Willa Mae Graham grips the Wii controller at her side, coolly eyeing the bowling lane on the LCD screen in front of her. “Come on, now,” she says as she waves the remote in a forward arc. Her virtual avatar swings and releases its ball in tandem, and a camera follows it to the end of the lane where it demolishes all 10 pins. “Nice strike!” the game’s robotic announcer chirps. Graham turns around, cracks a smile and walks back to her team to hand the controller to the next bowler.
At 81 years old, Graham—a former church-league bowling champ—has, in her own way, stepped out of retirement. Her Wii bowling chops have earned her the captainship of the Langston-Brown Senior Center’s LB-1 team in Arlington, Va. Today, her team is competing in the National Senior League’s inaugural Wii bowling tournament, a nationwide contest between senior-center squads for the “National Wii Bowl” championship. This first season is a test-run; organizers hope the tournament will eventually involve whole communities, akin to other intramural sports.
High expectations, but not unrealistic. The NSL’s tournament has quite literally changed some players’ lives, offering them a new way to enjoy the dizzying highs and lows of competition, forge friendships and discover unexpected reserves of spirit.
It’s a sunny, bracingly cold day in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. In the Langston-Brown multipurpose room, seniors gather under fluorescent lights to play dominos and assemble puzzles while “The Cha Cha Slide” pulses on a boombox. The center’s two Wii bowling teams are assembled in one corner of the room, donning tie-dyed team shirts before they play. “For luck,” explains Margaret Richardson, captain of Langston-Brown’s LB-2 team.
They can’t see their opponents, the Clark-Lindsey Village Guttergals from Urbana, Ill. (the scores are posted online after each game to determine who wins), but the competitive tension is still palpable. And yet Willa Graham’s serene demeanor never changes; in her church-league days, back in high school, she took home trophies, scoring as high as 290 one game. Her best Wii score is only slightly less impressive: 246.
The bowlers’ pre-game confab carries an air of warmth and mutual respect. Center director Eva Cano-Mayor thrills at how the game has inspired such camaraderie: “Wii bowling is definitely the most popular here, and I believe it’s because everyone is moving around a lot more and, most importantly, having more fun.” Cano-Mayor was born in Peru and speaks with a thick accent, but her voice has a forceful clarity and conviction when discussing the benefits of Wii bowling. “The spirit of friendly competition—it’s great,” she says. “Even the seniors who never play watch and cheer along. I would definitely say that everyone here has become a lot closer since they started.”
Richardson shares that sentiment. “Young people do things. It’s the seniors who sit around and do nothing. If we’ve got something that can get us up and moving around, and get us together, well, let’s do it,” she says with a laugh. “My grandkids still won’t play me though, I think they’re a little scared that their grandma would win.”
The National Senior League’s very existence is testament to the Wii’s incredible success. Since the console’s release in September 2007, Nintendo has sold more than 20 million Wiis in the U.S. and 50 million worldwide, far surpassing sales of Sony and Microsoft’s competing video-game systems. The Wii’s budget-friendly price and motion-sensitive control scheme have made Nintendo’s brand synonymous with a new generation of casual gamers, erasing the decades-long borderlines of age and gender that made gaming the stigmatized hobby of teenaged basement-dwellers and twentysomething men with too much free time. Gaming may be a wildly lucrative industry, but only very recently has the video-games-as-art argument been taken seriously.
The paradigm shift was long overdue. Steven Johnson’s 2005 book of low-culture apologetics, Everything Bad is Good or You, makes a neuroscientific argument that the strawman of gaming as a mind-numbing waste of time is undeserved; video games actually enhance the brain’s cognitive functions. Dennis Berkholtz, the founder of the NSL, champions Wii bowling for the very same reasons.
The inspiration for a nationwide video-game tournament for seniors came to Berkholtz after a visit to his parents’ retirement community in Cape Coral, Fla. “It bothered me that there weren’t any programs to engage the senior residents, programs that encouraged what I’d call a good community or active minds,” he says. “A year later, I played Wii bowling for the first time. A light immediately went on in my head: This is the perfect game to keep them sharp! So I worked out a business plan, and I discovered that many senior communities were already playing Wii sports. All I had to do was bring them together with a national championship.”
Berkholtz, 64, played handball for the U.S. team in the 1972 Summer Olympics, and he swears by the merits of organized competition as a panacea for the many ailments and illnesses that accompany aging. “It’s a fun way to keep them physically and mentally engaged, which is so important when you get older.” His steely voice trips for a split-second: “That’s why I started this, to help raise money for Alzheimer’s, as a way of honoring my father who died with dementia.”