Me, My Wife and the Wii

I don’t know how I did it. My wife, approximately six months ago, notified me that she thought we needed to purchase the new Nintendo Game Console called Wii. I agreed. So, we made plans and decided that we would purchase one as soon as we found a store that wasn’t sold out of them. That took until early this month. Now, the thing I am not sure of is why she was convinced that we needed the most up-to-date piece of technology out there. Normally it would take two significant factors to coerce my wife into considering such a purchase: 1) I would have to beg her in a prostrate position, often with heartfelt tears and 2) I would have to do several out-of-the-ordinary things that would earn me what are commonly called ‘brownie points,’ causing my wife to feel obliged to cave in to my incessant entreaty. This time she decided, on her own, that it would be positive to own this new, groundbreaking game system.

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Now, having been the proud co-owner of a Wii for over two weeks, I feel it necessary to tell you the impact that such a purchase has had on my wife and me. The games are incredible. The ‘paddle’ is an intuitive remote control that has no binding wires to mess with. A sensor on the top of the television and the internal tilt sensors of the handheld remote tell the Wii exactly what we are doing. So, when you are sword-fighting, you swing the remote around as though you are using a sword (see Figure 1). My favorite game is boxing because the system is designed to read your punches and translate them into your on-screen character. So for boxing, you don’t push buttons; you simply punch the air. OK, the impact: we are addicted.

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My wife was addicted about one week prior to myself, because she played it daily after work. I just recently got sucked into the kingdom of Wii fanaticism. The symptoms of such an addiction are grave. I find myself holding the steering wheel of my Mazda B2300 like it is the Wii controller (i.e. on its side, see Figure 2). My reflexes have changed dramatically. Instead of hitting the brake in my truck, I now search my truck for a button labeled ‘1,’ which on the Wii controller corresponds to stop and reverse in the game ‘Need for Speed Carbon’. The effects of Wii addiction culminated to a financial loss last Saturday: I was driving my wife’s car, she was with me, and we were on our way to our church to help out at a youth retreat. We had stopped at the Taco Bell drive-thru for dinner and were eating as we traveled. My wife had just finished putting three packets of fire sauce on my meat and potato burrito, and she handed it to me. Just as she did this, traffic came to a sudden stop and she screamed “STOP!” at a decibel level high enough to make me momentarily deaf. Time stopped, I slammed on the brake on my perceived Wii controller, which was actually a saucy meat and potato burrito, and we collided rudely with the truck in front of us. Nintendo Wii: $250. Chevy S-10 Bumper for the truck I just hit: $500.