Shame on Mii – Wii Fit Plus – Super Chart Island

For this guest post I am happy to welcome my friend Daisy Letourneur, who you can find on twitter at @DaisyLetourneur.

Searching for Wii Fit Plus reviews, Google suggested I add “weight loss” because, obviously, that’s what a lot of people exercise for. I’m going to save you a search : Wii Fit + will not make you lose weight, certainly not in any lasting way at least.

As pointed out by Iain in his review of the original game, Wii Fit is all about wellness, well being, equilibrium… all things that in a fatphobic society, are associated with purging your body of “excess fat”. Even if Nintendo had tried its hardest to be fat positive, it could not have stopped people from making that association. Wii Fit + was an opportunity to correct that course but it was 2009, and the whole game was built around a weighing scale. Of course Nintendo leaned on the diet culture aspect.

One of the main new features earning this game its “+” is basically being more calorie obsessed. The game still starts by calculating your BMI (an extremely flawed indicator) and fattening or slimming up your Mii accordingly. You then enter a daily calorie burning goal that is supposed to help you lose weight (you don’t lose weight by burning calories) and every in-game activity ends with a count towards that goal (which is meaningless). I may sound mad at all of this. Because I am.

I’ve never exercised regularly. Never for more than a few weeks at a time. I thank school for turning fun sportive activities into a gruelling humiliation exercise for me. I was never the best at anything, probably in part because I’m on the autistic spectrum and have poor coordination. I’ve also always been a slow runner. Those things I tried to compensate for in EPS (“éducation physique et sportive”, the French PE) by being good natured about it and never giving up. I may have been the last one of my class, or even sometimes the whole school, to finish a particularly long run, but I did finish it even when other classmates had given up and everyone was waiting for me, encouraging me to give up. I did my best, I suffered graciously, in scenes that could have been inspiring in a movie. In real life it got me passing grades from some of the most generous teachers and mockery from others. Needless to say I developed a rather conflicted relationship to exercising and the whole sports thing, a mix of defiance and shame, mostly.

Wii Fit and its sequel could have been great for me, because I could use it at home, away from prying eyes, not afraid of being mocked when I struggled with basic steps sessions the moment they incorporated handclaps (I remember giving up the handclap part). It could have been, finally, sports with no shame! But the game was so focused on calories burning, telling you the food equivalent at the end of every exercise, it brought the shame back in for me.

I’ve never been fat, but I was overweight according to BMI standards and I’ve experienced a bit of fat shaming from my family and doctors through the years. I didn’t need the game reminding me. So I ended up dropping my routine after maybe a couple months of Wii Fit + use. I may have used it even less than the original game even though it is, in some senses, better, because it’s largely more of the same. I’m pretty sure I didn’t lose any weight.

There are a lot of ways the game improves on its predecessor, most appreciably by updating the user interface so that exercising everyday does not mean so much navigating through the same cumbersome menus, which, when you played the game with DVD loading times, was an incredible bore. It’s still not seamless but it’s much better. You also get a lot of new games and activities, a few new yoga positions. What you don’t get is a cure for fat. You get the opposite of that.

Nowadays Nintendo’s exergaming solution is Ring Fit Adventure. It’s actually built on an exercise tool, not a weighing one, and it’s much healthier in a lot of ways. I have to admit I barely used it, even though I got it while confined in my apartment in 2020, I mostly let my then 4 year old go wild with it, spending all the excess energy he would otherwise have been hard pressed doing in such a small space. It was basically his first video game, motion controls being much easier for him then than a traditional controller.

Back then the game saved my life as a single mother in a small apartment. And I know if I didn’t use the game much myself it’s probably because that kid already took most of my energy, but there’s still that little voice telling me that I’m just lazy. What a shame.