You Look Like a Freak When You Play With Your Wii

Okay, so I am officially no longer cool or in touch with what is the hip and the now because I think you look like a freak when you play with your Wii.

Let me state that again very clearly: YOU LOOK LIKE A FREAK WHEN YOU PLAY WITH YOUR WII.

The terminology alone (“playing my Wii” or “playing with your Wii” or “I love my Wii”) in and of itself sounds vaguely pornographic and silly, mostly because Wii sounds like a slang for penis and the word Wii makes me think of wee wee which reminds me of penis or urination, both images / words that make me chuckle a little.

But they don’t make me laugh as much as the image of grown adults or even teenagers dancing around their living rooms holding little white plastic things in their hands and jerking their bodies around like they’re having some kind of epileptic seizure or recreating a scene from “The Exorcist” as they look at their television screens and drool with excitement.

Now as a woman of a certain age, I’ll admit my video game knowledge is mostly limited to the Atari 2600 (moment of silence let us praise it) and the early form of Nintendo (which involved the interactive game Duck Hunt which I also thought was lame after playing it for five seconds). No, I have never played with a Wii nor do I want to spend hundreds of dollars acquiring one. Why?

Because you look like a freak when you play with your Wii.

You want to dance? You want to box? You want to play tennis? Then get your FAT AMERICAN ASS outside and DO those things, for God’s sake! Do them in real life! My God, people. Our bodies were not meant to be cramped inside a little room holding a tiny, white plastic console and whipping ourselves around in a frenzy only to see a cartoon recreation of ourselves on the screen doing the exact same thing. WHY is this interesting, fun, fascinating, enjoyable, or even healthy? Why? Someone please tell me. Please.

I saw a piece on “The Today Show” about disabled people who are recovering from car accidents and on-the-job accidents using the Wii to rehabilitate their bodies. Great. Fine. That’s what the damn Wii is for. IT IS NOT FOR YOU, a healthy, able-bodied person who is physically able to do the things he or she is doing on a television screen in what we call real life. The real life that is waiting for you if only you put the Wii down and step away slowly and join the rest of us in the land of the living.

I don’t know why this has got my goat so bad. Perhaps it’s because it’s just another sign that we are quickly becoming a technologically obsessed group of fat geeks incapable of interacting with other human beings. Perhaps it’s because in a nation of debtors this is the last thing we should be spending our money on. Perhaps it’s because I fear a nation of console-clutching goobers is even less able to assess when its precious civil rights are being stripped away than it is without the console in its collective grip.

And perhaps it’s because I think it’s because you look like a freak when you play with your Wii.

There. I said it. – Jennifer Mathieu