Video Games Offer Best Way To Super-Fitness, Claim Video Game Makers

The console-game industry has lashed out at the government's recent Change4Life advertisements, angrily refuting the suggestion that people who while away their empty lives sitting on their arses, mechanically shaking a bit of plastic at a screen, may not in fact be leading the healthiest of all possible lifestyles.

The health campaign - which is supported by Cancer Research, the British Heart Foundation and Diabetes UK - featured a young boy holding a Playtendoboxega-type controller, with the strapline: "Risk an early death: just do nothing."

The industry has formally complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, claiming that they are being unfairly targeted.

"Many video games are mentally stimulating, potentially educational and social and some involve physical exercise," said one software developer. "Just look at the millions of people whose mental agility has been boosted way beyond the level of mere genius by being asked to add single-digit numbers in their heads by their handhelds. See how society as a whole has benefited greatly from a generation of Warcraft players learning how to co-operate in total harmony with other oddballs they will never meet, in order to slaughter everything that crosses their path. And furiously shaking your Pii controller at the telly all night has been scientifically proven to give the average teenager the right arm of a fiddler crab up to three times faster than compulsive wanking."

"Our researchers have painstakingly built up a profile of the average console addict," said a Microninkony spokesman. "They are exactly like Dr Manhattan in mental capacity and physique - although, of course, female players are missing the cock."

"Perhaps I should rephrase that," he added. "Or then again, perhaps not."

The government, however, asserted that there was plenty of contradictory research showing that most members of the gaming community actually bear a far stronger resemblance to the psychotic sociopath Rorschach, if Rorschach were to abandon his sparse diet of cold baked beans, nail himself to a lavatory bowl for ten years and punish his protesting guts mercilessly with a relentless, conveyor belt-fed diet of pizza, crisps and Red Bull.