craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

I'm getting into a new excercise routine these days, and the impetus behind it was a video game system. —One hears people saying that a lot these days, but in my case the system is the PS3, not the Wii!

I should back up a bit first though, since the Wii does deserve some of the credit. We bought Wii Fit when it launched, and for the first couple weeks I used it to work out for half an hour a day almost every day. This was more than I had been doing, in fact other than a daily 4K walk at lunch time I had been getting pretty sedentary. And as is always the case, once I started exercising a bit more I noticed that I felt a lot better. So far, so good.

But one thing really bothered me about Wii Fit: it came out just as the weather was getting nice. So although it is a reasonably fun game, and the way it tracks your performance over time is very useful and motivating, I still wanted to go outside. This is also why our excercise bike, which I enjoy using in the winter, is no fun at all when the weather's nice and I can't help from thinking how much better it would be to go on a real bike ride.

Then along came a heat wave and the house was so stuffy that there was no way I was going to do Wii Fit. This broke up the rhythm I had gotten myself into, and I haven't been doing it much since.

By the time the weather cooled back down, I had bought a PS3, and was enjoying games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Uncharted. In these games you play as elite special forces soldiers or parkour running adventurer: basically guys who are in peak physical condition, and you take them through some very physical adventures. All while sitting on the couch. There is only so much of that you can do before you start to feel like you need to work out more. How can I force my virtual character to run up the side of a mountain like that if I can barely run a mile?

What's interesting about this is that I play Madden Football on the Wii all the time but never felt the same kind of guilt. I think there are two reasons: the PS3 games are ones where you really identify with the character, they tell a story almost like a movie (Emilie loves watching me play Uncharted, in fact). Also, the Wii's immersive controls make you forget to some extent that you're not actually playing football. To pass the ball, for example, you make a passing motion. While on the PS3, my character is leaping from cliff to cliff, pulling himself up by his fingernails, while I'm just sitting back pushing buttons. So the disconnect between the activity of the game and the passivity of playing it is greater.

There were other factors in getting me outside too, like the Olympics, and my reading a lot of Homer lately, but I really do think a big share of the credit goes to the PS3—for making me feel so lazy!

(*I haven't given up on Wii Fit, either, but I think it should take a backseat to running and gardening as long as the weather is nice.)