I enjoyed this story in the NYT about the rising incidence of Wii-related injuries, mostly due to repetitive stress injuries and other muscle aches and pains.
In the moments after I felt the pop in my left shoulder, the sensation I felt was not pain. It was panic. How exactly does a 40-year-old man explain to his wife that he might have torn his rotator cuff during a midnight game of Wii tennis?
So, I’ve never been there myself, but then again I’m still relatively young, agile and fit. I’ve encountered my share of Wii-related aches, usually felt the day after a particularly length and/or intense session of something like hula-hooping on the Wii Balance Board.
Of course, that’s not to say I haven’t suffered my own painful Wii-related injury.
A couple of years ago, not too long after I got the Wii, I was bowling in Wii Sports. I had probably bowled dozens if not hundreds of games by that point, all without incident, until late one night I finally self-inflicted Wii damage.
Being left handed, I usually keep my phone in my left front pocket for ease of access. Anyway, I was in the middle of a game, bowling left handed, when suddenly I felt a tremendous surge of pain in my middle finger.
Evidently, I had my arm just a little too close to my body when I did my throw, and managed to slam my hand into the phone in my pocket, managing in the process to smack a hangnail. It hurt like something else, especially since I basically smashed my hangnail between the Wiimote and my phone, so it started to bleed. At least the pain subsided quickly, and the hangnail never got infected.
I’ve probably done something like that a few other times, but it was just that one time when I had the misfortune of having a hangnail and connecting with it just right.
Fortunately, I’ve never experienced any significant Wii-related property damage, unlike the anecdotes that abounded shortly after the console’s release. The only real damage I ever incurred was when I had a friend over to try it out, but I hadn’t installed the replacement wrist strap that was supposed to be stronger than the one that originally shipped from Nintendo. As a consequence, when my friend took a might cut in Wii Sports baseball, the deficient strap broke, sending the Wiimote flying. It took out a large Venetian blind, but it was fortunate both that it took out one on the end, meaning it didn’t leave much a gap for sunlight to burst through, and it was lucky that it hit the blinds, since the alternative was to hit the wall, which probably would have destroyed the Wiimote, or to hit the sliding glass door behind the blinds, which would’ve either broken the glass, smashed the Wiimote, or both.
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