I was never going to write about this. And I suppose I might pretend, even now, that my purposes are humanitarian, altruistic, philanthropic, whatever. They’re not, of course – rather, I’m not-so-secretly hoping someone over at Microsoft chucks a lot of endorsement cash at me instead, because I have bills to pay and a luxury condo on the moon to buy like everybody else. Anything else is just a coincidental bonus extra that I’ll claim as a kind of selfless magnanimity so it looks good on the novel, the movie adaptation, and (somewhat ironically, I’m sure) the otherwise inevitable game of the film.
So, about a year or so ago, I decided I’d had quite enough of this terminally indolent gamer existence, and set about getting myself into something remotely resembling some sort of so-called shape. No, I didn’t rush (ooze) out and buy Wii Fit. Actually, that’s because my Wii Fit was already just about fossilised in some cobwebbed corner of my living room. Fact: fitness games are rubbish. Because, fact: getting fit mostly ****ing sucks.
Honestly, nobody really, actually likes exercise. If we could all just lie around on the couch all day stuffing chips in our gobs, moving only about as much as it takes to press a button now and again, verbally abusing complete strangers online, and never get fat doing it, we would.
The clever trick, then, is reconciling this utopian fantasy with the horrifying reality of real, actual exertion.
Brace for epic.
What I did, was I went out and purchased a cheap exercise bike. Then I brought this vulgar, medieval apparatus home, and set it up in front of my Xbox. Finally, in a moment of startling genius, I contrived to bring these two things together in industrial accord by getting onto the bike, and switching on the Xbox.
On my first attempt, I bravely managed 5km and a few waves of Halo: ODST’s Firefight before falling off the bike, and denouncing reality at large as a cruel illusion of mass-marketing hype and paid-for reviews. The following day, I made it to 10km. By the end of that week, I was doing 15km.
Two or three months later, I was regularly pushing 80km and several complete rounds of Halo: Reach’s Firefight mode, and none of my clothes fit me anymore.
I’d also made it all the way to Lieutenant Colonel. I hardly even noticed that I was cycling while doing it.
All too often, gaming finds itself the subject and object of public defamation, one of the most persistent – and hard to deny, at that – being that it promotes increasingly and excessively idle behaviour. Let’s turn that around – and you don’t even need Mel B’s stupid Kinect game to do it.
Coming next week: Something provocative about something controversial, as expected.
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