Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Nintendo: Wii is not an exercise machine

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Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Nintendo: Wii is not an exercise machine

by Ian Bogost November 30, 2006

categories: Console & PC Games , Health & Medicine Games

There are a bunch of leading articles on Yahoo! this morning about the Wii, including coverage of people breaking their TV's and windows by inadvertently hurling wiimotes. More interesting, though, is a story on "Wii elbow", in which we get an official Nintendo position on Wii as exercise. Short answer? It's not.

Nintendo vice president of marketing Perrin Kaplan put it plainly. "[The Wii] was not meant to be a Jenny Craig supplement," she told the WSJ. "If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more."