Last week, Destructoid ran coverage of a couple of guys who fashioned homebrew treadmills and wired them up to World of Warcraft. They then filmed a dorky costumed performance of an obviously exhausting run across Azeroth:

Is this exercise? Sure, but it's mostly geekery. I can't imagine the pair will leave their rig set up, let alone use it for their daily workout. But if you stop to think about it, WoW jogging is more similar to real exercise regimens than it seems.

Wii Fit and other explicit exercise games promise to make the drudgery of exercise more palatable by making it more fun and increasing one's sense of progress. Repurposed exercise games, like DDR, do the same but through accidents of design. But what none of these games admit is that exercise is boring and repetitive. It's work. And worse, it's work that just piles back up again.

Exercise really is much more similar to the MMO grind than to other kinds of games. It's something you have to do everyday, or every few days. It never really changes, but you do get better at it slowly, over time. There are some new features afforded to the proficient but not many; it's mostly a sense of personal and physical satisfaction that emerges from exercise. Devices like the Nike iPod keep records and encourage mild competition among the proficient, but they don't offer much more than that.

At the Montreal International Games Summit last year, Jonathan Blow levied a strong criticism against MMOs, arguing that they are more like drugs than like games. And it seems to me that he's not wrong. Perhaps one approach to the genre would be to make the repetitive work it requires worth doing repetitively.

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