Published by Nintendo

Rating – “E for Everybody” for comic mischief

When I was a kid getting a haircut I used to kick the footrests of the chair out of boredom. Frustrated one day, my barber laid down his scissors and lectured me on it, explaining that every time I shifted my feet, the movements would follow up my body and change the position of my head. If I wanted a proper haircut, he warned, I should sit still. Instead he lit my curiosity and I experimented, moving my feet and paying attention to my head movements. He was right and my haircut suffered as a result.

Nintendo’s Wii Fit operates on the same principle, using a weight-sensing board to monitor subtle changes of movement in your feet as you stand upon it. By sensing how far you lean to the left, to the right, forward, or backward on your toes, heels, and balls of your feet, it can extrapolate the exact position of your hips, shoulders, and head. The result is a video game that can calculate your weight, your Body Mass Index, your sense of balance, guide you through Yoga, Strength Training, and Aerobics exercises, and simulate fun activities including hula-hooping, alpine skiing, and taking a run through a fantasy island filled with hidden areas to uncover. It is an experience unlike anything else on the market, an ingenious use of technology, and very effective in making work out routines a consistently fun, enjoyable task.

The system is structured around the same successful formula Nintendo has used in their Brain Age games. You enter in a set of personal details about yourself; your name, age, and height, and it uses these to create a daily journal. Each day you are given a “Body Test”, a set of quick exercises that are then used to calculate your “Body Age”, a number that is used to show your progress. As you perform better from day to day and get a higher score in the Body Test, you’ll be assigned a younger Body Age and so over time can enjoy the idea of being “younger” at least in the area of fitness.

In making this assessment, Wii Fit uses the Body Mass Index which is bound to cause some confusion and controversy. Created in the 1800’s as a way of getting an overview of weight issues amongst human populations, the Body Mass Index is a simple chart that divides a society into groups based on a measured relationship between height and weight. If your weight is deemed disproportionate to your height, the chart can define you as being “underweight”, “overweight”, or even “obese”. It was originally intended as just a quick way for medical professionals to get a snapshot of health problems within a society, but recently has been adopted by some doctors and health programs as a personal way to identify weight gain issues. The problem is that the chart is an oversimplification, one that treats human growth as being proportionately equal across all body sizes, as if humans expand in size like cartoon characters. Most people who consult the chart will be indentified as being “overweight” or “obese”. The math tends to exaggerate a little.

In video games scores are treated as absolutes and Wii Fit uses the Body Mass Index as a system for creating weight loss goals. The first time you play it will calculate your BMI number and then encourage you to set a target of weeks or months to lose enough weight to be considered by the Body Mass Index as “ideal”. For some, this will be unreasonable to achieve.

Fans of the Brain Age series know well that the numbers and exercises used by Nintendo in these programs are guidelines merely, healthy ballpark measurements that certainly do the job, but not without their gap of error. After using Wii Fit for just fifteen hours, for example, the software told me I had lost four and a half pounds. I can take the Body test repeatedly, one after the other, and come up with Body Ages that are ten years apart. Going by the tone of the game’s instructions and virtual trainers, these results are pushed as gospel, something Nintendo should do better to soften.

Beyond the journal the software has complete programs in Yoga and Strength training. In both exercises you are paired up with a virtual trainer who performs the routines while you mimic their movements from your balance pad. In what I think is the most effective element of the game, your balance is show on-screen represented by a small, wavering red dot. As you stand there, shaking back and forth, the red dot, used to show the position of the centre of your body, shakes back and forth in perfect rhythm. The exercises give you a target circle or box which you have to keep the red dot inside while you perform the various leg or arm stretching movements. This way you are forced not only to match your movements to the virtual trainer’s, but to also adjust your body into the correct posture, which is the kind of adjustments a real trainer would force you to make.

The balance pad isn’t just for standing on, the Strength Training routines involve push-ups and jackknives where you extend your body on the floor and lay your hands or the tips of your feet on the pad. There are times when you’re not facing the television screen and the game uses a set of whistles to guide you from repetition to repetition. The trainers are always talking to you, reminding you to breath through every movement to avoid increases in blood pressure.

The Aerobics are far more like video games than they are like exercises. It’s the section that includes hula-hoops where you have to circle your hips widely to spin virtual hoops. Characters off to the side will toss you new hoops and you have to lean over to catch them and add more spins to your score. The step exercise has you moving your feet on-and-off the board to rhythm, it’s like a non-music version of Dance Dance Revolution, and one of my favorites, a running program where you don’t use the board at all. Instead you tuck the Wii Remote into your pants pocket and run on the spot. The change in movements translate to a virtual running course where you explore a vast island filled with hidden spots to uncover.

All three fitness sections begin with but a handful of exercises and it’s only when the game detects a certain level of improvement from you that it then unlocks others or programs with more repetitions or longer routines. Your time spent performing each task is also added to an overall record and as you pass certain milestones, 30 minutes for example, you’ll be awarded “credits” which can be used as rewards to unlock more titles in the games section.

The games sections include simple, casual distractions all based on your sense of balance. There’s a soccer challenge where you have to move your head to deflect incoming balls (while avoiding strange items like panda heads and shoes), a tightrope where you must walk in place while keeping your body’s centre aligned, and a table filled with marbles that you must tilt to match them up with out-of-reach holes. Of all the games the one that best shows the potential for the Balance Board to be used with more realistic, complex games in the future is the ski Jump where you begin by crouching at the top of the hill, standing quickly up as you leave the jump’s ramp, and then lean forward on your toes while you fly through the air to soar farther for a greater distance. All of the games are fun and imaginative, but I feel only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of where this technology can go.

There are two interesting elements that suggest how Nintendo can extend Wii Fit beyond the basic experience. The first is the inclusion of two player modes in some of the exercises (the running one for example). That we might see software in the future designed for pairs or groups of users to work out together or play games is very interesting. The second is the Wii Fit Channel, a new section you can download over the internet and install on your Nintendo Wii system that allows you to access the basic exercises without the need for the game disc. This could easily be used by Nintendo to add downloadable exercises or games for the program in the future.

Wii Fit only asks that you spend a minute or two with each exercise and when you add up the entire set it creates a full, thirty minute workout that I found impacted different parts of my body for an overall sense of exertion. That Nintendo has managed to transform their video game system into an exercise machine is certainly an outstanding feat, but more impressive is that they have made it into a magical experience, one that my Canada AM colleague Fitness Expert Libby Norris points out has inspired more hype and excitement about fitness than any other program or piece of equipment she can think of, even Tae Bo. Nintendo has managed to out-innovate the top player in two industries and that's something to marvel.