PAYNEFUL TRUTHS: Occupational Hazard: Wii Will Kill Us All

With all the shrill press coverage of the alleged moral damage caused by violent video games, it’s rather surprising how little attention has been paid to the more immediate physical hazards associated with gaming.

For decades, video gamers had little more to fear than “joystick elbow,” eyestrain, bad posture, or keyboard-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. Some flashy graphics sequences posed threats to epileptics, but that’s nothing new; many effects-laden television programs boast that dubious distinction.

Sure, thrown controllers have bruised any number of hyper-competitive teenagers, while racing games—with their incessant tunnel-vision scenery—can necessitate a brief recovery period to adjust your vision to the boringly stationary real world. But until recently, serious game-related accidents were few and far between.

Last week’s launch of Nintendo’s next-generation Wii console has changed things considerably, and not merely by destroying the grades of countless college students just as many are about to enter finals periods. The Wii’s ground-breaking motion-sensing controller (if you want to attack an enemy in the new “Zelda” game, you actually slice it through the air) and low price point ($250, compared to at least $500 for Sony’s new Playstation 3) are sure to make it an instant success. But as with many revolutions in technology–—gunpowder, the printing press, Facebook.com—the Wii’s rise has a darker side.

In a matter of days, the chosen few Wii owners (the system is still nigh impossible to find at a fair price) started to discuss the physical risks inherent in such a revolutionary style of play. Players of the complimentary launch title “Wii Sports,” for example, have noticed that a few hours of macho smashes can result in a case of tennis elbow as acute as that experienced by any real court pro. With third-party game developers still warming up, it’s clear that this is just the beginning.

Already, rogue controllers—wireless and attached to gamers’ hands with only a relatively flimsy cord—have escaped from over-excited players’ grips, smashing televisions and beer glasses; it’s only a matter of time before someone pokes a friend’s eye out with a renegade Wiimote. On the popular gaming message board 1up.com, poster Shadowfamicom warns ominously that “the Wii will kill us all.”

Appropriately enough, Nintendo has always been an innovator in taking video game health threats to the next level. Years before the Wii, the Virtual Boy, the company’s ill-fated three-dimensional portable console, was notorious for its possible side effects—dizziness, headaches, and the like—and subsequent health warnings. Unsurprisingly, the system failed spectacularly. But as infamous as the Virtual Boy was, today’s new wave of innovative controllers has sparked a much broader wave of undeniably dangerous games.

The increasingly successful genre of music-related games has provided ample opportunity for injury, relying—as many of them do—on special controllers and real-life rhythmic actions on special dance pads. The lesson seems to be that expecting coordinated physical activity from gamers is a recipe for disaster.

One young man, Jimmy Winter of Omaha, Nebraska, even broke his knee while playing the popular music game “Guitar Hero,” a form of “shredaoke” in which players use a special guitar-shaped controller to rock out along with their favorite songs, as reported in a Dec. 9, 2005 New York Times article.

The Web site Winter has set up in reaction to his injury, www.guitarherobrokemyknee.com, features a mock-serious “Letter to Red Octane Games”—well aware of the absurdity of his accident, Winter is wisely not pressing charges—complete with lines like: “While I am in love with your game, it has caused me great harm.” According to his Web site, while “shredding a massive lick,” Winter “pivoted into a great thrashing stance,” and before he knew it his knee gave way.

Guitar Hero is nowhere near as egregious an offender as the popular game “Dance Dance Revolution.” “DDR,” as termed by acolytes, features gameplay which is about as representative of actual dancing as the doggie paddle is of Olympic swimming. The game has become a staple of bowling alleys, arcades, malls, and suburban basements, but its popularity has its own attendant hazards.

One woman sprained her knee after jumping sideways to avoid her cat, which had run across the dance pads into the path of her flailing feet. A 15 year-old girl—again in Omaha; maybe it’s something in the water?—suffered a heart seizure while playing an arcade version of DDR.

Ironically enough, the game has been installed in many public school gymnasiums across the country, as a part of official fitness programs. DDR retails with a calorie counter option, so the hope of school administrators seems to be that loafers can be changed into athletes through the subversive fun of an active video game; not everyone is convinced.

One commentator—going by the handle Fuxxtor—remarked on a story featured on the Digg.com, connecting this “half-assed way around teaching proper diet and exercise” to current geopolitical trends. Fuxxtor even declares that—in light of such decadence—“[he] for one welcome [sic] China, Japan and India as the United States’ new master.”

While Fuxxtor’s cynicism may be misguided, his comment touches inadvertently on the emerging hazards of global gaming market. With the rising economic and social importance of video gaming world-wide, gaming injuries have ceased to be the frivolous province of sore egos and accident-prone teens and have become disconcertingly serious, with the stakes much higher than bragging rights.

Last week at the launch of Sony’s new Playstation 3 console, Michael Penkala of Connecticut was shot in the gut with a sawed-off shotgun for refusing to turn over his wallet to a pair of masked robbers who saw the line of waiting gamers as easy prey.

Penkala claims not to regret his refusal, considering a non-fatal shot in the chest a small price to pay for the hot-ticket PS3. He left that day with four systems, which he planned to resell at a much higher price online. Other gaming-related incidents have ended in far more dire situations.

In China, Qui Chengwei was imprisoned for life last year after tracking down and stabbing Zhu Caoyuan, a fellow player of a popular online role-playing game who had stolen his (completely virtual) sword and sold it in-game for around $1000 in real money. Since there are as yet no legal protections for in-game property—despite the existence of mature financial markets in these online worlds—Chengwei took justice into his own hands, and Caoyuan died by the (all-too-physical) sword.

Much attention has been paid to video game violence as a possible model for real-world outbursts—with id Software’s hyper-violent computer game “Doom” infamously, and speciously, named as a contributing factor to the Columbine school shootings by media commentators—but incidents of violence directly related to in-game feuds are a comparatively recent development. They stand as an unwelcome testament to the runaway success these games have had in creating an alternate social universe just as real and urgent as the one we wake to each morning.

While the issue is undeniably global in scope, it is particularly significant for places like China—a country in which thousands of “gold farmers” are paid to sit at computers all day and obtain valuable items in online games for resale to first-world clients. Against this backdrop, such incidents look less like the actions of obsessed nerds, and more like the advance wave of an emerging society in which virtual realities are worth killing for.

In light of these more pernicious incursions of the virtual sphere into real-world violence, maybe “joystick elbow” wasn’t so bad after all.

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.