Wii Fit may bear the Wii name, but it has its roots in a new (relatively speaking, considering the company's age) game design paradigm for Nintendo. Said paradigm debuted with one of the Nintendo DS's key titles, Brain Age—or, as it's known in Japan, Tōhoku Daigaku Mirai Kagaku Gijutsu Kyōdō Kenkyū Center: Kawashima Ryūta Kyōju Kanshū: Nō wo Kitaeru Otona no DS Training... the key part being the word "Training," which has appeared in many DS titles since.
The structure is what defines these titles; you're expected to play daily, and when you do you generally kick your play off with a test that tosses random activities at you and grades you on your performance. You then train with your choice of other activities, the overwhelming majority of which have some sort of score attached as well. If you read my Wii Fit review, you'll recall that I praised the challenge at the time, and the opportunity it presented to improve myself.
Since then, though, I've run into an all-too-familiar problem.
I used to play Brain Age daily. Like just about anyone else who picked up the game for the first time, I did really badly at the unfamiliar activities the first few times out and was told my brain was 80 years old. Over time, though, I got really good at those tests and activities, and I ran headlong into the challenge ceiling. It was impossible for me to improve on what I'd already done. I'd learned all the activities inside and out. Maybe my gaming skills were just no match for the casual-targeted title, but it was at that point I began the downward spiral and stopped really caring about a title whose stated goal was to keep me exercising my brain for life.
Wii Fit is starting to look that way now, at least in part. I do have one very motivating graph to look at—my weight chart—as well as a much stronger desire to maintain my physical shape by keeping the Fit Credits graph as level as possible, which is something that Brain Age could never do for me. But I am caring less and less about trying to get a high score on each individual yoga pose, strength exercise, or even my Wii Fit Age, because I've really reached a point with those scores where it's impossible to do any better, not for my lack of ability to improve myself physically, but for exponentially diminishing returns; any improvements now would rapidly disappear into the statistical noise of daily measurement.
I wish this wasn't the case. In the days of arcade games, it certainly wasn't; the challenge ceilings were so far out, only the rare superhuman player felt constrained by them. (Maybe it's a reality of economics; arcade owners got another quarter each time you tried to beat yours or others' scores, but in the console model, there's no direct profit made whether you play for a year instead of a month—if anything, getting you to burn out more quickly means you're ready to buy a new game.)
We don't really need such effectively infinite challenge to stop the challenge ceiling from impacting us like it is, though. We simply need the opportunity to crank the level up farther than we're allowed to currently. Let me increase the speed of my jackknives, for example. In fact, for every exercise where it makes sense, give me the option of a Wario Ware-style speed up every few reps. Don't cap scores by setting an arbitrary performance level to 100 or to my age minus ten; let me rack up scores as high as the limits of human endurance permit. (And, of course, once you've done that, let me go head-to-head with automatic WiiConnect24 score sharing with my friends.)
At least with Wii Fit, I do have my weight to watch go down; and my geeky obsession with the numbers that do matter suffices for now. But what's going to happen when I reach that magic "Normal" weight? I wonder, sometimes.
Since then, though, I've run into an all-too-familiar problem.
I used to play Brain Age daily. Like just about anyone else who picked up the game for the first time, I did really badly at the unfamiliar activities the first few times out and was told my brain was 80 years old. Over time, though, I got really good at those tests and activities, and I ran headlong into the challenge ceiling. It was impossible for me to improve on what I'd already done. I'd learned all the activities inside and out. Maybe my gaming skills were just no match for the casual-targeted title, but it was at that point I began the downward spiral and stopped really caring about a title whose stated goal was to keep me exercising my brain for life.
Wii Fit is starting to look that way now, at least in part. I do have one very motivating graph to look at—my weight chart—as well as a much stronger desire to maintain my physical shape by keeping the Fit Credits graph as level as possible, which is something that Brain Age could never do for me. But I am caring less and less about trying to get a high score on each individual yoga pose, strength exercise, or even my Wii Fit Age, because I've really reached a point with those scores where it's impossible to do any better, not for my lack of ability to improve myself physically, but for exponentially diminishing returns; any improvements now would rapidly disappear into the statistical noise of daily measurement.
I wish this wasn't the case. In the days of arcade games, it certainly wasn't; the challenge ceilings were so far out, only the rare superhuman player felt constrained by them. (Maybe it's a reality of economics; arcade owners got another quarter each time you tried to beat yours or others' scores, but in the console model, there's no direct profit made whether you play for a year instead of a month—if anything, getting you to burn out more quickly means you're ready to buy a new game.)
We don't really need such effectively infinite challenge to stop the challenge ceiling from impacting us like it is, though. We simply need the opportunity to crank the level up farther than we're allowed to currently. Let me increase the speed of my jackknives, for example. In fact, for every exercise where it makes sense, give me the option of a Wario Ware-style speed up every few reps. Don't cap scores by setting an arbitrary performance level to 100 or to my age minus ten; let me rack up scores as high as the limits of human endurance permit. (And, of course, once you've done that, let me go head-to-head with automatic WiiConnect24 score sharing with my friends.)
At least with Wii Fit, I do have my weight to watch go down; and my geeky obsession with the numbers that do matter suffices for now. But what's going to happen when I reach that magic "Normal" weight? I wonder, sometimes.