’re not, then, the most reliable of sources. Having said that, the helicopter incident was real: a Lynx helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing over South Armagh in 1988 after coming under fire, and one soldier was slightly injured by the force of the landing. Michael Buerk was all over it in the days before he went all cranky and started hating women – though the original news broadcast came without the rubbish flute music, which is a recent addition courtesy of the IRA fanbase.

What went wrong, then, deep in the bowels of ITV Studios? Well, as much as I’d love for this to be a part of some massive conspiracy, with the Pope and the Illuminati and Simon Cowell all scheming together, the chances are it really was all a simple mistake. An unlucky, frazzled researcher needed to get the footage quickly, panicked and nicked the first thing they found on Youtube: after all, journalists are left with less and less time for fact-checking these days. Or maybe they just got their tapes mixed up: in the claustrophobic confusion of a busy edit suite, it can happen. The programme cuts maniacally from talking head, to reconstruction, to ominous footage of empty chairs, to newsreel clips and back to talking heads again so quickly and so regularly that just watching it made my head hurt and my eyes spin like caffeinated breakdancers – stitching it all together must have been a nightmare as the producers deftly intertwined fact and fiction.

EDIT #2: ITV has just released a statement : “The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers.”

Still, this really should have been picked up before the show went out. Especially in a week when the tabloid rags have been shrieking, so loudly that it was almost funny, about how we’re all doomed because nobody can tell the difference between games and reality (though I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that this claim is a cube of solidified gnat’s farts). The fact that it went un-noticed when the crew reviewed the final cut suggests that they must have been operating on a horribly tight schedule – it’s a fact of life that many shows are polished off at four a.m. in a cramped Soho edit suite.

So what happens now? My money is on ITV leaving things at the “it was all a mistake” statement for now, waiting overnight to see how bad the damage is after it gets picked up in tomorrow’s papers. It was an in-house production by ITV Studios, so they can’t palm off the blame on some poor independent company. They’ll certainly conduct an internal review, and if the public reaction is really severe they might rush out a new set of guidelines – these won’t address the central problem that the crew didn’t have enough time to check it properly, but will use a lot of words like “tight compliance” and “thorough analysis” which won’t really mean anything in terms of changes on the ground, though they might add a bit more unneeded aggro for producers.

However, if the reaction is really bad, and they’ve got the Mail and the Express and all the other jackals frothing all over their lapels, then ITV management might have to sacrifice one of their own, regardless of whether they deserve it. This wouldn’t be without precedent:  last time something like this happened, in 2007, the controller of BBC One – Peter Fincham – was forced to resign when it turned out that footage of the Queen had been grossly mis-represented in the final edit.

So – who at the top of ITV is most likely to be quaking in their X-Factor pyjamas? I can’t say I personally know who was involved in commissioning the show, but I’d keep my eye on Michael Jermey – he’s the Director of News, Sport & Current Affairs – and Alison Sharman, the Director of Factual & Daytime. They’re probably safe, though, because in these situations the baying masses prefer to get their blood right from the very top, taking a scalp from the Board of Management itself. Which means that the one person who could be in real trouble would be the Director of Television – and who might that be, but a certain…Peter Fincham, who may be one of the unluckiest men in TV.

This will be all from The Bucket this week – normal service resumes on Thursday next  

“Mr Jenkins, this chap says he’s from KPMG. He’s redrafted the PFI contracts for you.” “Ah, brilliant! Send him in, Charlie, I like the man’s style. He’s a snappy dresser, and such great taste in music.” “Are you sure, sir? He seems a bit like a lazy and over-exaggerated visual metaphor.”

Like an asthmatic platypus making a doomed escape attempt from a collapsed toffee apple factory, the botched NHS computerisation scheme has finally wheezed its way to a sticky end. Admittedly, cutting up its bloated carcass reveals a few still-useful organs, making it not-quite-as-massive a muck-up as everyone seems to be suggesting: the central patient records database works, a bit, though it’s only mildly necessary at best, and the digital X-ray sharing wotsit seems to be mostly running well. So that’s nice. Still – for something costing twelve billion pounds (coincidentally, the same amount as that tricky deficit thing that we keep trying to sort out by firing police and gutting charities) you’d hope for a bit more. I mean, according to the sums I’ve just scrawled on the back of my hand, that’s enough money to buy 4792,452,830 boxes of Coco Pops – enough for every man, woman and child in Britain to eat a delicious chocolatey breakfast every day for three and a half years.

(Admittedly, my methodology is hugely flawed here as it assumes everyone sticks to the recommended portion size – a stingy 35 grams, barely enough to cover the bottom of the bowl.)

So something that lets doctors send each other photos of your ribs doesn’t really seem worth it – they could have just got a Flikr account and spent the rest of the day figuring out how many swimming pools they could fill with all those Coco Pops (this is actually quite a tricky question). What happened, then? How did such a simple idea – a better computer system that’s standard across the NHS – grow into an enormous saggy monster that failed miserably in almost every single one of its aims, toppling soggily to the ground like a tower block of wet tofu? The full answers are still hidden away somewhere, but nevertheless  some brave explanations have emerged blinking into the light of day, stumbling cautiously out from beneath the massive rock of turds. They go like this:

The contracts were signed before anyone really knew what they wanted. It turns out that it’s a bit difficult to figure out what’s best for every single one of the UK’s 353 NHS hospitals, and apply it universally. When it came down to actually sticking the kit in the hospitals, everyone changed their mind faster than Gaga changes spangly kickers and everything was left going round and round in endless design meetings until they all got dizzy and had to go home.

The contracts were badly thought-out and poorly assigned. This one’s a bit obvious really, but the point still stands – at the beginning, policy bods crowed about how these contracts would punish any supplier who failed to deliver what they’d promised. But when the suppliers all started to fall away like scabs from an abscess, what happened? They, er, got away with it. Accenture could have been charged a billion pounds for walking away from its £2bn contract; instead it got away with a relatively paltry £63 million. Another main supplier, iSoft – who were tasked with writing the software for these systems – went bum-over-nostrils and had to be bailed out by the government to the tune of £82 million; four of its ex-directors ending up being charged over certain “irregularities” in the iSoft accounts. Whoops!

The tendering process excluded small companies. Amidst all the flap, this is the big solution to the NHS’s computer woes: letting individual hospitals sort their own IT out with small, local projects that can be easily managed. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley went so far as to call this “an innovative new system driven by local decision-making” – the very fact that this idea should be considered innovative just goes to show how squiffy the whole tendering process had become, skewed so far towards massive globocorps like Fujitsu and Accenture that it’s a wonder it just fall over into their waiting arms. Let’s use an example of standards-led design – the MP3, say. It shouldn’t have been too hard for the NHS to get a small technical team to decide the standards for coding up patient files, like the bunch of sexy Germans who came up with the rules for making MP3s. Then they could have left it up to the individual trusts themselves to figure out what sort of system they wanted – in the same way the German team let other people knock together stuff like iTunes or Windows Media Player or whatever, safe in the knowledge that MP3s would always be compatible between them. OK, this approach isn’t perfect – it doesn’t let the NHS as a whole use its freakishly huge purchasing power to get the cheapest deal. But it also would have meant that everyone didn’t get stuck trying to make a one-size-fits-entire-country bonkers electrobox.

Piers Morgan did it. Well, probably. He is a colossal dickhead, after all.

Brandenburg, Grill and Popp. They sound like they might be mascots for Aldi’s own-brand knock-off equivalent to Rice Krispies, but actually these guys did a great job on MP3 so I can’t really bring myself to make much fun of them. Good on you, lads!

This affair might have been relatively forgivable – it was a hugely ambitious project after all – were it not for the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time. Usually the culprit is PFI, an odd financial dodge beloved by successive governments of all party colours, which has private companies own things like hospitals and fire engines then rent them back to the state in a sort of buy-now-pay-more-later scheme: the Public Accounts Committee say it “provides a better deal for the private sector than for the taxpayer,” the head of Unison reckons it’s like paying for a mortgage on your credit card, and Private Eye has an entertaining examination of the whole sordid mess here. PFI leaves the government stuck in contracts lasting twenty or thirty years – it’s got a lot of hospitals built, and some of them have worked out fairly well, but they’re expensive to keep going, and there have been few spectacular implosions along the way.

There’s the amazing story of FiReControl, whose oddly capitalised name makes it look a bit like a Japanese kids’ merchandising phenomenon. It was actually a wheeze first coughed up by John Prescott  to fiddle with the 999 calls system, against the wishes of just about everybody else. In full public view, it went massively wrong on a scale not often seen outside the Katona family, costing nearly £500 million in the process and leaving us forced to keep paying fifty grand a week to rent empty buildings from the PFI contractor. Then there’s Metronet, the PFI consortium that was supposed to run the London Underground and instead just wazzed it all up the wall, collapsing under the weight of its own ineptitude and having to be bought out again by the government. £410 million for that one, which might explain why a single ticket in central London costs four pounds while you can go anywhere you like on the Beijing metro – air-conditioned! – for 20p.

Even the PFI schemes that work out still don’t provide as much value as they should: one of the key assumptions underpinning the calculations behind PFI is that the companies involved will pay tax on the profits they make, thus giving the Treasury a refund of sorts that makes PFI cheaper. Problem is, the rules guiding these sums – the so-called “Green Book” – were written by the consultancy firm KPMG, who also have a nice line in advising PFI companies on how to avoid that same tax by registering their businesses in Guernsey. It’s a nice trick for KPMG, but a kick in the nuts for the public purse. Which, er, is apparently the sort of purse that has testes. Best not dwell on that.

PFI contracts are often hastily-drawn, short-sighted monstrosities – but they’re glitteringly faultless in comparison to the overpriced and badly-tendered reams of bogroll that come streaming out of the MoD printers.  The kind of contracts that spend £500m upgrading helicopters, and then downgrading them again while they sit unflown in a hangar for eleven years. Or hiring a consultancy firm on a single-tender contract worth a cool twelve mill, which wasn’t advertised or opened up to any other bidders. Or allowing employees who work on the contracts to leave and take up a post at the very same company that was just awarded the job – a policy which can backfire in a seriously bogus way, man.

Basically, the government is rubbish at buying stuff. It doesn’t shop around, or think about what gives it the best value. It gets everything on credit, from its mates who assure it that they’re all perfectly legit, and ends up losing billions which it then has to claw back from teacher’s pensions and the dying: groups which, unlike massive arms companies or consultancy peddlers, aren’t in the habit of regularly taking top civil servants out to lavish dinners. I don’t mean to come across as some raving hippy who snorts wheatgrass and thinks shoes are unethical , but still – when the government is spurting cash down the U-bend like it’s the morning after they’ve just gone for a night out on the poppers to celebrate winning  the “Let’s See Who Can Spend a Whole Week Eating Nothing But Vindaloo and Coins Contest,” you’ve got to ask: would it be too much for someone to learn how to write a decent contract? And if not, can I still have my 42 months worth of free cereal?

His head really is that shape, you know. You could call it "bulbous".

American football is bloody brilliant, and it knocks most other sports into a cocked hat. Formula One? That’s just a bunch of millionaires playing fancy Scalextric. The BBC was right to get rid of it – F1 on TV barely works as a screensaver, let alone an actual sport. Pole vault? The only reason anybody pays attention is because they all look silly when they get it wrong. But American football – ah, now there’s a game. Violent as well as tactical, it’s got something for everyone – and nowhere is this more evident than in the crown princes of the sport, the quarterbacks. In the space of just a few seconds, these athletic ubermensch have to see through the opponents’ strategic bluffs, reorganise their entire team’s positions, pirouette gracefully out of the clutches of the bellowing tackler who’s ploughing towards them like a fleshy express train, and then throw an inch-perfect pass sixty yards down the field.

In a world full of impossibly shiny helmets and immaculately-coiffured cheerleaders, these men are gods among mortals. In the eyes of the fans, they can do no wrong. But what about the eyes of the law? And what happens when those eyes overlap in big gooey optometrist’s nightmare?

Last week saw the return of Michael Vick to the NFL’s elite ranks, as he signed a cool hundred-million-dollar deal to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because in 2007 – while he was the darling of the Atlanta Falcons – Vick was uncovered running an illegal dog-fighting ring. Oh, and just to add a little spice to the story, they electrocuted the animals that lost. Yet now here he is, his prison stint over and done with, and all is forgotten. Even a shooting at his birthday party couldn’t throw things off course. Meanwhile, Ben “Rapey” Roethlisberger looks set to become one of the best-performing quarterbacks of recent times, despite the murky shadows cast by the many sexual assault accusations against him. How do they get away with it?

When you’re as great a player as these two undeniably are, you become a hero in the eyes of thousands. As a fan, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that someone who’s single-handedly transformed your team from a pathetic potato gun into a mighty VICTORY CANNON could also be an absolutely horrendous person, someone who in any other career would have been kicked out long ago. When you hear, yet again, that Roethlisberger has been accused of getting a woman blind drunk and locking her in a nightclub toilet with him, you definitely want him to get properly punished for it. But a less rational and much louder part of you wants to see him nail another sixty-yard score, so you try not to think about the other thing. You make excuses – like in this astonishing piece from Michael Tomasky, who claims that since “you can’t be a great athlete at that level and be living an effed up life,” Vick’s prowess on the field must in itself be evidence that he’s reformed. Unlike Tomasky, I do have the courage to swear properly and so I’m not afraid to say that his argument is a soggy, gently pulsating sack of absolute bullshit.

However, looking again to that ever reliable mirror of public sentiment – the internet commenter – you can see that plenty of people share this desperate desire to see their heroes remain untarnished. In Vick’s case, many are praising him as a reformed character, someone who started off as a good guy, went wrong, but now has turned his life around and is even greater than he was in the first place:

• how about considering the positive idea that our corrections system MAY occasionally work the way it’s supposed to instead of just complaining at someone who’s trying to change his life for the better, for whatever reasons.
• he did his time and I am sure he is very sorry for what he did
• He paid his debt to society.  Leave him alone.  To all of you who think he has done nothing you should do better research on the things he has done.  he got congress to put tougher sanctions on those who are doing this.

Maybe Vick really has changed his ways. Maybe he hasn’t. Amongst the choking haze of the PR smokescreen, it’s impossible to tell – though it looks like the tight cocoon of advisers, lifestyle coaches and other babysitters that the NFL has woven around him will leave him with no choice but to toe the line from now on. As appealing as this ‘changed man’ narrative is, some fans took the even simpler, and far uglier, step of arguing that what he did was fine all along:

• Go Vick!  I don’t give a flying phuck about those dogs with NO SOULS!!!
• People get so damn emotional over dogs. The US is getting too soft.
• Well, speaking as a Philly guy, I can tell you that we just really do not care about whether he is reformed, although we would like to tghink so. And some of us are wondering exactly why dog-fighting is a Federal crime.

(the above come from Vick’s fan forum, the Sherdog MMA forum, and the comments on Tomasky’s story above)

Yet for all the heartless fans out there who don’t care for dogs, there’s far more who have even less respect for women. The responses lying below every Roethlisberger story, festering like the rotten puddle at the bottom of the restaurant’s bins, don’t only show off just how little these fans understand sexual assault, or can sympathise with how a victim of such a crime would feel. They go out of their way to pour hot, violent hatred all over the women involved:

• I think the girl is just out for money,Ben could get about any girl he wants why would he have to rape someone.Ben I do agree you need to pay more attenion to your fans but good luck Ben and as for the girl if u are making this up just think about all Ben’s young fans like my son who idols him and how hard it is to explain this to them
• who cares. she is just a fame whore and a slut who didn’t get her way so she cried rape. like a million other girls.

And finally there’s this particularly delightful nugget, in response to the news that one of Big Ben’s alleged victims ended up leaving college because she found the attention from the press and her classmates unbearable:

• The tramp ruined her own life. She wasn’t raped. Who cares if he touched her boob? She shouldn’t have been in a club anyway, she’s under 21. I doubt Ben did anything but if she didn’t want to deal with the press, she shouldn’t have filed charges. Maybe after Ben gets his third super bowl ring, he can give that to her to make up for the alleged boob rub.

(these ones are from WXPI and TMZ)

But look, he has his own sandwich! His OWN sandwich. He must be one of the good guys!

The Roethlisberger ones in particular show just how far fans are prepared to go in order to desperately sweep aside the fact that Ben’s been accused of three sex crimes in eighteen months. Of course – those women must all just be in for the money! The problem is, some of those same fans happen to serve the judicial system: like Jerry Blash, the first officer on the scene of the Georgia toilet case and the only one to directly interview the quarterback. Blash had to resign when it emerged that while doing so he’d told the distraught girl and her friends that “the fucking bitch is drunk” and that they should go home, because “Mr Roethlisberger has a lot of money” and a police report would be a “waste of time.” Not one to miss out on a good opportunity, he also snapped a few photos of himself with Big Ben. You know – a treasured memento. Something to show the kids. Here’s Daddy, and here’s the sex attacker he helped to avoid jail!

Quarterbacks are the most precious asset a team can have. Good ones are coddled from high school onwards – repeatedly informed of their own brilliance, they can easily start to think they’re invincible. That their performance on the field gives them a free pass to do whatever they like outside it. This means that, sometimes, good quarterbacks are bad people. Sometimes, good decorators are bad people too. So are good HGV drivers, or copywriters. But they don’t get to enjoy the protection that these superstars do – they don’t have the collective unconscious of thousands of devout fans on their side, each of them attached with an intense, primal adulation. When a big name gets into trouble with the law, rather than delude themselves into thinking that it must all be some sort of conspiracy and going out of their way to discredit absolutely everyone who dares suggest otherwise, the fans need to ask themselves: what if he just sold plumbing supplies for a living? Even if he was the best plumbing supplies salesman in the whole country, would you still take his side?

And would you want to have your photo taken with him afterwards?

Look at this thing! It's not a gun, it's the lovechild of a water pistol and an electric shaver.

Who here among us hasn’t honestly, at some point, wished that they could kill someone not for justice or revenge, but for convenience? Maybe it’s that annoying housemate who always gets to the shower first, or a terrible boss who blocks all your ideas, or that MONSTROUS BUMHOLE stood at the train station barriers, fiddling around with his bag because he was too DENSE to get his ticket out BEFORE he reached the gates, and now EVERYBODY is being held up and it’s been TWELVE WHOLE SECONDS now and this is just INFURIATING and – oh, he’s found it now. Well ABOUT BLOOMIN’ TIME. Tosser.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just kill these awful people and get them out of our way? Not KILL kill them, obviously. Properly killing people is really bad. But maybe we could, y’know, just kill them a little bit. Knock them out for a while. Get them out of our hair.

This magnificent dream has been enthusiastically taken up by film and TV, who have to struggle with the problem that violence is really cool and exciting and offers a fast way to resolve conflicts without any boring talky nonsense, but also leads to people getting hurt or selfishly bleeding all over the place. As we’ve mentioned, this is a BAD THING and as such can ruin your movie’s age certification. The solution is to pretend that it really is possible to just duff people up and knock them out without any nasty consequences whatsoever – Superman, Spiderman and all the other “-men” of the comic book world are heroes because they beat up bad guys but never ever kill. The best manifestation of this wonderful fantasy has to be the Phaser, from Star Trek – a wizardly technology that works just like a real gun, except it painlessly stuns you for a bit rather than messily spraying your insides all over the bookshelves. The show’s pitched battles between good and evil are basically a paintball match, but with better sound effects.

You tell 'em, Kirk.

Phasers aren’t real, which is probably just as well. But Tasers are. The name’s almost identical, they look like a kiddies’ toy raygun, and they promise to “incapacitate dangerous, combative, or high-risk subjects who pose a risk to law enforcement/correctional officers, innocent citizens, or themselves in a manner that is generally recognized as a safer alternative to other uses of force.” That is: they zap your nuts off with electricity, and you fall to the ground, still awake, in a grotesque twitching mess.

Before I go any further, a clarification: this piece isn’t really about Tasers themselves. I’m not actually against them, in principle – if they allow an officer to quickly and accountably respond to an immediate threat, without lethal force, then great. However, there’s a whole tricky quagmire of arguments around whether or not Tasers cause heart attacks, whether all those muscle spasms can properly damage you, and exactly how much it hurts to be shot by one. I can’t drive through that quagmire – this blog doesn’t have the tyres for it.

What I will say is this: it can be very easy to get carried away by all the exciting possibilities that a magic stun-gun has to offer, whether or not it really is as non-lethal as it claims. This week, there’s been a storm of controversy around the things, and looking abroad you can find some truly terrifying examples:  like the tasing of a twelve year old girl who ran away from a truant officer, or of a lone man who ran onto the pitch during a baseball game, doing dangerous and threatening things like, er, waving a flag. Did these people deserve fourteen thousand volts of bowel-loosening shock therapy? Of course not – but they got it anyway, because the promise of a quick and easy, consequence-free violent solution is too alluring to resist. It can be addictive – like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer learns the Vulcan nerve grip, and promptly pinches his way out of every awkward social encounter.

Other people can be a real pain. They can be stubborn, wilful, ignorant beasts who get so far up your nose that they could carve a likeness of Bill Shatner in your bogeys. Dealing with them properly requires diplomacy, respect and phenomenal patience – a mature and considerate approach. Toddlers might bite and kick to get their own way, but we grown-ups are supposed to be better than that. So yes, if someone poses a real and imminent danger, then by all means zap their buttocks into a clenching frenzy, but let’s not start using these things as a cheap shortcut to deal with any slightly difficult situation. It’s just rude.

"Man, I wish that stupid castle didn't keep getting in the way of my swimming. What a mindless tribute to the endless human capacity for tackiness."

The European debt crisis is primed to explode. The US economy is a ticking time bomb with a short fuse. Britain, meanwhile is stuffed to the guts with economic H-BOMBS that could go OFF at ANY SECOND and incinerate your GOLDFISH – quick, better go stock up on lead-lined tanks and reinforced concrete versions of those little castles that everybody puts in there for some unfathomable reason, even though fish (being gill-bearing aquatic vertebrates rather than warty medieval monarchs) probably couldn’t give a wet slap about the detail on the crenellations or the defendability of the cornices. They’re just fish, man. They’re never going to need to hold their ground against a horde of rampaging Jutes.

There was supposed to be a point to that first paragraph, a point which goes something like this: there’s a certain specific terminology that’s springing up around the state of the western economy, one which paints the whole thing as a horrendously mismanaged superweapon whose hapless controllers are always just seconds away from making the final moronic mistake that will trigger the whole thing and doom us all. Imagine the Death Star being piloted by the Chuckle Brothers, and you’re more or less there.

Human society has a fascinating predisposition for taking metaphors and grinding them so deeply into the fabric of conversation that we forget that they’re even there in the first place. There’s a funky book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By that lifts the lid on this whole “conceptual metaphor” business, with examples like TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY*:

Do you have much time left?

He’s living on borrowed time.

How do you spend your time these days?

That flat tyre cost me an hour.

I lost a lot of time when I got sick.

Thank you for your time.

(*the authors insist on always writing out these metaphors in big capital letters, and I’m not going to disagree. I don’t want the robot death police smashing down my door for crimes against linguistics.)

Time, of course, is not a precious commodity. There’s absolutely loads of it around. In fact, the whole notion of time as a collection of discreet little chunks is a specifically Western idea, which plenty of people – say, Hindus – might disagree with. Yet because we’ve managed to precisely quantify time, and tie it up so closely with the way we understand work and pay, we’ve come to see time as a sort of currency. This idea has become so embedded in our culture that we talk about it constantly, reinforcing it through our language, without really thinking about it as a metaphor anymore. We go straight from the words to the emotional response, bypassing any conscious awareness of either how the mechanism works, or that there might be any alternatives.

This rubbish stock photo for motivational business presentations is a pretty strong argument for the idea that "Time = Money" is absolute doggyplops.

Getting back to the point then, this whole “economic bombshell” notion could well be a lot more dangerous than it sounds. If the same thing starts to happen here as with time, if people get so used to saying it that it just worms its way into their subconscious, drops anchor and refuses to leave, then there might be trouble. Because an economy is not a timebomb – it isn’t really a physical thing at all. It certainly can’t suddenly engulf you in white-hot fire, wracking your body with searing pain like you’re on the cover of an old Cradle of Filth album. I’m no expert on economics, but from what I can tell from lazily flicking through the financial news, the important thing seems to be confidence. There’s a load of people out there with absolutely truckloads of cash that they’re happy to keep pumping around the planet so long as they’re confident that everything’s alright. If that confidence starts to wobble, though, they shut down all the valves and sit on their enormous money mountains while the rest of us scrabble for pennies.

Confidence, like time, isn’t limited. It isn’t a rare compound that can only be found by employing dextrous Indonesian children to ruck through the droppings of a rare pacific sea weasel, scrabbling through the acrid muck in search of just one elusive, glittering nugget of hope. It’s a state of mind, something that you can inspire in others: but you won’t manage it if you keep shuddering on about how we’re all on the brink of disaster. If we change our tune, though, we might be in with a chance: TIME IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY might be well and truly wedged into everybody’s heads, but there’s still a chance to change our metaphoric minds on the economy question. How about EUROPEAN MARKETS ARE DELICIOUS LOLLIPOPS or AMERICAN WORKERS ARE GODLIKE UBERMENSCH?

It doesn’t even need to be daft propaganda – just the absence of the usual doomladen fear-mongering might do the trick. Right now, the world is full of bankers and brokers hiding inside giant citadels of cash, guarding the gates to normality. They’re still a bit too scared to come out, but if we all settle down a bit and stop screeching for a second, we might be able to calm their skittish hearts and coax them back out. After all, they don’t need their make-believe fortresses any more than your goldfish do.