Have an iPad, perhaps? Love to play on it, except getting a little tired, maybe, of playing by yourself?

So, there you are, at, I dunno, a coffee shop, maybe, with a friend – maybe a good friend, or someone you’d like to have for a good friend – and you just happen to have your iPad with you, as always, ever since you got it. And you turn to your friend, saying “care to Fingle?”

“Fingle?” asks your friend, quizzically.

And, without another word, you whip out the old Pad, launch your brand new Fingle app (which, for a limited time only, is only 99-cents and includes four, count them, puzzle packs), and you Fingle. Together. Laughing at the sheer delight of engaging in something quite similar to a game of Twister, only with your fingers. Challenged, ever-increasingly so; entertained, ever-more deeply so.

It’s Fingle. A game for two co-present players sharing an iPad. A cooperative game. A game that, from time to unavoidable time, makes you laugh together.

You have your squares. Your friend has hers. You put one finger on each square. Your friend puts one finger on each of hers. And, without losing contact with these squares, you attempt, simultaneously, to slide your squares into your targets, and hold them there, until your friend has managed not only to slide her squares into her targets, but also to hold them there long enough for the game to decide that accomplishment has been achieved. And then you go on to the next challenge where you have to use four fingers, each. And then the next, where you have to use your four fingers, each, to move into moving targets.

I first encountered Fingle at the DiGRA conference. I was excited about the potential of the game even before it was completely actualized. And now that it’s available, and finally on an iPad near me, I am even more excited to share this surprisingly innovative, paradigm-shifting, touchingly cooperative iPad game for two players even.

Designed by Adriaan de Jongh & Bojan Endrovski, from Game Oven Studios. Major Fun? Oh, yes. Majorly so.

You indubitably know about the Major Fun award-winning game of Par Out Golf. Should you have somehow forgotten, the link will tell all. (Remind me to make a “links” pun somewhere in this review). If you’re too, shall we say, busy to click on the abovementioned, I quote myself, liberally:

Of the several skills you practice while playing Par Out Golf, a fascinating, and, to any golf player, significant challenge is learning how to visualize your shot. The more observant you are, the more capable you are at remembering the lay of the land, the more effectively you can imagine the exact amount of drive to put on the ball, the better you’ll do. This, of course, is the essence of Par Out Golf. Like “real” golf, Par Out Golf challenges both mind and body.

It’s kind of like the spiritual essence of golf, made manifest. If you are not familiar with said essence, hie thyself over to Michael Murphy’s classic Golf in the Kingdom.

If you also happen to have an iThing – iPhone, iPad, iPod – you’ve probably caught yourself wondering – what would Par Out Golf be like if it were an actual app, if it were something I could play on my very own iThing, by my very own self, or, now that I think about it, with my very own friends, i-to-i perhaps.

After all, how perfectly logical it would be for there to be such an app? A course is presented, filled with cunningly arrayed sand traps and rocks and other things to avoid. One takes one’s finger and, without touching the screen, traces and retraces the ideal route. Then one places one’s finger so it is in actual contact with the virtual ball, holds one’s finger there as the clouds cover the course into visual oblivion, and, having visualized the path, one draws said path, taking into account not only one’s memories of the terrain, but of wind direction and speed, and perhaps even choice of club, lifts one’s finger at the end of said visualized path, and beholds one’s fate graphically recapitulated as the clouds clear and the chosen path is revealed.

Accompanied, of course, by encouraging and perhaps sympathetic sounds from the invisible crowd, the soothing sounds of ocean breezes, the calls of birds, the striking of rocks, the landing in the rough, one’s stroke is made, and one’s score is entered onto the scoresheet of destiny.

No, no, of course, shall we say, no, it is not about speed or force of stroke, but rather entirely about visualization and execution of, as one is oft too tempted to say, the path.

And so on, hole by hole, until the very end of the course. And, should one have succeeded in manifesting some reasonable par-like status, one collects one’s just rewards. And should one’s rewards prove of sufficient merit, one unlocks yet another course, of even greater complexity, more tortuous paths, more entertainingly profound challenges.

All of which is to say Mike Martin and Phil Boden’s concept and Endless Wave Software‘s execution of the Par Out Golf app for your iThing reach a whole new, and delightfully playworthy level in its app manifestation. It is what any game designer would consider a masterful achievement, what any player would find a seamless transition. Not to replace the original, but to extend it into the virtual world, creating one more link between the game, the simulation and the simulation of the simulation – each link a direct link to the fabled links of golf itself, each being at least as much fun as one deserves, and, some would say, perhaps even more.

Island Cycling (via The Bit Block)

So, you finally buy yourself a Wii. And because you’ve been so good and so patient, you wind up with the Wii Plus. And you play. And you play some more. And you visit, virtually, every part of the virtual island. You fly, you bowl, you do it all. And great fun is had by all, precisely as promised. You are not disappointed. Even after you’ve acclimated yourself to the many Wii wonders – the controller that responds so responsively, that vibrates and even sings to you; the realistic, fully-rendered, 3-dimensional-looking ocean paradise (is that a whale? thar she blows!), populated by everyone you’ve played with and a cast of hundreds, who wave at you when you pass, and sometimes even cheer, while all the time accompanied by a richly detailed soundscape that further engages your senses: touch, sound, vision, humor.

And then you say to yourself, I think I’ll by me a Wii Fit Plus. Why? Because I want to, as the song says, put my whole self in.

So you buy it, even though it costs half as much as the Wii console, because you have dreams of the Wii taking you to places you’ve never played before.

Now, somewhere in the back of your copious intellect, you know that the Wii Fit Plus has something to do with fitness. And even though you just want to play, you silly person you, fitness is something that people take seriously, and the Wii Fit Plus is, of necessity, just as serious about helping you do precisely that. So you unpack it and set it up and find yourself sufficiently mollified by the intuitive ease of it all. And then you step up, as it were, on the Wii Balance Board, as instructed. And you continue to do as instructed, registering yourself, so to speak, informing the Wii Ones of your birthdate, your height, and other rather personally, but fortunately password-protectable details, and get informed of your BMI, and your balance (it is called a “Balance Board” don’t you know) and your body age. Your body age! Arggh! And, at last, unavoidably confronted by your precision-determined state of decrepitude, you meet your personal trainer.

All of which is to say that yes, if your goal is to become more fit, you can now, thanks to your purchase of the Wii Fit Plus, pursue that goal with ultimate seriousness.

On the other hand, you can also have fun. Actually, lots of fun. Fun that is so much fun you almost don’t realize how much actual exercise you’re having. Of course, the Wii Plus people take great pains to inform you of your progress in sometimes painful detail, and they use words like “failed” and “unbalanced” to make sure you know just where you stand, or didn’t. But, ultimately, it’s the fun that makes the whole thing worth our collective interest, and the fun is plentiful and varied.

The majority of the new and improved Wii Fit games are in their own section called “Training Games.” (Again, in order to keep with the seriousness of it all, they had to use the word “training.” Fact is, this is where the fun is, where, according to my playful way of viewing the world, the Wii Fit Plus becomes something very much like a paradigm for the whole fun-fitness connection.) There are 16 games in this section (others can be found in sections devoted to “strength,” “aerobics,” and “balance”).

Of those 16, Island Cycling is probably the best place to start. It demonstrates how the system can engage your whole body (you “steer” with your Wii controller and “pedal” by marching in place on the Balance Board), it’s relatively easy to master, and, most significantly, there’s no time pressure. So you can bike around the virtual island, both hither and yon, knocking flags down or not. Of course, the less time it takes you to find and knock down all the flags (a handy interactive map helps guide you), the higher your potential score. But if your goal is to get comfortable with the system whilst engaging your considerable self in a leisurely tour of the virtual environs, you will find Island Cycling fun and pleasant, even though you just happen to burn some calories in the process. And your pre-schooler will want to play it as much as you’ll let her.

Then there’s Bird’s-Eye Bull’s-Eye, which is clearly silly, and most obviously fun. Silly? First of all, you’re a chicken. And I mean that in the best possible way. You look like a chicken. You fly like a chicken if a chicken could fly. Second, you fly by flapping your arms. So yes, there you are, standing on your Wii Fit Plus Balance Board, actually flapping your personal arms. And there you also are (as faithfully rendered by your Mii avatar), on your TV, looking like a chicken. Lean left, right, forward or back to navigate. Don’t flap too hard or you fly too high. Find a target. Land on it. Get more points (time). Find the next. Try to land dead center for the most points.

As funny as it all is, it’s not a little kids game, by any measure. The controls, though intuitive, are engagingly complex. Keeping your body properly positioned while your arms are flapping at just the right speed requires a very fine-tuned sense of balance.

Here’s what I mean:

(one of many excellent instructional videos from WiiFolderJosh)

Major Fun-wise, the games included with Wii Fit Plus are worth the price, even worth suffering through the sometimes insufferable humorlessness of the whole “fitness” concept, because they so beautifully exemplify the fun-fitness connection.

Though the games may look childish, Wii Fit Plus is not just for children. Children already know how much fun it is to use their bodies, to test their physical limits, expand their abilities, engage themselves fully, physically, emotionally, mentally, and unconditionally in the world they are growing into. But for adolescents, adults and seniors, for the differently-abled and the significantly-abled, the games of Wii Fit Plus demonstrate, over and over again, the sheer joy of exercising our many abilities, all at the same time. Whether you’re cycling around the island, flying like a chicken, throwing and dodging snowballs, driving your Segway into beachballs, being a drum-major, keeping time,  leading the throngs, skateboarding, doing Kung Fu, navigating your bubble through a maze of waterways, running an obstacle course, or balancing on top of a ball while juggling – you will have so much fun you could almost (if only they didn’t constantly remind you) forget that you were exercising.

On the other hand, maybe all the reminders will help you remember that fun is, after all, the best exercise you can get.

We learned another lesson about playing on the Wii with a 4-year-old, courtesy of neighboring 4-year-old, grandson Cole. This lesson concerned canoeing for two.

Beating a 4-year-old at anything is not much of an accomplishment. Unless you’re also 4. Or perhaps even the 8-year-old sister of a 4-year-old. But for the grandparent-grandchild play connection, the real accomplishment is finding a game we can play together and both have fun.

We have two controllers, so we can play some games simultaneously. Even with the controllers and the simultaneity, it’s still not as fun as it sounds. In most of the games in the Sports Resort package (e.g. bowling, frisbee, baseball, air sports) the discrepancies between our abilities are too obvious. Try as I might, it just seems wrong for me to keep throwing gutter balls, or purposely tossing the frisbee in the wrong direction…well, you get my, so to speak, drift.

Canoeing, on the other hand, it seemed a little easier for us to wander gently down the stream together. Sure, there are goals to cross, but, if I want, I can paddle around, making up my own goals – like trying to follow him as closely as I can, even trying to see if we can both cross at the same time – and still find challenge enough. There are a lot of opportunities for us each to develop our own versions of paddling mastery. Unlike many of the games in the Sports Resort, this one doesn’t pressure us to compete.

This was an important lesson for me about what we need from games if we want to share them across wide ranges of abilities. One of those fun lessons.

Here’s what the game looks like:

video via Gamersonica1

Wii Sports Resort for the Wii is the first videogame  to receive a Major Fun award. Despite frequent urgings from some of our veteran Games Tasters, we’ve maintained a deliberately narrow focus on board and table games and puzzles that are easy to learn, generally take less than a half-hour to play, and, most importantly, invite laughter. There are few enough people who recognize the importance of such games, so we accepted it as our obligation to remain one of that particular few.

The Wii is a recent evolution of those computer-like machines that attach to your TV, first introduced in the 70s by Magnavox and Atari. Like the earlier machines, the Wii, introduced in late 2006, also attaches to your TV and accepts a variety of different controllers and special game discs. Its wireless, motion-sensing controllers, which allows players to interact much more physically with a wide range of games and activities, proved to be a significant evolution of game technology, especially for people who spend the majority of their time sitting (in front of a computer or TV), which covers most of our population. Even though you may only use the hand controller (though new kinds of physical controllers are introduced every year), your whole body follows. By engaging mind and body, the Wii invites a much healthier, more physically and mentally restoring kind of play. And, surprisingly, this proves true for a remarkably wide range of ages, the Wii becoming almost as ubiquitous in the senior center as it is in the youth center.

Since its introduction, the Wii has continued to evolve. The controllers further connect the player to the game by vibrating and making their own sounds as the player’s cursor moves about the playscape. They have become more responsive to a wider variety of physical motions. The console can connect to the Internet, wirelessly – further extending the capabilities of the machine and allowing players to interact remotely.

The current version is significantly fun – so inviting, so easy to set up and learn, so mentally, socially and physically engaging, that we were forced to accept that our consistent focus on games of the non-virtual kind was doing no one a service. Because it’s so entertaining, to play as well as to watch other people play, and so easy to understand, it can just as easily involve the whole family. Because it’s so attractive, it can become a welcome addition to any party – game, dance, food, for family and friends.

The package includes everything you need to play (except your Wifi station and TV): the console (in black or white), a Wii Remote^TM controller with a Wii Motion-Plus^TM accessory, a Nunchuk^TM controller, and two “games” – Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort.

For anyone new to the system (like we were), the technology is so impressive that it becomes difficult to suppress the giggles of awe long enough to appreciate the games themselves. But the games are the thing, so to speak, and of the two games included in the system, Wii Sports Resort is the one thing that led us not only to giving the system a Major Fun award, but to introducing a whole new category of games to our Major Fun repertoire.

To begin playing, you create your own Mii, an avatar that, despite the easy, menu-driven input, you can make look remarkably like yourself. For children especially, this interaction is so engaging that they can spend a half-hour or more creating their avatar in their own image. Once completed, the virtual stand-in can demonstrate its ever-increasing prowess in each of the 12 sport-like games. Wii Sports Resort introduces a veritable slew of sport-like activities to choose from, many of which can be played by as many as 4 players.

We highly recommend that you begin with a game called Island Flyover. It’s the easiest game to understand and play, the interface the most intuitive. You hold the Wii Remote very much like did when you were a kid, flying your hand outside the open window of a speeding car. As you fly over Wii Island, you encounter all the various environments used in other games in the Sports Resort package. Ambient sounds apparently coming from the landscape invite further exploration. Eventually, you discover targets which you attempt to fly through for score. You can, of course, ignore the targets, and just fly around for the sheer thrill of it all, twisting and turning your virtual plane, smashing into things only to be reborn, dangling from a parachute. The following video, courtesy of someone who actually calls him- or herself SonicPinhead, captures the game perfectly:

This is only one of three flying activities included in the Air Sports section (there’s also sky-diving and parachute jumping), and Air Sports is only one of 12 different sport-like games – each providing an engaging, yet light-hearted challenge, each appealing to children (as young as 3) and adults (older even than I am).

When you play a new game, you are taught how to play, either before the game in a special practice session, or during the game. In either event, the instructions are always clear, and never too complex. You learn how to do one thing, and then, when the time is right, introduced to yet another thing you can do. The individual games are all structured to invite repeated play. Every time you play one through, another variation becomes accessible. This gives you more and more choices (up to a certain limit for each game). Your progress is tracked, so that you can compete with, or simply admire yourself. When you achieve a perfect score or something of similar ilk, you get a special “stamp,” further validating your self-esteem. Curriculum development and text book authors could learn a great deal by studying the pedagogical architecture of the Wii.

In many ways, the opportunity to choose from so many different games, variations and levels of difficulty lends itself to exactly the kind of play experience I have so long championed – because the players determine what games are “good enough” for them to play again and again, rather than the games determining whether the player is good enough to play, the game remains an invitation to fun rather some arbitrary measure of your “excellence.”

We had a difficult time determining which game was our favorite – so difficult that we were ultimately forced to accept that the extensive variety of games appealed to an equally extensive variety of moods. Some times, especially after a day of less-than-fulfilling social interaction, the “Showdown” game (the third in the Swordplay game series, Showdown is revealed only after you’ve played Duel and Speed Slice) proves to be almost ecstatically fun. Basically, you get to hack your way through an increasing number of computer-generated opponents, who, after all, are trying to do the same to you. I know, I know, it seems, shall we say, violent, but it’s violence of a very cartoon-like kind, abstract, and bloodless. Other times, the graceful flow of Frisbee Golf (the third in the Frisbee series) provides unparalleled release.

The package also includes Wii Sports. A brief comparison between the two games, both technically excellent, illustrates perfectly how the system has evolved. Simply put, it has become much more playful; the narrative much funnier, the fun much more major.