Persuasive Games: The Missing Social Rituals of Exergames - Ian Bogost
The Cultural and Social Future of Exergames The obsession with exercise as enumerated personal physical performance has become so widespread that even players themselves have adopted physical performance as a primary metric for the success of these games. Mickey DeLorenzo, an ordinary gamer, not a researcher, ran a “Wii Sports Experiment,” in which he played Wii Sports for 30 minutes daily and meticulously tracked his weight, BMI, resting heart rate, calories burned, and body fat over the course of six weeks.2 As DeLorenzo’s experiment testifies, the Wii has stood out in particular as an exergame platform, with its preference for gestural interaction. Nintendo’s early ads for the system showed players of all ages jumping around in front of their televisions, performing exactly the kind of informal physical exercise proponents of exergames celebrate. As someone interested in videogames as cultural artifacts, I have to admit that I’m less interested in videogames’ ability to help us count calories and more interested in their ability to change the way we experience or reflect on our world. So I was more than a little amused when I unlocked the exercise level built into Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, the Wii version of the popular micro-game franchise. Dr. Crygor, the series’ mad scientist, reveals his latest invention, a thinning machine. At the start of the game, a fatsuit-encased version of me (with accurate head taken from the Mii I had assigned to my game file) enters the contraption and the games commence. Unlike normal Wario Ware play, the player always gets a chance to play 20 micro-games no matter his performance, the implied goal of each to exercise as much as possible. Performance is measured in an invented unit of energy, the “kelorie,” and the more/harder/faster the player works in each micro-game, the more kelories he burns. It’s unclear if Nintendo intended Crygor’s diet game to offer a legitimate exercise experience, but I took it as a biting satire of exercise in general and videogame exercise in particular: every absurd gesture, from balloon inflating to nose picking, has been quantified in Wario’s invented units. After the player completes the 20 micro-games, he is ejected from Crygor’s device and deflated in accordance with his kelories burned.
The whole experience exposes the inhumanity of exergames of this type: videogame-induced movements are no more inherently inspiring than exercise bikes or stairmasters. Wario Ware’s micro-games are cute and quirky, but their novelty quickly fades, and Wario’s characteristic end-of-session cackle becomes the gracious alarm of a new kind of countdown timer. Compare this experience with another popular videogame that also requires physical input: Guitar Hero. To be sure, the amount of physical exertion expended when strumming a plastic guitar is assuredly lower than that used when jumping and flailing with a wii remote — but just getting players up off the couch counts as one of the title’s major accomplishments. Much of Guitar Hero’s success comes from its successful simulation of the jam session, the garage band act, and rock superstar performance. Add a friend and you can compete or you can collaborate. By simulating a ritual activity like the jam session, Guitar Hero also becomes an abstract instance of that ritual itself. When played without the heart monitors, scales, and BMI calculators, Wii Sports offers a similar experience. The rituals of sport as competitive social practice remain very strong among amateurs who golf, play tennis, box, or bowl for real. Sure, some of us may hit the course, the court, the ring, or the alley for exercise, but we return to these places thanks to the social rituals that surround them: everything from the locker room taunts to the scorecard handicap. When we play Wii Sports with one or two friends or family members, we recreate micro-environments that mimic the golf course or the bowling alley. One thing I notice in particular while playing these games is how I fill the time between turns: sometimes I watch, but just as frequently I read, or write email, or chat with other people in the room until, “Oh, is it my turn again?” This sort of social environment is very similar to that of the neighborhood basketball court, the golf course, or the bowling alley. Those interested in exergames should be particularly interested in establishing new ritual practices unique to videogames. Guitar Hero and Wii Sports are successful examples of ritual-bound physical games, but they borrow their rituals entirely from other domains. Even successful exergames like Dance Dance Revolution offer only transitional examples of developed videogame exercise rituals: DDR on the home console completely erases the complex social dance performance practices of the arcade game. Physical controllers have been around for 25 years, but they have only ever occupied the fringes of the marketplace: Atari’s never-released “Puffer” exerbike controller, Amiga’s 1982 Joyboard, LJN’s 1988 Roll & Rocker. As the popularity of physical input devices increases the market viability of exergames, it is tempting to assume that videogame play will automatically become more active, and therefore more valuable as exercise. But now that the novelty has worn off, I have already begun to test the limits of my Wii, and it actually affords more slothful play than its traditional controller-bound competitors (try it yourself, you can play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess slouched back in your sofa, hands at your sides. Just wiggle your wii remote hand to swing your sword). To incite real, motivated physical activity, exergames will have to do more than just demanding physical gestures that produce latent exercise. In addition, they will have to simulate and create the social rituals that make us want to be physically active, whether alone or with others. 2 http://wiinintendo.net/2006/12/05/wii-sports-experiment/
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