Panorama Accuses Games Industry Of Addicting Players To ‘Fun’

Hard-hitting BBC current affairs flagship Panorama will tonight blow the lid on the computer games industry’s despicable use of a dangerously addictive ingredient in their products, which scientists have identified as ‘Fun’.

The Panorama team spent weeks playing various Fun-packed games on a range of computers and consoles, all of which can be bought over the counter in any town in the UK without a prescription from a medical practitioner. Within a single day, say psychologists, each and every one of them soon developed classic patterns of compulsive behaviour.

What a tragic waste of young lives

Undercover reporters say there is mounting evidence to show that cynical game designers try to cram as much Fun into their products as possible, and are demanding government action to outlaw it completely.

Canadian software developer UbiSoft, however, was singled out for praise.

“Because you can’t save a game until they say so, every time you get killed you have to wade through the same old crap time and time again. Tests have proved that the typical player would get more Fun out of an Excel spreadsheet,” said investigative reporter John Sweeney, who is now in recovery after throwing his laptop against a wall. “Canada must have some sort of law against it.”

According to the programme makers, the television industry has become a world leader in the abolition of Fun.

“Unbelievably, there was once a time when Fun was a regular part of the television schedules,” droned a hatchet-faced Jeremy Vine. “Disturbingly, we have uncovered evidence that this was even targeted specifically at children - leading to a lifelong craving for Fun programming which has left many victims, now in their forties, sad and depressed because it is no longer available in these more enlightened times. These tragic cases desperately tune into shows like The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing hoping to find just a trace of Fun, but producers now follow strict guidelines to ensure that any element which suggests even the slightest hint of Fun has been ruthlessly excised from the content - leaving these pathetic addicts disappointed, twitching and moaning about their fix.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health said that politicians from all parties were deeply opposed to Fun, pointing out that the coalition government had, in six months, done more to eradicate the Fun from people’s lives than any previous government.

“Gordon Brown - a moral paragon who has never had Fun in his entire life - made it a personal crusade to eradicate it completely from our society,” he pointed out, “So it was a tragic irony that, as soon as he became prime minister, an entire industry immediately began making Fun of him.”

Although the present government has already made rapid progress in taking all the Fun out of life in Britain for the foreseeable future, some observers have suggested that many senior Conservative ministers are secretly having huge amounts of Fun.

“Just look at George Osborne,” pointed out a lobby correspondent. “Every time he jumps up with another cut to make your miserable existence even less tolerable, you can plainly see the Fun in his eyes.”

The only entirely Fun-free politicians, he added, were the Liberal Democrats.

“When they contemplate their impending local elections wipeout next May, it’s obvious that all the Fun has gone out of their lives,” he observed.