January is traditionally a fairly sleepy month, current affairs-wise, but a horrified gawp at the news confirms that 2015 has already had one heck of a morning. Clearly it takes a lot to knock a garish underage sex allegation involving Prince Andrew off the news agenda, but the Parisian terror attacks managed it, partly because the horror of it all warranted such blanket coverage, but also because the resulting conversation about freedom of speech is taking up so many column inches, there’s scarcely room to run anything else. There hasn’t been this much furious debate about the merits of a cartoon since the introduction of Scrappy Doo.

(Fun imaginary scenario: in a bid to revive their flagging ratings, ITV launch a live, feelgood Saturday night version of Celebrity Pictionary. But chaos ensues when Paddy McGuinness pulls the first card from the deck to discover it requires him to sketch the Prophet Muhammad.)

Still, depressing though January’s headlines have been, if you delve a little further and uncover some of the lesser-reported stories, you’ll discover to your boundless delight that they are profoundly depressing too. For instance, take this week’s story about German AI researchers creating a version of Super Mario World starring a self-aware version of Mario, which doesn’t simply play the game by itself, but is psychologically affected by the experience as it does so.

This meta-Mario experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape. As such, he’s more advanced than I am. And he looks better in a hat. I think I hate him, although there’s every possibility that’s just what I’ve been programmed to do.

Eerily enough, you can ask the self-aware Mario questions and he’ll respond, via a speech bubble accompanied by a synthesized “Hawking” voice (rather than the comical Italian “it’s-a-me” intonation we’re accustomed to). In the demonstration video, he discusses various emotional states, veering from “I feel very good” to “somehow I feel less happy” as his “happiness reservoir” is depleted. Hey, we’ve all been there: it’s just kind of heartbreaking now Mario’s there too.

At one crucial point in the promotional video Mario learns that jumping on a Goomba (the scuttling mushroom enemies common to all Mario games) will cause it to die, thereby making him a self-aware murderer trapped in a cartoon world, his cheerful surroundings belying the achingly bleak nature of his existence. In order to win the woman of his dreams, Mario is compelled to kick in the heads of his enemies while gathering gold coins. I’d be astounded if the self-aware Mario doesn’t wind up muttering to himself, walking in circles and tumbling off high platforms in an apparent bid to end it all. Come to think of it, that accurately displays my inept playing style. Guess I’ve just been trying to help him out all these years. In fact, this could provide the startling-yet-hideous concept for a whole new genre of video game – a cutesy platform game in which you control a biologically realistic lead character who’s begging you to punish and kill him as efficiently as possible, moaning enthusiastically whenever you mistime a jump and cause him to fracture his ankle on a cartoon rock.

Perhaps Mario would fare better psychologically if he was given a distinct, positive purpose that directly affected the real world – and for that, we need look no further than an accompanying story from the US, which reveals that medical scientists have successfully sent a group of “nano-machines” into a living creature for the first time. In a sort of rodent reimagining of the film Fantastic Voyage, researchers at the University of California fed a live mouse some microscopic-tube-shaped machines – “micro-motors”, apparently – which react to digestive acid by delivering drugs to the stomach lining. Or something like that. I don’t know precisely how it works and I refuse to find out, in case it turns out I dreamt it, and then my legs fall off and I have to gnaw my way out of an igloo made of frozen dog’s blood before the Queen arrives to take my temperature.

Anyway, it means we’re surely only months away from a situation in which they could create a microscopic self-aware Mario, trap him inside a capsule, and then release said capsule into the human body, where it would dissolve, leaving Mario to hop around fixing things. Mario’s a plumber, so he won’t find surgery too taxing. And when he’s finished he can simply jump out of your sphincter like he’s disappearing down one of those green pipes he’s always leaping into. In fact the one drawback would be hearing that incessant cheery music playing inside your liver and kidneys as he went about his work, your bones vibrating each time it hits a low note.