How Fatphobia Shaped Early Motion Control in Video Games
Alice Scarlet Death
Video games make you lazy, have you considered Dance Dance Revolution? I lost a lot of weight playing it! You can too!
Just to preface, I am medically considered fat. 6’3″ and 300 lbs. (190cm 140kg.) Being overweight and subjected to its alleged correlation to laziness and weight gain. As a gamer (rise up gamers!) I was subject to this erroneous correlation many times. From the dance floor to waggle controls and all the way to Pokemon Go. Here are my observations on the marketing employed to shame people into getting exercise.
The earliest motion control accessories were fairly simple. Such as the many Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom accessories. Things like the track mat were marketed to people who were already athletic. Most experiences up til Dance Dance Revolution.
Dance Dance Revolution was just marketed as a rhythm game. It became a hit all on its own. The novelty likely swayed people to try it more. I remember thinking that DDR was a fun game first. Second, I felt like it was a great excuse to lose weight. Weight I wanted to lose from external societal pressures.
My goal was never to stay indoors all the time. I was bullied by people in my neighborhood and at school. I found video games to be a good way to escape the harsh realities of an abusive home. Unfortunately, it made me sedentary. I was often made to get off the game and go outside which seems like a pretty normal thing. I didn’t need to stay glued to it all the time. I’d play basketball or go ride my bike. No big deal. I didn’t like it. Thankfully these days I have better ways at coping with such stressors.
By the time the Wii had come around there hadn’t been any successful motion control mechanisms designed in quite some time. There was the Eye Toy. A few games here and there that required a microphone to play as well. But nothing major.
The Wii was a breath of fresh air. Waggle controls had me shaking and swinging my arms around. It was fun, something Nintendo was good at it. Albeit a little repetitive. Its marketing was more about being able to play with family.
Then they released the Wii Balance Board. It was one of the ‘get off your couch’ type games. There were a number of minigames on the prepackaged game that came out with it. It also let you weigh yourself and keep track of calories. I feel like Wii Fit gets away with this if only because it was mostly isolated as its own game.
Playstation Move and Xbox Kinect though? Those are entire platforms intended to get people off the couch. The Playstation Move still allowed for some sitting since it was a camera tracking two glowing lights instead of full body capture like the Xbox Kinect did. Some games like House of The Dead and No More Heroes come to mind. First party games like Sports Champions and Singstar not so much. I liked the PS Move because it allowed for diversity by allowing choice.
The Kinect did not offer much choice. There were two cameras that could determine depth. Imagine something like the 3DS that would use two cameras for 3D photos you took. The Kinect was doing the opposite of this, basically receiving 3D input of its surroundings instead of showing it.
During this motion craze, the media loved covering some of these things. The Wii at least. The news would default to thinking video games made you fat and lazy. So it would cover these motion platforms as a human interest story on how now you can play games and not be one of those cliche abominations people described nerds as back in the day.
Gaming went mainstream. Gaming was for everyone now. Not just for basement dwelling fatties!
Not that it helped any but most of the people society ended up calling the derogatory statement above were called ‘casual’ by them. Online there were heavy debate over casual vs hardcore. The media and advertising had split us into two and that’s where it ended up.
Gaming is just a hobby. If you’re in the industry it might be your job. But like any hobby in the age of social media and anonymity people tend to be very vocal about their passions. All the while the everyman is enjoying video games with their families.
Even if the games weren’t openly shaming overweight people, some of its marketing might have been. Fat people have been shamed by every other industry, it only took gaming to go mainstream for it to happen there too. Hence the resistance.
The Wii came out in 2006. PS Move and Kinect were late aughts/early tens. Then you had things like the iPhone coming out in 2007, a year after the Wii. The iPad in 2010. Both of those devices revolutionized the way we think about portable technology. If you thought Sony was smart for putting a DVD player in the PS2, then how about Apple putting games on a device everyone used: their phones. Games were being snuck into mainstream culture slowly but surely since their inception but this was the final straw.
Motion games began to come to a slow crawl. Xbox One and Playstation 4 were released. They both had cameras and such but they were kind of novelty items at this point instead of anything serious (Playroom on PS4 anyone?)
Mainstream games had gone mobile. And if you’re mobile, well then you’re mobile. Games on a phone don’t have the stigma of being a sedentary art form.
By the time the PS VR came around, the marketing around it wasn’t about getting off the couch. It was just about new experiences, exploring, and the technological feats. There are many of the same tropes on PS VR as there were on PS Move, but they are backed by a much better technology this time around. You get off the couch because it’s your idea this time around, not because you were shamed into doing so.
Above: my friend playing Child of Eden on Xbox Kinect
There is one last thing to talk about: Pokemon.
The Pokemon games always had social elements to them. Finding friends, trading Pokemon. The creator of Pokemon wanted to recreate the feeling he had when bug collecting. This wasn’t always the focus of Pokemon’s advertising though. Things like the PokeWalker or Pokemon Go would definitely help you get off the couch, but neither fat shamed anyone. Consistently the Pokemon Company/Game Freak has kept it simple. It’s about exploring. It’s not about being casual or hardcore.
I really appreciate their angle. They don’t shame me into getting off the couch. They give me a good reason. A fun reason.
There is nothing wrong with exercise games or games that require you to physically explore. The problem comes when people assumed that because you were a gamer that you likely needed exercise and motivation to off the couch.
It took over a decade but I rarely see rhetoric about gamers’ weight and lifestyle and as much as I did in growing up in the 90s and early 2000’s.
