Live Fat, Die Young…

 

Obese?

 

Let’s face it, a lot of people in the world are fat. No, I’m not talking about the ones who could stand to loose a few pounds. I’m talking about people who are clinically obese; people who are stretching the physical limits of just how large you thought a human could be. People who are pushing their bodies to breaking point through sheer size alone.

It’s not surprising. Our society eats high fat, refined foods and many people exercise less than a narcoleptic sloth with a nasty case of glandular fever.

Actually, I was once trapped in the top floor of a club for two hours when a massively obese woman passed-out (from alcohol) in the stairwell. Five bouncers couldn’t move her. We had to await the emergency services and specialist lifting equipment.

Anyway, back to the point. Games.

Games have a reputation for being part of this growing problem. We already know they can cause migraines, back-strains and motion-sickness. And of course, sitting down for long periods of time doesn’t do anything for one’s physique.

But active games like Dance Dance Revolution, Eye Toy and Wii Fit are starting to change things. By making games more active and less static, the same addiction to the virtual environment can be used to combat poor fitness.

 

 

Other games out there are also trying to educate kids on the risks of an unhealthy diet: Fatworld, for example.

According to creators, Persuasive Games, “Fatworld is a video game about the politics of nutrition. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. It’s one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away”.

 

 

Your avatar can select a starting weight and height and predispositions to medical problems like diabetes. You then have to select what and when you eat, what you avoid and whether you exercise. And the results of your choices are reflected in the size (and health) of your avatar.

So perhaps gaming is the future of combating obesity? The Wii certainly likes to tell kids they’re solidly built, even if they don’t want to hear it.

But it’s a Fat World, after all…

Extra, Extra, read all about it…

 

I don’t think I complain a lot but actually looking back at the blog posts I’ve written recently, I think I’m becoming a bit of an online whiner…and nobody likes a whiner, on or offline. Still, sometimes you just need to vent and where better than on here? So my mini rant for this week is about “extras”. What do I mean by that? It’s the sort of things that you assume you will automatically get when you buy something so you don’t give them much thought, but then actually when you get home, unwrap what you’ve bought and then go to use it, you realise it doesn’t have batteries / storage card / control pad – delete as appropriate.

 

 

Now I know that perhaps I just haven’t read the small print but I reckon writing it in small print in the first place is just sneaky. If you’re buying something you’re vaguely excited about, like a new camera or games console, you tend not to think about the small things – you just want to play!  I remember when I bought my Wii I was devastated that I only had one Wiimote so couldn’t play 2-player tennis. And then when I found out they were £33 each I was more than a bit miffed. Especially since I then bought 4 so we could all play a full doubles match – which set me back £132!! Ouch. The Wii only cost me £160!

 

On the Download show last week we looked at the Sony HDR-TG3 and the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1000. The Sanyo is by far the cheaper of the two and boasts that it has room for 16GB SDHC cards but then you realise that it doesn’t actually come with an SD card at all! So you have to shell out another £50-£100 for a good quality SDHC card too! Ggggrrrr extras. I’d stick with the Sony – it’s more expensive but at least it comes with a 4GB storage card so you can at least start somewhere. And as my dad always says, if you pay peanuts, you tend to get monkeys J