Wii little Nike

One of the things that I hope to be able to do this year, after surgery a year ago and Bug arriving in February was to be able to run a half marathon and to get back to my “wedding weight”. I’m just shy of both goals today. With a little luck with the weather, I’ll run a 21.2km course on Monday (I’d rather be running that distance in Disneyland this weekend) and hopefully within a few weeks I’ll have the last few pounds gone. Along the way, I’ve been using a couple of tools to help track things. The first is the “body test” in WiiFit and the second (after graduating from Twitter and GMaps Pedometer) is Nike+. After almost four months of training, I’ve come to the conclusion that I would never allow WiiFit to be allowed near anyone who is even remotely conscious of their personal metrics. Why?

Unlike Nike+, where you set your own goals and achieve them without any continuous feedback (though I haven’t tried any of the coaching programs yet), WiiFit’s annoying board is a bubbly know-it-all avatar that will think that anything that deviates from textbook normal is bad. If it doesn’t see you everyday, it chides you for not being committed. If you show up everyday, it encourages you to take it easy. If you train at odd times, it ponders your sleeping habits and if your weight spikes for reasons that you truly can’t figure (or that are outside of the meager list that it provides), it suggests that you have just smushed a cute little animal. WiiFit doesn’t really want you to be a better you, it wants you to fit into a textbook version of you. Granted, you can ignore all the body testing and just play the games, but then one is leaving half the functionality at the door (so it would work in the higher ed context where profs only use half the text anyway). It would be really nice if there was a way that you could tell it that you are actually doing other workouts as well. Maybe that would help mitigate some of the issues, but I’m not all that sure about that. Why? Because WiiFit believes that it has all the answers, which when you are working towards a personal fitness goal doesn’t seem to make very much sense. The Nike+ system has few answers and those that it has don’t seem to be obtrusive to the casual user. I’ve yet to see anything other than trophies for meeting goals and winning challenges and a couple of system messages for passing mile markers.

If Nike is smart, they will partner up with Nintendo and create a Nike+ channel that will integrate the Nike+ site with the balance board so the Nike system is able to not only tell you how many calories you are burning, but if that actually changes how much you weigh – so you could set a goal to burn 10000 calories in a month and see if that actually results in the changes that you want. I don’t know if Nintendo would want to do this with their WiiFit, but I can certainly see EA getting into it with their EA Sports Active – think about the money there for both sides.


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