Things like StreetWars make me feel less guilty for spending the majority of my life too confused and anxious to leave the house.

StreetWars started in London last Monday and for a month a few hundred stunted freshmen will stalk the city trying to “assassinate” each other with water pistols. Once you’ve splashed the £40 fee it costs to “get involved m8” you’re given an address to head to where men in trilbies arm you with details – a photo of your target info on where they live and work and their phone number.

Needless to say the game only works if some other maloccupied dicklet has been handed your details in a manila envelope, which means you’ve just given some guys calling themselves The Shadow Government £40 to lose in online poker games while an idiot stalks you all month.

StreetWars is a game for those whose lives are so tediously straight-laced they’re happy to employ their own personal narc to ruin their lives. These people, who go by names like “thebumbandits”, “ButterLove007” and “Mike Hunt”, talk about wanting to rekindle the harmless fun of childhood, but none of the funnest stuff you do when you’re a kid is harmless.

Hurtling down the M5 overnight in the clattering hail, with a driver so high his eyes are rolling into the back of his head – not harmless. Sleeping at the home of a one-eared sex offender for a dare – (potentially) not harmless. Johnny Green sticking one of his digits up his arse then rubbing it on someone – pretty much harmful for everyone involved.

We invented sports to honour harm. If you were hit above the knee in ‘Bootball’ you’d be fair game for a foaming, 50-strong swarm of clamp-sacked schoolboys until you’d escaped from one of those concrete and wire cages schools keep children in. I tried to see if some wet-eyed nostalgiaLAD from Cox Green Comprehensive had set up a tribute to it, but all I found was a bisexual classical music fan from Nepal.

When we were nine, there was another, nameless game that involved a dozen or so of us tearing around the school field mindlessly hacking at each other’s shins. It was banned after it ended in racial abuse.

StreetWars isn’t a reclamation of or a tribute to childhood fun. It was spawned, decades before The Shadow Government got hold of it, by students: those at that stage in life when genuine dare and wonder usually start to evaporate into wastoid etiquette and routine hedonism, Doritos stink and Family Guy marathons.

If you’re playing StreetWars you obviously don’t have enough paranoia in your life. If you can find me, let’s get you pranged.