Last night I saw an extended commercial for a “program” for Nintendo’s Wii console called “WiiFit”. WiiFit hold itself out as an “exercise game” that offers approximately 40 activities, such as yoga, push ups, and aerobics. One programs one’s height and weight into the game, and then uses the Wii “balance board” along with a graphical interpretation of the body to perform the activities. For PlayStation, you can try Dance, Dance Revolution. This game is a kind of electronic twister sheet; you try to get your feet to do what the feet on the screen are doing, at various levels of difficulty. While these games may be played with another person, there is the spectre of playing alone, with your avatar body or disembodied feet.
At first this just seemed ridiculous; the commercials depict entire families sitting on couches as cheering spectators while an individual enthusiastically works out. But then I started to think.
I admit taking part in exercise at a gym, something I used to ridicule. I didn’t understand why people couldn’t get enough exercise via normal everyday activities such as bicycling or roller skating, or just good brisk walking. Now that I’m a little older and not living the urban life, though, I use the gym primarily to take classes and, well, just to get out of the house.
During and after the commercial, my mind kept returning to a science fiction story I read years ago, a story about people who have lost the ability to live on the Earth’s surface, and so live under the earth in isolated rooms, all their needs, including feeling and waste management, provided for by a machine that, like the Wii or PlayStation, has been built by humans. This was E.M. Forster’s 1909 story, The Machine Stops.
In that story, people have reached such a state of isolation and discomfort with others that they have begun to cherish their privacy, becoming unwilling to travel between cells even to see their children and equally uncomfortable having others visit in their own cells. They communicate through a network remarkably similar to the internet.
1909!
I understand that this is a matter of personal preference, yet I cannot imagine exercising an avatar with only a secondary concern for one’s actual self. Yes, there are plenty of gaming addicts who spend all of their free time on Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft. I can almost comprehend the increasing proliferation of electronic pets; they don’t shed, and only need to be walked insofar as one can call pushing a button walking. So why does WiiFit seem to me to be so much more…chilling, more so than the iPod, or reading books, or any other solitary pursuits?
It may be the fact WiiFit is marketed as a game. And while I see nothing inherently wrong with electronic fitness, I am disturbed by the fact that it begins to appear that some segment of our society will not participate in anything, including eating and dancing, unless it is alone, in their own virtual cells, and presented as a “game”.
I won’t spoil the ending of Forster’s story. Just call me apocalyptic; what happens when the machine stops?
