Review of Yourself! Fitness
December 22, 2004 - by Ian Bogost

This was a big year for the dance fitness game, with significant numbers of new consoles sold after NBC's Today morning show ran a feature about how gamers were losing weight -- significant weight -- playing Konami's Dance Dance Revolution. Sony's Eye Toy has made strides in this direction, and indeed the new version of DDR includes a (quite difficult) mode that can be played with the dance pad and the Eye Toy. In the last month mediocre peripheral manufacturer Mad Catz finally brought a dance pad to the Game Cube. Moving beyond software, more expensive hardware platforms abounded at May's E3, all meant primarily for play with console-based racing games. Given the subsequent, outrageous success of DDR, which has sold over 6.5 million units worldwide and over 1 million in the US, it's surprising that there haven't been more attempts to tap the exercise game market. New developer/publisher ResponDesign's first title, Yourself! Fitness, is trying to do just that.

ResponDesign was founded by fitness and athletic shoe executives who raised an impressive US$5 million in VC funding to become the first indie developer/publisher of fitness games. In fact, the company is based in Portland and has a parntership with nearby Nike that allows them to take advantage of the latter's advanced consumer focus group and athletic experts. The company's first title, Yourself! Fitness, is quite easy to characterize: it's an attempt to reinvent the home fitness video in the interactive medium of the videogame.

The game features Maya, an intricately, uhm, modeled "virtual personal trainer" who serves as the game's hostess and personal trainer. Maya is a fascinating specimen in herself, a sort of anonymous amalgam of cultural and racial representation who could pass for caucasian, persian, and latina. At the Games for Health Conference earlier this year, pediatric exercise expert Vish Unnithan pointed out to me that Maya is in-shape but non-threatening; she is very toned but yet soft -- approachable.

The game itself is ingeniously simple -- the player sets up a profile by setting their height, weight, vital signs, and goals. Maya then crafts a customized training program that typically requires less than 30 minutes per day. The majority of the routines are standard aerobic exercises, guided by the intricately motion-captured Maya. However, the game does take advantage of the procedural affordances of the medium. When you start playing, Maya takes your heart rate and asks how you're feeling. If you're not up to working out, she might give you a pass for the day. In other circumstances the developers say that Maya might advise you to go out for a walk or a jog, although I haven't seen this yet. You can also play the game without setting up a profile, but this "quick play" mode rather decimates the game experience over the long haul. The game also features a yoga mode, but it's impenetrable unless you already know the basic yoga moves and positions, which I didn't. Provided ResponDesign and Microsoft can get through the pending lawsuit over this game, I know the former has plans to release new editions of Yourself!, including one devoted to yoga specifically. Consider the yoga mode a taste of things to come.

The motion-capture exercise routines are very high quality, but they suffer from a large dose of the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe a huge chasm in emotional response to synthetic characters that occurs just between representative specimens that would produce empathy and specimens that look truly human. I found Maya downright creepy at times -- Polar Express creepy.

Because the game attempts to provide a holistic fitness regimen, it also offers menus and recipes for healthful eating. While well-intentioned, I found this aspect of the game frustrating and ultimately useless. The menu feature asks the player to input the number of calories he or she plans to consume per day and builds a menu based on that input and other saved settings. Given the computational power of the console, it's truly disappointing that the game asks the player to master a numerical system like calorie intake, something the computer is far better able to make sense of. I'd much rather have had Yourself! Fitness help me build a diet profile that determined my proper daily calorie range and provided menus accordingly. Of course, you still have to get the menus and recipes from your TV into your fridge and eventually your body, which inevitably requires that very non-computational technology, paper and pencil. This is perhaps the only case where the PC version of the game has an advantage (see below), provided the game can output directly to a printer.

As part of the reinvention of the exercise video, the developers wanted to abet the inevitable boredom of that medium -- the same woman saying the same thing on the same beach with the same wave crashing at the same time, day after day. To combat this boredom, Yourself! Fitness allows the player to unlock new exercise "arenas" and music much like players of racing games can unlock new tracks. Whereas a racing game rewards performance -- your finish position in the race -- Yourself! Fitness rewards consistency -- the number of workouts you do without missing one. It's the kernel of a clever idea, but unfortunately the motivation is fairly empty: at the end of the day, unlocking new music and backgrounds simply underscore just how similar Yourself! Fitness is to the fitness videos of yore, boredom and all.

Yourself! Fitness is currently available for PC and Xbox, with a PS2 version due out in January 2005. I imagine the PC version was released to accommodate those players who don't have a console and don't want to invest in one -- yet. Unless you're one of the ten people who has a Media Center PC, forget about the PC version. The fact that the title was launched on Xbox should remind us of just how much Microsoft is invested in taking over our living rooms. While the PC version allows players without a console to get into the game for under US$30, playing Yourself! Fitness on anything other than a console is a recipe for disappointment. Following its exercise video pedigree, the game simply requires the living room floor.

There's no question that Yourself! Fitness is a brilliant business and marketing maneuver. The game deftly updates the aging VCR exercise video for the videogame console. In fact, the company's ability to land the funding to create the game in the first case seems predicated on this very identifiable market shift -- same idea, different medium. As ResponDesign co-founder Phin Barnes noted at Games for Health, women should get something out of the $150 investment in the Xbox they buy for their kids. Female consumers dominate both the home fitness space and the videogame retail space -- they make (or "approve") 75% of consumer electronics purchases. Personally, I think Barnes is right -- the most promising market for the game is among parents, especially mothers, of kids who own a game console. While the kids are at school or in bed, mom can make use of junior's Christmas present. With a creative distribution partnership with Nordstrom and a research and marketing partnership with Nike, ResponDesign is indeed exploring new terrain in getting videogames to market. The game itself is very feminine, and I can imagine many husbands and boyfriends rejecting it for that reason, despite Maya's Maxim-worthy good looks.

But Yourself! Fitness suffers from a significant problem of motivation. Whereas DDR and Eye Toy completely reinvent the idea of exercise by creating incentive to get physical through gameplay, Yourself! Fitness falls quickly into dry repetition. To play Yourself! Fitness effectively, you must already be self-motivated to start and continue a fitness regimen. Such a requirement simply does not exist in games like DDR, which produce exercise as a quasi-emergent outcome of play itself. The attempt to motivate players through unlockable backgrounds and music is a mixed metaphor -- an attempt to graft a rather mismatched goal-directed play onto the game. This problem would have been less severe if the rewards were integral to the gameplay; DDR provides music unlocks, but music is the centerpiece of DDR gameplay. Even a kind of unlockable progression of exercises, akin to learning new forms in a martial art, would have been a better choice than a new pagoda background. That said, Yourself! Fitness offers a much more consistent, formal kind of aerobic exercise, something that DDR can't purport to recreate. Yes, DDR and Eye Toy do have higher learning curves, but they also provide adequate motivation to do the learning. For players who are more concerned with the form of their exercise than just getting some exercise in the first place, Yourself! Fitness is a clear winner. But how many of those people really exist?

Yourself! Fitness marks an important moment in videogames -- an unabashed, AAA-level effort that tries to take the medium beyond entertainment. For that, I give ResponDesign much-deserved credit. The game itself is top-notch with very high production value, a real specimen of where non-leisure games can go. But the implementation of a procedurally-customized exercise program that remediates the exercise video seems like incremental progress to me. The promise of games like DDR and Eye Toy is in their ability to engender physical activity through play without demanding the player to adopt a complex, indeed ideology-steeped understanding of "fitness." Those are the exercise games that interest me most.

POST A COMMENT

TRACKBACKS