The heroes have to get through a locked door, or across a courtyard, or into the back of a van, but they can’t. All is very much about to be lost; and then, out of nowhere, some nameless character just doing his or her job steps up and does The Right Thing — looks the other way, distracts the bad guys, presses the button.

Situation saved, everybody rejoices.

Except…

Call me odd [1], but I often find myself thinking about that character, long after the movie has forgotten that he or she existed. You know, the character who was instrumental in saving the day, who no-one seems to give a damn about less than half a minute later.

I often wonder if that character, as he or she is being gently lowered into a pit of scorpion spiders by a very annoyed Evil Mastermind, ever stops to think, “You know what? My life would have been a lot more pleasant if I’d just yelled, ‘Hey fellas, they’re over here!’”

That character even has a trademark look — first the indecision, second the realisation that it’s down to him or her to do The Right Thing, and then finally… the nod.

The nod that says, “This is totally worth the scorpion spiders. I mean, sure, I don’t know who any of you are. And, come to think of it, I have no idea what you’re doing here — for all I know, you’re simply going to steal the photocopier. But, but, helping whoever you are do whatever it is you’re here to do, is totally and utterly worth the scorpion spiders.”

I know I’m not alone in being mildly worried about these things — fabulous author Terry Pratchett has written several books in the Discworld series about the guards of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch — characters who, in any other literary context, would have been considered to be expendable carnage-fodder for the Good Guy and the Bad Guy as they go around indiscriminately stabbing a lot of people to demonstrate just how Good, or, as it happens, just how Bad they recpectively are [2].

***

I think I worry about that character because I’ve always wondered — if the chips were down, if the writing was on the wall, if the day needed saving — what would I do?

Would I look the other way? Press the button? Distract the guards? Would I go gently into the pit of scorpion spiders happy in the knowledge that the heroes are probably off somewhere enjoying a cold beer and getting medals for heroism and bravery?

Or would my final thoughts be, “I wonder if they even remember my AAAAAARGH!!”

In particular, I always get a kick from the show’s musical dance numbers, and so I present two of them here, for no better reason than they make me smile.

Hope you enjoy!

After all, who wants to go out and get a job and pay bills and deal with “Hi, my name is Sally, and I’m here to help you!” [2], when you could instead be sitting in your basement for 38 hours straight, ruling a fictional interstellar empire with an iron keyboard, or driving around LA capping GangStas and prostitutes for extra bonus points, or freaking out when another player leads you to your inevitable doom in the valley of the face-eating mega spiders.

If anything, as computer and console games have become more realistic and more immersive, the collapse of civilisation has become even more imminent [3].

So imminent in fact, that, yes, aha ahahahaha, we now have hugely popular games [4] based entirely around how to kill time — and a lot of people — in the aftermath of the collapse [5].

Would you like the interesting solution, or the one that will work? … You chose Option A

Back when I first realised humanity was going to become extinct as a result of deliberately breeding out the ability to deal with boredom, I thought to myself, “What we really need is a game that forces you to navigate your way through an average day in the life of an average person. And then we need to nail all young adults to a computer screen and make them play the game over and over and over until they get it.”

A game in which your normal 50 minute commute to work takes two-and-half hours because of a railway strike or an accident on the freeway. A game in which your boss distrusts you and treats you like a child and ridicules you in front of other employees. A game in which your customers are rude, and your coworkers are emotionally distant, and your bills add up to more than you earn, and your company is thanking you for all your efforts and hoping you will enjoy your next job and it’s nothing personal, they just need to find a cheaper workforce in some country you’ve never heard of before.

And the only weapon you have, in the midst of all this mind-numbing immersive reality?

The only way you can finally get to the last level of the game and sit in a chair next to a window in an old people’s home and wonder why no-one ever visits?

The only way to win the game is through a general approach of trying to get along, trying to solve your problems, trying to accept that the story of the world isn’t about you, trying not to freak out when someone does something trivially wrong on the freeway, and definitely trying to avoid going postal with a letter opener one day on the 12th anniversary of ‘being promoted’ into the mailroom.

That’s it.

That’s all.

Game over.

The Future Is Almost Now, Please Hold

We may be decades away from this kind of fascinating and incredibly validating technology, but there are glimmers of hope ahead.

Let me introduce you to City Bus Simulator 2010, a game in which you… drive a bus.

No, you don’t save the world.

No, you don’t rule an empire.

No, you don’t have the special ability to make people’s faces melt.

Instead, you drive a bus and you negotiate through traffic and you make your allotted stops. If you do your job well, the extra special bonus is that you get to drive a different type of bus.

Of course, from watching the trailer, it appears that City Bus Simulator still has some distance to go before it can provide a truly realistic bus-driving experience. No-one, for example, attempts to stab you in the game. There isn’t someone sitting in the back row who took some bad acid and who’s screaming about how the texture of the seat tastes like watching a Stanley Kubrick movie. And no-one is bitching at you about how late you are and how you shouldn’t have gone through that last orange light and how being expected to have correct change will lead to the kind of fascism that started World War II [6].

But it’s still a step in the right direction.

One day, we will all be required to spend some time in Carlos The Bus Driver’s shoes, and maybe we will be a little kinder to our real bus drivers, and sometimes we will try to have exact change, and occasionally we won’t attempt to stab him for being 8 minutes late.

We can only hope, right?

Aha ahahahahaha.

Fair warning: the song does contain some ‘expressive’ language, but still manages to sound sweet, which is nice.