You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
A screen shot of the Wii hula hoop game.
FUN.
Period.
I had the opportunity to be one of the first to try out the new Wii Fit suite at my number 2 daughter’s school today. As a “special treat,” the mothers who attend the weekly parents’ group got to take it over for almost an hour.
I had reservations about even participating. For one thing, I’ve know about the things I would have issues with concerning the system for months now. For another, I have very little experience with video game consoles in general, so I felt like a right idiot even being in the same room as these things!
But I have to admit: I had a great time.
Caroline, one of the other mothers, happens to own one, so she patiently explained to me how it worked. And then one of the school employees and I beat the pants off of her and her daughter at tennis! 😉
(I also managed to bash Natasha [Caroline’s daughter] in the arm with my control thingie during the game. I felt SO bad!)
Then I moved over to the other console and played the hula hoop game pictured above with the lady who runs the library. Oh man, is that ever addictive!
And I have to admit that when I was done, I had that pleasant ache in my hips that I get when exercising. That little one that is like my muscles are saying to me “We’re still here and we still work! Thank you for moving us a little today!”
And there I was, in a room with 5 other women, moving my body and having FUN, and it occurred to me what a wonderful thing this could have been.
I say “could have been,” because the fact that I had fun didn’t negate the fact that there are serious problems with the game. That still remains a fact.
It remains a fact that it follows the bullshit BMI standards.
It remains a fact that anyone so much as one pound into the “overweight” category gets a little Mii that has a stomach hanging down to its knees. (In other words, if you’re not “normal,” you’re OMG TEH FATZ UR GONNA DIE!!!!ELEVENTY-ONE!!!11!1!)
It remains a fact that it’s touted as being a “weapon in the war against obesity.”
The fact that it also happens to be fun doesn’t change those facts.
But it could be so much more.
And that’s what went through my head as I was wiggling my hips and swinging my arms and doing things that made my body feel good. That this Wii Fit thing could have been so much more than what it is.
And it’s such a shame that it wasn’t.
Filed under: introspection | Tagged: Wii Fit |
The Long and Winding Road 
Are you able to log in and use the wii fit withOUT inputting your weight? I was able to use the wii on a visit to my mom’s and found that the games we used didn’t even ask for weight or anything but wasn’t sure if the Fiit games made it a requirement to play. If not then I’m tempted to get it for the fun factor and just leave the poor little machine guessing!
Was there any one there who was over the ‘recommended weight’ for using the wii fit? I was under the impression the “recommended weight” (ie the fattest you can be before you could break the damn thing) wasn’t very high.
aww I really want one!! but I don’t want to have to put up with the insulting stuff
glad you had fun on it!!!!
maybe I will bust out my hoola-hoop 😀
Well, you can’t register your Mii without letting it measure your weight, and I am told that if you try to use someone else’s Mii it can tell it’s not them because your weight is too different.
I played it a bit when a friend bought it. I told it I was 250 cm tall. That is the highest it goes. My favorite part is the skiing game. I didn’t try the hula hoop game because I have too much leftover shame over the fact that my butt is large and don’t want to draw attention to it by waving it around. 😦
Well, you can’t register your Mii without letting it measure your weight, and I am told that if you try to use someone else’s Mii it can tell it’s not them because your weight is too different.
I played it a bit when a friend bought it. I told it I was 250 cm tall. That is the highest it goes. My favorite part is the skiing game. I didn’t try the hula hoop game because I have too much leftover shame over the fact that my butt is large and don’t want to draw attention to it by waving it around. 😦
Wow my triangle is angry!
April, I can’t say for sure, because all the systems were already set up. I THINK the teacher in charge of the suite is the one that set them up, and I would assume that he used his own weight to do so (he was still fiddling with them when we walked in there, but he was almost done, so I didn’t really get to see what he was doing).
We didn’t have to re-do them with our own weight, which is part of why I had so much fun doing it. I didn’t have to deal with all that unpleasant stuff and just got right to the fun part. 🙂
Bri, I do believe that Caroline is over the recommended weight. My MIL (who was also there) MIGHT be, but I’m not sure. I know she’s bigger than me, but I wouldn’t even DARE venture a guess as to how MUCH. But Caroline didn’t get ON the board (she did the tennis and baseball games, where you used the controller thingie and not the board). My MIL wasn’t there very long, and I didn’t see exactly what she was doing. She was using the farthest system in the room, whereas I was on the other end of the room. She had to get back to work (she works at one of the local primary schools as a Classroom Assistant/Dinner Lady), so she didn’t get to stay very long. So I just don’t know whether she’d used the board or not.
Meerkat, I tried the skiing game. Twice. The best I could do was “only” missing 7 of the flag sets. Natasha did much better – she only missed 2!
To be honest, I’ve got a big ass too. And I was a little nervous at first about waving that ass around, but I thought ehh…. fuck it. If somebody wants to watch my fat ass, let ’em. I wasn’t going to let the size of my ass spoil all my fun!
I did the first body test to register my Mii with Wii Fit, watched her get fat, and then went right to enjoying the game. I heven’t bothered to do anymore body tests, so I don’t really think about it that much, and the Mii bodies all seem to look the same when you’re playing the games anyway.
i have a wii fit (and the wii sport too) and i agree that it can be a lot of fun. i adore the skiing game and the toggle board game. i’m in the process of trying to master the snowboard game. it’s really a blast. but i have definitely found that the being weighed thing is annoying and my enormous mii is insulting. now, the mii that i see for the game is NOT fat. so that is something. i only have to be reminded that i’m ZOMGTEHFATZ!!! when i do an assessment of my progress in posture and balance. i can’t figure out how to do that w/o it weighing me and telling me i’m a fattie. if anyone knows how to do a balance test w/o the weighing in, please tell me! it’s actually starting to bring me down. HOWEVER… i did manage to make my ‘fitness goal’ weight even more than i actually weigh. so it at least keeps telling me to gain some weight! i find that terribly funny.
I love them. I really want one. I played the tennis game at my friends house and was buggered in about five minutes. It really is good exercise. Like you I was pleasantly suprised at how fun it was AND what a good workout it was.
OK so this WII thingie does sound after all, like something I might enjoy. I’ve not given it a chance yet, but as you say, it does have its drawbacks if it uses bogus BMI tables.
An old topic, but I just wanted to mention that the max weight on a Wii Fit is 330 pounds, which sucks for me because I’m 340.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose 10-15 pounds just to use it….even if it is incredibly awesome.
The thing about Wii? Is that you could just exercise without a screen and an overpriced gaming device.
…that is programmed to be judgemental about weight.
We finally scored our Wii Fit – but I added 3″ to my height so I could be merely “Overweight” instead of “Obese”…
I don’t have enough curse words in my vocabulary to say how fucked-up that is. (& when the game was urging me to “Set a goal!” I wanted to throw the controller through the screen, but it’s my son’s toy, too expensive for me to break…)
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