GAMING: JUMP ON BOARD

Wii FIT | August 27th 2008

Weight loss tool or party game? Tom Standage wiggles his hips and gets some exercise ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Does standing on a white plastic board and assuming a yoga pose, while trying to keep a skittering dot on a TV screen inside a circular target, count as exercise? I'm not convinced, but this is what Nintendo wants you to believe. The plastic board, which resembles a set of bathroom scales, is the centrepiece of Wii Fit, a new set of games that supposedly turns Nintendo's hugely popular Wii console into a fitness centre.

It is not quite as nutty as it sounds. Sensors inside the board measure your weight and make educated guesses, as you lean in various directions, about your posture. You can then choose between various exercises, including yoga poses, balance games and aerobic workouts. Unlike with a fitness DVD, the board means the Wii can check that you are really doing the exercises, and monitor your performance. There's a simulated hula-hoop game where you wiggle your hips to keep an increasing number of hoops circling the waist of a cartoonish on-screen figure. You can step on and off the board to do step-training exercises, and do push-ups in the usual way, but with your hands on the board.

Most tiring of all is the jogging. You put one of the Wii's motion-sensitive controllers in your pocket and run on the spot. The Wii figures out how fast you are running and your alter-ego trots through scrolling on-screen scenery at the appropriate pace. After several minutes of this, it felt as though I had actually done some exercise--because I had. Simply waving the controller up and down by hand proved much less taxing.

It was all a bit worthy, frankly. The game can calculate your body-mass index and monitor your progress towards a particular goal--to lose a certain amount of weight within a month, for example. Wii Fit has been out for several months in Japan, and some people really have lost weight using it.

But never mind the serious stuff--the best thing about Wii Fit is that some of the mini-games are simply hilarious. There's a great ski-jumping game in which you crouch down, build up speed by keeping as steady as possible, and then jump by straightening your legs. Another game involves rolling balls around a tilting maze by shifting your weight on the board, and trying to drop the balls into a hole. My favourite was a game in which you have to head footballs by leaning from side to side. After a while pandas and football boots, which you are supposed to avoid, are mixed in. It sounds daft, but as with many other Wii games, using physical movements to control the on-screen action makes it oddly compelling. Children will love it, and that gives adults--even those who do not consider themselves gamers--an excuse to have a go too. (Brett McCallon, our online gaming columnist, complains about this very trend in his piece "Nintendo, Me and Your Mom".)

Wii Fit neatly advances Nintendo's campaign to broaden the appeal of video gaming, and to dent the widely held beliefs that all games are violent and that gamers are anti-social slobs. But it is striking that the most enjoyable games tend to involve the least exertion. No doubt some will buy Wii Fit to lose weight, or as an alternative to exercise videos. But I suspect its more virtuous uses will merely be an excuse, for many people, to buy an excellent set of party games.

Wii Fit is on sale now, if it's not sold out: £69.99 ($140)

(Tom Standage is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life)