The Pokéwalker

So I recently picked up Pokémon SoulSilver for the DS. The original Gold and Silver have always been my favorite of all of the iterations of the pokémon games, but I still wasn't instantly convinced to buy the remakes. I had just finished playing Diamond not long ago and as we all know, Pokémon games tend to be rather similar.

What did spark my interest though, was the pokéwalker. Of course, I was reminded of the Pokémon Pikachu from years ago that was included with the Yellow version of the first generation games. Memories of sitting in my bedroom shaking that little yellow rat to death to collect watts flooded back with oddly fond memories. Now that I was older though, I thought to myself, maybe I could actually go out and do my daily chores with a monster in my pocket instead of just shaking it silly.

After I got one of the creatures into the device (my level 6 Totodile), I went for a walk around the block. When I got home, I transferred him back to the game cartridge was pleasantly informed that my Totodile had grown by one level. I was later disappointed to discover that my pokémon could only grow one level at a time using the device, but I quickly got over it and have now grown several levels for my party pokémon by walking, biking and doing various chores.

Then I was reminded of the "Design Outside of the Box" presentation at DICE 2010 by Jesse Schell. In the presentation, he builds up to where he thinks games are going, which is a real life reward system for doing various chores, eating properly, etc.

The pokéwalker is doing doing exactly that. Instead of shifting your thumb left and right walking through tall grass to power-level your creatures, it encouraged you to go for a real walk or get something done to get the grinding done. I was instantly excited that I wouldn't have to grind in the later part of the game to prepare my party for the elite four. Instead I could go see some friends, go for a bike ride, or do some groceries, all the while leveling up in my pocket. A device like this was the solution to an RPG gamer's nightmare: level grinding. With home consoles becoming more and more complex in their capability to connect to various devices, it's entirely possible that we'll someday see some sort of universal pedometer device that game developers can choose to implement into their game to encourage gamers to go outside to walk instead of stay in their game, walking back and forth waiting for the next random encounter.

I admit that I'm mostly anti-wii at the moment, but this kind of thing is right up Nintendo's alley. They already created the pokéwalker, so I'm hoping to see something like this encourage us to do real life activities to benefit in our games rather than reward us for killing the same enemy 37 times to get that 1 rare drop.