Back in middle school there was always one kid on the baseball team with gangly legs too long for his body and ears too big for his head: that athletic disaster that you didn’t want to see come up to bat, even though you knew that everybody gets to play in Little League. Remember how that kid didn’t really want to get up to bat either? I was that kid, and I excelled more in the field of videogames than on a physical field.
Fortunately, I grew fully into my legs and mostly into my ears, and since I’m too old for the YMCA league, I haven’t had much opportunity to be embarrassed that I can’t throw a baseball straight to save my life. At least, that was true until I became one of the lucky few to own a Nintendo Wii.
When I first fired up my treasure over Christmas break, I was floored by how the motion-sensitive controller so easily became a tennis racket, a baseball bat, or even a bowling ball. Your golf shot depended on your actual swing instead of an arbitrary combination of button-pushes. Even the character on the screen was a cartoon version of myself. I’d finally found a videogame that approached reality, and I was ecstatic.
It was only after I began playing with my friends, who obviously were not that kid in middle school, that I began to lose my enthusiasm.
There are three “pro” level bowlers in my house: I am not one of them. I don’t hold any high scores. When I go golfing with my dad at home, I routinely get double and triple bogeys. When I play Wii golf, I routinely get double and triple bogeys.
At first, I couldn’t understand why everyone was doing better than me. I have a reputation for skill at videogames, and I’ll put a virtual bullet between the eyes of anyone who doubts it before they figure out which button means shoot. On the other hand, I just can’t seem to get that last bowling pin to fall down, in real life or on the Wii.
But I figured it out: the Wii is not a videogame, it’s a real, honest-to-life game, the same as ping-pong, darts or curling. The way you swing the controller is too real to be a videogame.
A Nintendo should take you away into fantasy. The point of videogames is to fight Germans in World War II, to destroy aliens in outer space and to shoot zombies with rocket launchers, not re-live the experience of consistently striking out in front of your friends. Even people who prefer sports games don’t want to merely recreate hockey or baseball; they want to be Wayne Gretzky or win the World Series as the New York Yankees. The Wii does not transform you from a normal person into an exceptional hero; it transforms you from a person of mediocre athletic skill into a computerized person of mediocre athletic skill.
On the other hand, playing a game with your friends can be more fun than sitting alone, glued to the TV screen and imagining yourself elsewhere. Instead, I frequently find myself sitting on the couch, enjoying the company of my friends and trying to throw their aim off by yelling “miss!” at the appropriate time. It’s something that everyone does together, and I’d have a hard time claiming it was completely un-fun. I just tell myself the same thing I did back in middle school: maybe they can hit a stupid baseball, but I’m smarter than they are! I like to glaze over the fact that they also got into Georgetown.
