The Wii and Wii Sports were a magic trick. Waving a remote around and using a “sensor bar” which could be replaced by two candles, you could point and twist and swing and have it all appear on your TV screen. This when any kind of wireless controller at all was a pretty new thing. The effect it had was magic too, giving Nintendo a cultural reach which it had pretty much never had in the UK before, bringing in new audiences and selling in numbers way beyond those of its predecessors.
A bit more than a year later, in an even more unlikely twist, Nintendo carried off a second magic trick on nearly the same scale. This time, you wouldn’t even need to hold a controller (well, mostly). Your body movements would provide the inputs, but this time based on your shifting weight, channelled through your feet and the balance board controller you stand on. The ski jump game in Wii Fit, where you lean forward, centre of gravity carefully controlled, before bursting out into an extended shape and trying to hold as still as possible, is a moment of sorcery to rival the first racket swings of Wii Sports tennis. Wii Fit also cast a similar spell of popularity once more. It went on to spend a total of sixteen weeks on top of the combined formats chart, and twenty-four on top of the individual formats chart.
This was in some ways a more sinister kind of magic. The timing of those runs at the top of the chart tells a further story of what it was tapping into. After a handful of single weeks in the spring and summer of 2008, it got a five week run at the top starting from January 2009. Nintendo might have been reaching new markets in video game terms, but look further afield and advertising expensive fitness equipment to capitalise on aspirational New Year resolutions was an old trick in a new shape.
The concept of training yourself through a game was also one that Nintendo had already applied highly successfully with Brain Training. The jolly, gently hectoring tone makes its way across, as does the calendar and the idea of using a variety of training exercises and making unlocking them as a reward in itself. And when Wii Sports previously drew attention as a means of encouraging physical exercise, it was something that explicitly formed part of the game itself. It had a mode called Wii Fitness that would, like Brain Training, put you through a few daily tests and give you a score in terms of age, the younger the better. Wii Fit is in a sense one big expansion of that.
When it works, it is frequently great. It tells you how to do yoga poses and exercises in a friendly and approachable way. It mixes heavier-going workouts with balance games which are enjoyable enough to want to keep going for more, from that ski-jump to heading footballs to playing Marble Madness but by leaning your body. It gives scores for every time you do an exercise or game, in a way which is sometimes clearly spurious but still adds to the experience (“Burn rate: 101%”!). The presentation builds on the Wii’s established aesthetics in a really charming way, too. It turns jogging on the spot into something lovely by giving you a scenic island to run around, with your friends going back and forth cheering crowds by the side of the path. I didn’t really care about my Wii Fit age, when I played it in 2008 or now, but I found doing exercises enjoyable.
The problem comes in what else Wii Fit measures. The scientific validity or otherwise of Brain Training’s approach was, well, academic. If it didn’t achieve anything beyond making you better at Brain Training, no harm was done, and no one was going to be stigmatised for having a high brain age. The same goes for the age on Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Wii Fit does not ask you to set targets based on your Wii Fit age though, but on Body Mass Index, that simplistic calculation of height and weight, as if bodies and health aren’t way more complicated than that. On starting up, it asks you for your height in order to be able to calculate BMI, and proceeds to ask you about the goals you want to set for it. Specifically, it told me that I was in the ideal BMI range and still suggested to me that I should aim lower. It assumes that you’re in this to lose weight. It tells you unprompted about the best ways to use it to monitor your weight. And BMI being, to be generous, highly flawed matters in a way that those other games never had to contend with.
Wii Fit sometimes shows that Nintendo knew that it was dealing with something different. sometimes. You can password protect your account on it, which was never a thing with Brain Training, where on my second hand copy I was free to peruse its previous owners’ stats. Wii Fit can offer you discretion. In other aspects, though, it tries to play things in exactly the same tone, as if reminders to use it regularly to reach your weight goals, and to “go easy on those afternoon snacks” aren’t loaded with an entirely different societal context of guilt and scorn and discrimination. Reading that the game contributed towards lasting mental health issues for some of its players doesn’t come as a surprise in that context.
It really didn’t have to be that way. There is an entire game’s worth of stuff based on strength and balance, a Balance Training game that’s itching to get out. Societal attitudes to weight are so encompassing that you don’t actually need to put them into your fitness product for them to be part of the reason for people to buy it. Even if it still let you choose to do the obvious thing with a controller shaped like a set of scales, Nintendo could surely have reversed the emphasis of Wii Fit and still sold an enormous number of video games. A decade later, they did just that. As is, Wii Fit was one more video game that couldn’t keep up with its own implications, even if for once the implications weren’t those of killing people.
Wii Fit spent a total of 24 weeks at the top of at least one UK chart. Details on what else was #1 at the time after the page break.