Hi, remember me? Girl-Who-Hates-Exercise? I think I'm being sucked in by Nintendo's Wii Fit.
I know, I'm shocked too.
As a rule, I think exercise for the purpose of exercise is pointless. I can understand that there are those for whom it works, but I have not been blessed with co-ordination or a love of team sports, so the whole genre does not appeal to me, as a rule. Going to the gym is totally outside my realm of comprehension, running (if not away from certain death) is a form of torture, and my own personal hell is a gymnasium.
I've done yoga exercises before (you can't be in theatre as long as me without being exposed to it, heck, these days you can't hardly be in high school drama class without it). I seem to be the only person who thinks that this is a form of torture, because not only do I have no idea what it's supposed to be accomplishing, I have never thought that it "felt good." I have thought it was complicated, and badly explained, and painful.
While everyone else can manage to replicate body patterns, I can't. I don't know why, but I can't do it. I can't dance to save my life- I've never attempted DDR because I would manage to throw myself off the board and become entangled in innocent bystanders. You laugh, but it is true. I have all the grace and agility of a three legged cow.
But I've often thought if someone could just explain to me exactly where I should be in space, I might be able to manage it. I know that sounds silly, but, incredibly, that's what WiiFit's supposed to do.
I was watching a video of a guy doing the yoga- the game tells you where your centre of gravity needs to be, ideally. If you can get the pose down, from there, you can adjust your weight and position to perfect the pose.
That's specific, that's a goal to work towards. That sounds like something I could actually do.
I also like the fact that the only person I'd be competing with is myself. My father calls me the least competitive person on the planet, and he's right. I won't compete with anyone else who wants to win. Team sports? Fine, you want to win so badly, go right ahead and win, because I don't care. What benefit is there to winning? None, other than that you won, and if you really need that, I can give it to you.
The only thing I've ever been rabidly competitive about was MarioKart. Because I was competing with myself. Yes, my brother could blow my times out of the water, but I would race those little ghosts of myself over and over and over, shaving seconds off my time until I'd finally beat my brother's time. But I wasn't concerned about beating him, it was the fact that I beat myself so well that was appealing.
On top of all this, the sheer mechanics of the balance board are amazing. The fact that it knows where the rest of your body is because of your weight distribution geeks me out. And it seems that Nintendo used an already tried and true method of measurement. There are little strips of alloyed metal in each corner of the board that can shift with such a small amount of weight that our eyes can't detect the metal moving. Apparently they use it in airplanes. (I don't know how, instruments, I'd assume, but I couldn't say in what capacity.)
Of course, I also think that if they don't make a skating game for this thing, some developers somewhere are out of their minds.