5. The Life Rhythm of your Family

In other words, what you find out by walking is not just your own life rhythm, but also the life rhythm of your family.

There is a lot of meaning behind including two Activity Meters with the game. A wife who is worried about her husband’s weight might ask him to join her in using Walk With Me! and hand him one of the Activity Meters.

And when she finds out that on weekdays he just sits at his desk at the company doing work, it can lead to a conversation about going out for walks on his day off.

If you were just competing over the number of steps, discussion wouldn’t get much further than “I walked 6000 steps today” with a reply of “Then let's try and walk more tomorrow”. But if, for example, you give an Activity Meter to your child, you can make new discoveries such as “Ah, so he’s walking around at this time of day”.

I think there are lots of fun ways to use it like that, so I hope that people will play it with their whole family. We are selling it together with two Activity Meters, but for those who need 3 or 4 it is also possible to buy them separately. One Activity Meter including tax comes to 1800 yen. (about 15 euros)

(laughs)

Well then, since the business person amongst us has come into his element, we should probably start summing things up. Could you please tell me what you paid the most attention to and give some words of recommendation to the customers? Let’s start with Shimomura-san.

I think that most of all I’d like them to use it for a long time. The Activity Meter has been designed supposing 10 years of use. A little earlier we talked about upturning the tea table with the Activity Meter, but part of the reason we decided the original design wasn’t good enough was because we were thinking about whether we had built something that could last for 10 years. Since it is a product that has been built with those feelings and attention to that aspect, I hope that you will make use of it for many years.

OK then, Akita-san.

OK. Well the thing I paid the most attention to was making the Activity Meter compact. At one time there was a problem with the interior components and it was suggested that we make it a bit bigger, but partly since this was the only thing I could make my dog wear without him hating it, I definitely wanted to keep it this size.

Since even your dog doesn’t mind it, it means that people wouldn’t notice wearing it at all either, doesn’t it?

I think so. But when you are walking your dog there are lots of places you stop, when your dog wants to sniff something or if you talk to a neighbour. That’s why even if you think you have spent plenty of time walking, the amount of exercise your dog has done is actually less than you had thought. So then you can decide in advance a target for how many paces you want your dog to walk, and when the lamp on the Activity Meter changes from red to green you can think “Yes! We’ve reached the walk quota for today.” Especially with all the talk about overweight dogs recently, I really recommend this to all the dog lovers in the country.

Morimura-san, you next.

Hoping that all kinds of people will use it, from a one year old who has just begun to walk to grandparents who love to walk, and of course dogs, I have tried to make it as simple and easy to use as I could. Shimomura-san mentioned it already, but I really do hope that people will use it for a long time.

Since you specially spent such a long time making it too. (laughs) Last but not least, Mizuki-san.

Like Morimura-san said, I’m anticipating a wide range of people enjoying this product. As testers for this project, we had employees in their 50s and 60s who aren’t involved in development evaluate it from the perspective of customers. We received lots of pointers on which parts might be difficult for seniors to understand and went on to rectify them. As well as hearing the opinions of people that don’t know much about games, we also had developers with lots of experience on practical software like Brain Training and received lots of pointers so that everybody will be able to play it without getting confused. That’s why I don’t think there is going to be anybody who doesn’t know how to use it. I really want a lot of people to enjoy this game.

Then let me say a bit to finish. I wonder if people are going to see things they couldn’t before, become conscious of that and use it as a chance to change themselves. Then maybe talk to others about what they couldn’t see before and before you realise it the whole country is walking more than they used to. While it’s unusual, I do hope that lots of people will embrace this game. Thank you very much everybody.