Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Wii insults little girls... The solution? MATURE!

Okay, so here's something to ponder...

"I know it is just a game but we already have to worry about young girls starving themselves to look like magazine models and now we have a game that tells them they're fat. This to me is very worrying."

Taken straight from this article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-566754/Obesity-experts-condemn-Nintendos-Wii-Fit-game-tells-10-year-old-girl-shes-fat.html

I tend to agree to this. Why should your performance in a game be based on how much you weigh? I think game success should be based on how well you PERFORM... What you can DO, not a gross statistic that can be measured while you're standing perfectly still doing nothing.

On the other hand, I can think of a lot of games which could easily be deemed far more degrading to players... but they have ESRB for that... maybe an easy solution would be to just change the ESRB of Wii Fit to MATURE.


Problem solved.

4 comments:

Anton said...

Oh, forgot to mention a guy at work brought this in today, and I got to try it out... You start by choosing a Mii and creating a profile (you can only have up to 8 profiles which we quickly filled up at work since everyone wanted to try). It's a little finnicky sometimes because it tells you to step off, then a second later step back on, and if you don't do it fast enough it comes up with messages saying you're doing it wrong (The game did seem a little overbearing the way it worded instructions to me, I confess). It asks your height and weighs you and that's where it gives you an evaluation of your weight and it does not mince words (Fit, Fat, Overweight, Obese I think are just a few of the categories you can be given) Then you do a little balance practice, meaning you try to put this much weight on the left foot and that much weight on the right foot and sustain that weight distribution for about 3 seconds at a time. Then you do that about 5 more times, and finally it tells you how good you are at balancing.
That's about all I played. I saw some friends doing a few of the mini games, I think there were roughly 9-12 of them, but only 4 are unlocked at the start. They were even more simplistic than anything included with Wii Play though, just to give you an idea.

aewtech said...

Nice.

Thallian said...

now thats funny :)

Anton said...

Correction: according to a comment in the article by someone who's played the game more than I have, the actual ratings you can get are: "underweight, ideal, overweight or obese". "Fit" and "Fat" aren't used in the game at all.