Health Meter: Hey, What Happened to the Fun in Fitness Gaming?

5/5/2009 7:12 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2

As a personal trainer and a writer who covers both fitness and gaming, I've always been a fan of movement-based games. The clients at my Boston-area Black Belt Fitness Personal Training studio are not only familiar with the Nintendo Wii, but also with the PlayStation 2 EyeToy and its very cool, last-generation, motion-based gaming applications. The idea of using games to get the body moving and -- as a result -- get the player to see improvements in strength, endurance, coordination, agility and balance is a wonderful thing. It's an ideal means to an end. You are improving as a person by having fun. It really doesn't get much better than that.

Somewhere, though, the line between the "means" and the "end" has gotten blurred. Games that used fun to improve fitness have been joined on the shelf by "games" that use, well, fitness to improve fitness. It's not to the point where we should be looking for a NAF rating -- "Not Actually Fun" -- on the package, but we could be close.

Wii Fit was guilty to some degree. While the Yoga and Hula Hoop mini-games were a giant kick to play, and helped you improve your balance, cardiovascular condition and flexibility, the strength-training elements weren't all that enthralling. Games like Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009 take it to another level by just about removing the "fun" component entirely. If you don't like doing squats, then you're not going to enjoy doing them just because an on-screen character is telling you to do them -- even if it's supposed to be part of a "game."

Think about it this way. If you play a lot of role-playing-games, you get used to dealing with inventory management. You have a certain number of empty slots that you have to use to carry around all of your armor, weapons, ammo, health boosts, etc. In some games, this can get very complicated and demand a lot of attention. The benefit of having to constantly be aware of your inventory is that it helps you develop organizational skills that can cross over into your real life. I guarantee you that my closet is cleaner and that when I have to travel for business, my suitcase is more organized, because of the skills I've subconsciously honed while playing "The Chosen One" in any number of RPGs. These games used a logical, intuitive and unforced means to help me develop certain skills -- and I had fun doing it.

Now, let's flip things around. A publisher sends me copies of "Sock Drawer Xtreme Clean-Up III" for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. An accompanying PR release screams out that "SDXCU III will forever change the way you look at keeping your sock drawer at home organized -- and it'll do it at 1080p!" If I were a professional sock drawer organizer, I'd know that as a means of getting people to organize their socks, it's probably going to fail. If people's sock drawers are a mess, it's probably because they don't have the time to keep them organized or that they don't attach enough importance to the benefit of neatly organized socks.