Blips: My Shape

Source: What the Next Generation of Health and Fitness Software Can Learn from Wii Fit
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: Forbes

OK, I'm not back on normal posting schedule yet, but I'm recovering from surgery, so give me a break. Anyway, perhaps appropriately as I lie here considering my own bodily existence, I've also read this piece my Michael Thomsen on Wii Fit, Wii Fit U, and electronic fitness monitoring systems. I'd never really paid the original Wii Fit much mind, which is crazy considering how popular it was, but Thomsen's description of the way it pushes you to elaborate on simple instructions with subtle body movements is really profound notion. This especially in light of how most games ask very little of the human body but perform complex feats of virtual athleticism on screen, as Thomsen explains. This is before even getting into the angle of who has time for these kinds of tracking devices (hint: not the people who can't afford to shop at Whole Foods).

I have used video games as a fitness tool myself. In college I began playing Dance Dance Revolution PS2 games on a regular basis with the intention of lowering my heart rate. I played a lot, and burned through a couple sets of dance pads and a handful of DDR sequels, and achieved my fitness goal. Also, I got pretty good at DDR; not competition good, but still. However, one thing I liked about this was that I didn't have to guilt myself into playing, and the game never tried to shame or motivate me from a fitness perspective. I'm pretty sure there were "calorie burner" modes in some of those games, but I never touched them. DDR was a fun game to play with physical health side benefits, but I did adopt a regular workout regimen with the game, aided by the social context of a friend in college that would play along side me. It was a perfect confluence of factors to make me feel happy and healthy, one that I haven't experienced since.

Nowadays it seems like "games as fitness tools" is its own industry, so any electronic device that involves exercise is designed with the "workout session" in mind. DDR predates this, and to me, makes it more approachable. Who knows, maybe DDR is a poor exercise tool, maybe it's bad for your knees or bad for your eyes since you have to stare so hard at a screen. I'm probably better off just going out for a run, but running sucks (I've trained for and run a half-marathon in my post-college years) and, for me, requires the external motivation of training for a race. In the end, it's not just what the tools at your disposal are capable of, but how they make you feel about yourself and how they fit into your life. From my experience, physical fitness has everything to do with circumstance, and the factors that play into that aren't tracked in a calorie counter.

Blips: Excessive Motion

Source: The Body of the Gamer: Game Art and Gestural Excess
Author: Thomas Apperley
Site: Academia.edu from Taylor & Francis Online

OK, let's see how quickly I can break down this essay by professor Thomas Apperley about game art and human body glitch aesthetics. Putting aside whether video games are art, there exists game art, which is art that makes use of games in some fashion. This could be a straight-up art game, or it could be something else that makes use of the glitch, performance, or social aspects of games. The definition of game art is not simple to categorize and seems to be ever-expanding. Apperley's main focus is on motion controls and how they call more attention to the bodies of players than button-based interfaces do, and that the expressiveness of bodies at play using motion controls is ripe for implementation in game art, though not all that much game art has taken up this mantle. Apperley proposes that as far as game art is concerned, the human body acts as a glitch itself, though what he terms gestural excess. An example of gestural excess would be like when you're playing tennis in Wii Sports, and instead of performing a slight wrist flip to swing the virtual racket, you swing your entire arm as if you were actually playing a game out on a real court with real equipment. That excess motion is not factored into how the game interprets the controller motions, nor is your stance or your offhand. These are game behaviors, but they do not help players succeed in the game, and can in fact be detrimental to players' in-game success. Motion controls turn the role of glitch back onto the players when it comes to certain aspects of how the body interacts with games, but as these devices become more sophisticated and able to process minute gestural details, the window for gestural excess will begin to close.

How'd I do? I still recommend checking out the whole essay which cites a ton of neat examples of game art, most of which were new to me. I think Bennet Foddy's games fit into this discussion in an interesting way too, seeing as they get a lot of mileage out of the physicality of button pushing. A game like GIRP turns your computer keyboard into a timed game of Twister that you play with your fingers, and the ever-popular QWOP simultaneously simulates and abstracts muscular rhythms. I was a DDR player for a few years and definitely fell into the non-excessive "only do what's necessary" category, but not out of principle; I just wasn't good enough to have the time or energy to showboat. Then, when the Wii came out, dancing games that only tracked the Wiimote just seemed dumb. I couldn't understand why someone would dance an entire routine when the game only cares about the position of your right hand –too much excess.

Still, I worry that the time for game art to comment on these issues may be past us now. Wand-like motion controllers have fallen out of public favor, and only touchscreens and the new Kinect remain, the latter of which is attempting to cut out excess as much as possible, down to the minutiae of facial expressions. I fear we may have to wait until some kind of nostalgic reverence for the Wiimote emerges before we see game art of the sort of which Apperley identifies.