T w e n t y S i d e d
Dance Dance Revolution has a good reputation for helping young people stay in shape. Now someone has lost weight just by playing the Wii – presumably by standing and waving the wand around and not by parking himself on the couch and just exercising his wrist. For the last couple of years years I’ve been expecting a game focused on exercise to show up. It hasn’t happened yet – at least not on a large enough scale to appear on my own limited “industry trends” radar – but recent controller innovations indicate that someone might start thinking in this direction soon.
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| TOP: A high-end DDR Dancepad. MIDDLE: Nintendo Bongo controller. BOTTOM: XBox360 Guitar Hero controller. |
I think so. Maybe now that Harmonix is no longer making Guitar Hero they will investigate something along these lines in their now-copious free time. Maybe someone else will take a crack at it. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the next console generation before someone works up the nerve.
I have a pretty clear picture of how something like that should work, and an excellent picture of how it could be royally screwed up, which is more than likely.
The key here is that we want to harness the “just one more level”, or “just a few more minutes” nature of videogames, and tie it in with some form of steady, low-impact exercise. You want the player to keep going, keep playing the game, and keep exercising.
And here is where things are likely to get hosed:
The game should in no way be focused on racing.
The most obvious thing to do is to plug an an exercycle into the XBox and have the player “race” against the CPU. This is a terrible idea which is doomed to failure. Here is how that little drama will play out: The player is going to select a challenging race, and then pump furiously for two minutes. They will then stagger away from the machine, exhausted, dizzy, and suddenly keenly aware of their heart and the role it plays in sustaining their life. They will walk – perhaps crawl – away from your device and your game, not feeling particularly fulfilled, either from an exercise or gaming perspective. They will not return.
I suggest that the exercise in our theoretical game should be an aspect of the gameplay, not the entirety. It should be steady and prolonged, not intense and short. It should allow the player to slow down when they feel fatigued and speed up as they recover, without punishing them for the respite with things like total failure. All of this lends itself to more interesting gaming, and (as an added bonus) is less likely to kill them.
So the idea is to present the player with a more or less “normal” game experience, and then provide them with motivation to keep pedaling. Let’s outline our needs:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Videogames + Exercise”
