My latest addiction on the Wii is Dr. Mario Online Rx. It’s a puzzle game (very similar to Tetris) that came out as WiiWare on May 26, 2008. WiiWare games are developed specifically for the Wii and can only be purchased and downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel. The coolest thing about WiiWare games is their price–all between $5 and $15. Dr. Mario Online Rx costs $10. Contrast this to the titles that are sold on disk. I was in Best Buy last night and the cheapest Wii games were $20 but most were between $40 and $50.

If you’ve never played Tetris, the appeal of Dr. Mario Online Rx might be difficult to understand. The idea of both games is that shapes drop from the top of the screen. The player’s goal is to move the shape as it falls–moving it horizontally and flipping it around. The goal is to get a sequence of blocks in a row. In Tetris, the goal is to get an entire row filled in while in Dr. Mario Online Rx, the goal is get 4 blocks of the same color in a row or column. When you make the goal, the row (or blocks of the same color) disappear. If you aren’t able to get things to disappear, the screen fills up and eventually there’s no room for anymore blocks to fall. That’s when you lose the game.

Dr. Mario Online Rx has an additional premise that makes the goal a little more difficult to achieve. The premise is that the screen is covered with colored viruses. Dr. Mario is at the top of the screen dropping colored pills. Your real goal is to make all the viruses disappear by getting the colored pills to line up with the viruses so that you have 4 pill parts/viruses in a row or column of the same color. If you clear the screen of viruses, you move to the next, more difficult level.

One of the nice features of Dr. Mario Online Rx is that you can play over the Internet with other players (the Online part of the game’s name). You can play with strangers from around the world who have purchased the game but you also have the option of allowing friends who haven’t purchased the game play via your game. Greg and I played the other day and it seems that the speed of the game doesn’t suffer when you play online, even when one of the players has not purchased the game.  This is a great feature that I hope more games incorporate.  It’s nice to be able to share titles and I’d bet it would result in sales because people can try out games that they haven’t yet purchased.  If they like the game well enough, they would probably want to be able to play on their own without having to wait for someone else to invite them to play.

I love these kinds of puzzle games. In fact, Tetris helped me get through my dissertation. Each day when I sat down to write, I would allow myself to play three games. The challenge, of course, was to stop after three games. Because these games are so simple (some would probably say repetitive, perhaps even tedious), it’s instructive to think about why they’re addicting. I think Janet Murray (in Hamlet on the Holodeck) was on the right track when she suggested that Tetris (and games like it) allow us to feel that we are in control of our hectic, chaotic lives. The game throws blocks at us just as life throws things at us. We manipulate the blocks to put them in order and if we do it well, the blocks disappear. We are metaphorically sweeping things off our desks, accomplishing tasks and maintaining order. For me, this explanation feels accurate. I do feel in control while I’m playing and I definitely like being in control. The ironic thing, of course, is that the more time I spend playing Dr. Mario Online Rx, the more things accumulate on my real desk.

We recently bought Wii Fit and have been spending a fair amount of time exploring all it has to offer. There are many things that the game does well and a few things that could be improved (without much effort, it seems to me, which makes me really wonder why these things were not part of the original design).

For those who haven’t heard any of the hype about this new game for the Wii, I’ll give you a summary. The game comes with a new input device called a balance board. The balance board looks something like a scale without the numbers (and it does indeed function as a scale). The game is comprised of sub-games in four categories: yoga, strength training, aerobics and balance games. In addition, there’s a possibility to do a body test once a day. The body test gives you a Wii Fit Age which is similar to the Wii Fitness Age from Wii Sports. When you first register your Mii in Wii Fit, you have to go through the body test, which includes weighing and calculating your Body Mass Index in addition to a balance test. Depending on who you’re playing with and how you feel about others knowing your weight (and BMI), this process can be a little awkward. The first balance test that you do involves shifting your weight from left to right and trying to hold steady at a particular spot. The amount of weight placed on each leg is represented by a blue line that moves up and down as the weight on that leg changes. The test presents you with 5 pairs of red lines into which you try to move your blue lines and hold there for 3 seconds. You have 30 seconds to complete the 5 sub-tests. Once the 30 seconds has elapsed, your Wii Fit Age is calculated based on your real age, your BMI and how well you did on the balance test. As I’ve confessed in these postings in the past, I’m a sucker for this kind of random testing of how “good” I am, especially if I do well. So you can imagine that I was quite happy that my Wii Fit Age was 38 the first time I went through the process.

Once your Mii is completely registered, you’re ready to start getting fit, that is, playing the sub-games. There are too many sub-games to list here but I do have a few favorites. I enjoy many of the balance games. The first one I like is a soccer-based game. As a player, you stand on the balance board and see the back of your Mii’s head. As you shift your weight on the board to the left and to the right, you see your Mii’s head lean to that direction. Other Miis then line up to kick soccer balls at your Mii. The goal is to lean in the correct direction (left, right or middle) so that your Mii heads the ball. When the game starts, this is quite easy. It gets difficult, however, when the Miis begin to kick shoes and panda heads (of all things) at you. You need to avoid these because they smack you in the face and cause you to lose points. The smack is quite funny, accompanied by an appropriate sound effect and the visual of your Mii’s head snapping backward. The first time I played the game, I had no idea about the panda heads and because they look like soccer balls (round, black and white) until they get close to you and because I also thought that I had to lean my weight forward in order to head the ball, I did horribly (I got 20 points–to put that into context, Evelyn got over 100 the first time she played). It turns out that you don’t have to lean forward to head the ball. Instead, you just have to get your Mii’s head in the correct position. Now that I’ve figured out the game, it is quite fun. It’s also hilarious to watch other people play it.

Another of the balance games that I really like is a slalom skiing game. You lean forward to get more speed as your Mii moves down a hill and back to slow the Mii down. You lean left and right to move through the gates. It’s a simple game that is quite addicting because I keep thinking, “I can do better than that.” There’s also a ski jumping game that is addicting. In this game, you lean forward to get your Mii to move down a ski jump. At the end, you extend your knees quickly and try to keep your balance as your Mii flies through the air. The funny thing about this game is that if you miss the jump, your Mii tumbles down the hill head over heels becoming a larger and larger snowball. This is another game in which I keep thinking, “I can do better than that.”

Like I said, there are a ton of other games, some of which I’m sure I’ll talk about in future posts. An interesting question is whether the Wii Fit will actually keep anyone fit (or get them fit if they aren’t already). I think the good thing about the game is that it gets people up and moving, perhaps doing things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. The rewards (seeing your name move up the record holders list, unlocking additional levels and new games) are exactly the kinds of incentives that keep people motivated to continue to do these things (saying to themselves over and over, “I can do better than that.”) And eventually, as you unlock levels, some of the aerobics games can definitely get you sweating and breathing hard (try the hula hoop game at the duration level which is 6 minutes). The strength training games that I’ve tried are pretty difficult. But one major deficiency in the game is the inability to create a training program. You can’t string the sub-games together to automatically do one after the other. Instead, you have to stop in between each game, perhaps listen to an explanation, get your reward, and then select the next game. This lack severely limits the game as a serious fitness tool. Adding such a feature seems like it would be relatively easy to do so I’m surprised it’s missing. But even if this particular game doesn’t get me to be fit, it’s a reminder that I need to get up and move every day and that’s a good thing.

So is it strange for a 45-year-old woman to covet a Wii? I’ve been intrigued by this game system since I first saw one two years ago. So I finally bought one. I’ve been looking around in Best Circuit Shack-type stores but everyone has been sold out. Last week, I bit the bullet and ordered one online. I went all out–extra remote, numchuk, classic controller and so on. And to top it all off–I got DDR to go with it. It arrived today via UPS and it took only about 20 minutes to set it up.

Evelyn and I played all the sports right away. It turns out that I’m really good at tennis but she’s really good at boxing. She’s a brute and I should be eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. In the boxing game, I haven’t quite figured out how to protect my face and body but score hits on her face and body at the same time. She beat me in a decision and then in our second match, she outright knocked me out in the first round! We had a blast and were both sweating profusely by the time we were done. We got so tired out by the sports that we haven’t even tried DDR yet. We need to get another dance pad before we really have a great time with it.

One interesting thing to me about the Wii is the how poor the graphics are. For years, game reviews have focused on increased realism in the rendering of the game worlds. The technological challenges involved in rendering a tree blowing in the wind in a realistic manner are great but the average person doesn’t get excited about those challenges. The Wii moves us in the direction of ignoring the graphics to focus on the game play and how the player interacts with the game world. In the baseball game, for example, the Miis run around without any legs. In the boxing game, the Miis’ hands are separated from their bodies. And yet there’s something about the interface that has captured the imagination of all kinds of people, especially people who aren’t typically gamers. While Evelyn and I were playing, we both got into the games with our entire bodies. In fact, when Evelyn would serve in tennis, she would use her left hand to toss an imaginary ball into the air. Her left hand didn’t have any sort of controller in it and so she did that movement solely for her own brain, rather than for anything in the game itself. I think that’s the key to the appeal of the game–your movements in the real world are almost directly mapped into the game world. The manner in which we use the Wii remote (and the numchuk) are mapped into the game world in a way that makes us feel as though the remote is both a part of our world and a part of the game world. It exists on the boundary, the threshold, of the real, physical world and the game world. Like the dance pad in DDR, it is the threshold object (what Janet Murray would call the “liminal object”) that engages us, immerses us in the world of the game.

With the success of the Wii, all kinds of companies are focusing on different ways to interact with games. Ars Technica today has a review of a new game controller that sounds interesting in the way that DDR’s dance pads and the Wii are interesting. It’s called the Novint Falcon. It remains to be seen which of these new hardware interfaces are going to be successful but I think the focus on them is a positive development.