Wii Fit: Calling your children fat

Supply can hardly keep up with the demand for Nintendo’s Wii Fit game & balance pad bundle. Amazon.com reported that during the pre-order phase, 2.5 units were being sold every minute quickly leading to the label 'SOLD OUT' appearing for anyone coming in late to buy one.

However, Nintendo's flagship Excergame has received some criticism for telling some of their more sensitive customer's that they were overweight. The Wii Fit calculates a person's fitness level in an over-simplified way:

"Once the player has entered their height, the game uses BMI, a measure of body fat based on an adult's height and weight, to calculate their level of obesity, placing them in categories such as 'underweight' and 'fat'."

The parents of the affected child in this case claim that she was, " devastated to be called fat and we had to work hard to convince her that she isn't." Since the parents don't seem to be looking for money, I feel somewhat inclined to side with them in the belief that Nintendo should have been more careful about what they were saying to their prospective audience. The Wii Fit does have an ESRB rating of E and its developers should have went over its content knowing that very young children would be playing it. Nintendo has apologized to anyone offended by this issue but declared that they would not be putting a warning label on the game.

An entirely separate issue is the weight limit of the board itself. The US version of Wii Fit will support a person up to 330 lbs. Some people assumed that it would simply not register anything higher than that, only to bring it home and find that it will not let you use many of the features if you are over that limit.

This seems counter-intuitive, since people who do in fact weight more than this strict weight limit and play video games would be the ones most excited to have an exercise program that they might be interested in.

The Wii Fit does a great job of bringing exergaming to a mainstream audience, showing impressive sales figures (Wii Fit sales figures approached and possibly surpassed all-time sales of DDR games within a week of release. 2003 sales figures for DDR)

So is the Wii Fit getting people off their couches and making them exergame daily? It's hard to tell this early. What it does show is that there is clearly a market for these games. For the good of all unfit gamers, I hope the success of the Wii Fit inspires game developers to get creative and give us, the consumer games that we can enjoy and keep us fit at the same time.