Your emotions, kinected

There's an old article on Gizmodo on how making certain physical motions can drive your emotions, and how the Kinect and Wii can "hack" that effect.

Numerous studies have shown that movements or postures generate cues the mind can use to figure out how it feels, a phenomenon dubbed the physical-feedback effect. Wii games might also create emotions between people through "emotional contagion," where the brain can make us feel what we see, hear, read or think others experience.

I think this goes without saying -- haven't these people ever danced before? Climbed a tree? Been on a swing? Done a really great exercise class at the Y? And I'm not even talking runner's-high endorphins, I'm just thinking about that moment when you let something loose and boom, you feel fine about everything.

It's like that funny trick with Yoga -- you connect the name of the pose with the action you're doing (get into being a snake while doing Cobra, really push down like a petulant child in Child's Pose, make like a Warrior, etc.), you definitely get that mind-body connection.

However, I think one thing that the Kinect brings to the sheer joy of moving, something that hasn't been explored, is how pairing the Skinner box-like rewards systems of flashy lights and "gamer point" rewards with the fact that moving is fun.

Below are Wii players rating their emotions as they are having them. Maybe we should be doing this during daily activities -- and novel, exercise-based ones, as well?

Review: "Your Shape: Fitness Evolved"

One of the things I think the Kinect has the most potential to do is take the place of fitness DVDs. Instead of following along with an instructor who can only pre-record feedback, you'll get real feedback based on how well you are based on your actual body movements, since the Kinect analyzes your motion. It seems like an obvious fit, as well as an obvious way to make the technology attractive to people who don't play a lot of videogames.

However, The kind of people who like technology and the kind of people who are hard core into exercising are two -- I'm only guessing here -- relatively different groups. I can only speculate that those who purchase exercise DVDs are either doing it because a) they are hardcore so they need to keep up a routine when traveling or holidays or a Y class is cancelled or the weather's too bad for a run or b) they will get in shape like that Billy Blanks. Someday. In the privacy of their own home.

So you have two types of motivations, very different, and with very different exercise needs. "Your Shape: Fitness Evolved" had to pick one. So they went with the couch potato who probably is more likely to spring for the technology for technology's sake. (The fitness buff might spring for a Kinect to, say, try to get her kids to do something more active than a regular video game.)

In that sense, even for someone in middling shape like myself (but who has a pretty hardcore workout past), the workouts are too gentle to start and too long to rev up, too broken up to keep your heart rate up for a significant time and your calorie progress is ... slow. The pace is very leisurely, and it's disappointing to bust open the box and have to work your way through three very gently-paced sections of one "cardio-kickboxing" class, each lasting about five minutes, to be able to do them in one go. Six minutes, back to the menu, four minutes, back to the menu, five minutes, back to the menu, then all 15 minutes. And this is the "Silver" class, which you only unlock after you work through the even easier-paced and shorter "Bronze" class.

Can't we just say we want to do a cardio/strength/toning/Zen workout lasting a certain number of minutes at an easy/intermediate/advanced level and have the disc pick out moves for us that will be a surprise?

I get that there is a Skinnerian reward system at play, but this is too much and not good for a real workout. I'm not sure how well it rewards a couch potato, because if you do five minutes and it burns, are you going to hit the next five minutes?

There are also gym games, which are too short for a real workout, but some of them are pretty good -- or better -- on their own than the "fitness classes" (which aren't the same as the "personal training"). Play the stacking game for balance challenge, play the block smashing one for a good cardio workout (if brief). The games allow you to work out at your higher level instantly -- the "fitness classes" and "personal training" don't.

Other reviewers have noted that you have to be in sync with your "trainer" for your moves to register correctly with the game, and that the text is small (especially on my cathode ray. CRT 4 LYFE!) and the user interface isn't as simple as it could be.

What other reviewers don't note is that to get the full YSFE experience, you are urged to log in and create an account with their website and track your progress, challenge other people and even post stuff to Facebook. No thank you. Isn't it bad enough that FB knows I like Lady Gaga?What is data-mining (FB or Ubisoft) my workouts and food choices going to do for me? Nothing positive, as far as I can tell. Either it's an attempt to build brand loyalty or find out our habits to fine-tune the next edition of the game. Just do a survey.

Other reviewers don't go over the add-ons for YSFE. They all suffer the same lethargy in gearing up, and for the money, you may get 15 minutes of a Bollywood routine that is not necessarily strong enough on fun to come back to again. It's not like Dance Central -- you have to do the moves slow, then at speed, every time you play. And the music is nowhere near as much fun as a real dance game. And the price -- 400 MSP/$5 unbundled from the Toned Body package -- isn't as good as the price for a single Dance Central song. There are some free, sponsored classes, as well, so you may be able to extend your disc's life, but if you don't like working out in tiny chunks before heading to the menu, it's going to be frustrating.

In the Zen class (the prone positions for stretching out Yoga-style are hard for the Kinect to draw a bead on, so the cool-downs are tai chi and standing Yoga), however, you get the promise of great feedback delivered on -- very much so. Your body, transposed on the screen as a wavy color, gets lines along its limbs and back that turn green when you lock into the pose the right way. If your arms are off, only your arms remain red, for example. It's very accurate, able to tell if the pelvis is correctly tucked and all. I took Kung Fu for a while, and so I'm used to knowing the feeling of doing it right. And the Kinect could tell every time I hit a pose right and when I didn't. It was really impressive.

Another thing that was impressive: You stand in front of it and it measures you. The measurements it gave for me seemed on target. You can't fool the thing.

It's great seeing the game deliver on the promise of Kinect, and I'm hopeful that the next version will incorporate that with the promise of a good workout. I can easily plow through 700 calories on an elliptical in an hour. But I was in front of "Your Shape" today for 45 minutes and barely topped 100. As Skinner realized, the rewards have to be big enough for the rat to keep pushing the lever, or she'll just be demoralized and stop pushing it at all.

The trailer for the 2012 version doesn't look too shabby. Hopefully it will be as active as the people in it:

Why Kinect?

The first time I seriously considered getting a videogame system for myself, I was playing with a Wii. It was me, my much younger cousins (like, in high school), and "Just Dance 2." I could have played that game all day with them.

My exercise life was in a bit of a transition at the time. My longtime aerobics instructor had just left the classes I'd depended on for fitness, and my work schedule was making increasing demands on my time. My local Y is overcrowded, and I don't get excited much out of the fitness machines, if I can even get the one I want. The Wii appealed to me, and "Just Dance 2" was precisely the kind of thing I liked to do -- boogie down.

So when I went home, I thought to myself that maybe a Wii was right for me. At the time, the Kinect had just come out, and when I started Googling around, I made these notes:

1) Kinect had no controller except your body. I'm in my 30s and a decade of desk jobs had given me some carpal-tunnelly/repetitive motion-y type stuff in my right wrist. Gripping a Wiimote was not something I wanted to do all day. Also, being in my 30s and basically having never played much in the way of videogames, I was not into the whole controller thing. Too many buttons, too much pressure to make the right combinations, too much Skinner-boxing. I want to use all my muscles, and I don't need anything that keeps me on my butt. (My decision was further confirmed when the new Wii was shown to have an iPad-like controller. Clever, but no thank you, I do not do traditional push-the-button gaming, I am an old lady.)

2) "Just Dance 2" was published by Ubisoft, a company which had just announced its intentions to be the number one third party videogame publisher for Kinect. Since "Just Dance 2" was a huge winner for me, I thought, "Dude, that sounds perfect."

3) The reviews for Kinect were ecstatic. Its sales were already breaking records, and it seemed like a pretty sure bet that developers would fill the gap of its fairly paltry initial game offerings. Plus, what existed at the outset seemed to fill most of my basic needs. It doesn't matter if there aren't a lot of games as long as the few you need are on offer, and as long as better ones come along as time goes on. Right?

A couple of things nagged at me. First, there was the fact that it is a Microsoft system. I'm sorry, but Microsoft has always offered products with counter-intuitive, over-buttoned, over-optioned, not-quite-working-right clutter. Nintendo is sort of the Mac of the videogame world, albeit softer and fuzzier. Playstation is the Unix (in the sense that hardcore gamers, like my brother, use this system). By this equation, I should be a Nintendo person, considering the Playstation Move as my backup. But the Move doesn't seem to generate much enthusiasm at all, and Nintendo is headed in a touchscreen direction.

Second, there was the cost. The Xbox and Kinect are freaking expensive. No getting around that.

There was a lot of dithering room, and I dithered. Enough so that my husband -- who I would have expected to say, "Don't do this, do you really need more time in front of a screen?" -- said if I thought I'd really enjoy it, I should go get it. Nuff said.

So, months later, here I am, Kinecting and liking it. Hope I can help all you other grown-up ladies and gentlemen out there who are considering expanding your videogaming from Farmville and Bejeweled to something more physical.