Critics attack video games as the antithesis of a fit lifestyle, but fitness video games offer America a rare opportunity to change their lifestyle for the better. Here's how Wii Fit solved a 15-year-old problem for AJ Glasser.
Here's my problem: I was a fat kid.Wasas in I'm no longer 155 pounds at age 11; I'm 130 pounds at 26, and I'm happy with that. It's just that for the past 15 years, I wake up with a momentary stab of panic that I've turned into the fat kid again.
Here's how Wii Fit solves my problem: It lies to me. It says I'm doing great when I'm not, that I'm running 5 miles when I'm really running about 2, and it periodically says that, yes, Iamthe fat kid.
The thing about being the"fat kid"is that you can lose the weight, but somehow you never stop seeing yourself as overweight. It's a twisted head game you play with yourself every day when you get out of bed and start getting dressed, wondering if today's the day your favorite jeans won't fit anymore and you'll have to go up a size.
For me, it's not so bad because I work in the video-game industry. Very few people here would judge me for how I look if I was 130 pounds or 230 pounds, and even fewer actuallyknowhow I look based on the fact that most video-game interactions are done online. But I still catch myself sucking in my gut when I walk past reflective store windows or biting the insides of my cheeks when someone takes my picture so my face looks thinner.
Like so many Americans, fitness is an unhealthy obsession for me. I'm not as at risk for serious medical problems as one of the8 million Americanswith a full-blown eating disorder, but I still have a problem treating my body right because of how I see myself. I could be 10 pounds lighter than I am now (which my doctor wouldn't like), and I'd still have the same problem.
But with Wii Fit, YourShape: Fitness Evolved, and Dance Central all lying to me about how look, my head has a harder time playing games with me. Wii Fit makes me look like a chubby cylinder even when I clock into its definition of a normal Body Mass Index (BMI). YourShape uses realistic proportions but makes me look like a wobbly Jell-O mold, which is really hard to scrutinize the way I can a naked body in a mirror. And Dance Central? Unless I leave the Freestyle camera function on, that game goes way out of its way to hide my own body from me while it tells me I'm"dancing."
At first, people don't like being lied to. There was some media frenzy aroundWii Fit calling some little girl"overweight"because her BMI clocked in as higher than whatWii Fit's preset statisticsthink an 8-year-old should be. And I admit I made a face when I saw my Mii morph into what I thought of as a chubby cylinder ("Hey -- you said I was normal! Why do I look fat?!"). I also bristled when the game suggested a"healthy"weight for me is 119 pounds. If I lost that much weight, I'd lose my size C bra cup, and you could count my ribs from the front --not attractiveeven by America's thin-obsessed beauty standards.
But whenever these games piss me off, I can step back and remind myself,"Hey -- it's just a game."I can't take what Wii Fit tells me too seriously -- I mean, how can it say I ran 5 miles in 20 minutes when my Mii has such stubby little legs? I don't even think of my legs as"legs"in YourShape because they're bright orange (and sometimes purple), and Dance Central presents me these ridiculous-looking preset characters that look like they got dressed in the dark, which completely absolves me of any shame I might feel about my own body.
The truth is a fitness game needs to lie to you to be a game. How else could it decide who scores higher on dancing to"Maneater"or how many points you get for kicking a block unless it has a set standard by which it can judge all players? Fitness, meanwhile, cannot be judged the same across all people -- not everybody's born with supermodel proportions; diets vary widely by region and culture; and not everybody has the money or the time for a daily personal trainer. You also can't"win"fitness, but you can"win"in fitness games.
Take competition, for example. Video games are naturally competitive even without multiplayer because it's always about who has the higher score. Tacking that on to a game about fitness warps the concept of"fit"so that top score on the Obstacle Course mini-game becomes more important than the number on the scale.
The lie frees me from my"former fat kid"anxiety. If it doesn't matter what the fitness games say about my body because they're full of s***, then I don't worry about my body so much when I play them. With the game steadily lying to me about what I can accomplish, I feel safer telling some of those lies to myself in real life and maybe trying to make some of them true.
Just this past summer, I ran theSan Francisco Half-Marathon. I don't think I could have done that in the pre-Wii Fit days, because it never would have occurred to me that I could without that dirty, lying jogging mini-game. Now, it'd be silly to credit Wii Fit completely with my half-marathon victory (2 hours, 44 minutes—hells yes!). But it was the game that got the ball rolling, the thing that finally convinced me that fitness is more about attitude than weight.
AJ Glasser could kick your ass in Wii Fit Plus's Obstacle Course even if she weighed 300 pounds.
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