Zombies, Run!?

2 July 2014 | 5:24 pm | Mitch Knox

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Zombies, Run!

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Nexercise

“And in the future, we don't need horses. We have motorised carriages called automobiles.”

“If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody walk or run any more?”

“Of course we run. But for recreation. For fun.”

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“Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?”

Doc Brown and the wisest drunken cowboy in the West, Back to the Future III.

What kind of people run for enjoyment? Some apparently sane people, probably, but it's safe to say it's mostly masochists, and all of the Flashes. True, it's widely accepted that regular exercise is a crucial part of living well, but – unless you're way into self-flagellation at 9km/h, or a metahuman speedster who runs at unbelievable velocities just to feel freedom in the wind – it's also widely accepted that it's about as enjoyable as giving a tongue-bath to the worst person you know while they talk at length about their recent digestive problems.

But enjoyable or not, exercise really is good for you. Luckily, some savvy smartphone-app developers have recognised that it's not laziness that keeps us pinned to our cushioned surfaces – it's a lack of motivation (and, honestly, a lot of laziness) – and have set about finding ways to make fitness interesting.

You might be open to, for example, Nexercise (iOS, Android, free). Developed by a group primarily made up of University of Pennsylvania postgraduates, Nexercise is all about using technology to motivate yo' sedentary self through incentives and rewards. The suspiciously positive copywriters on the app's website do a great job of selling it, saying they believe that exercise “doesn't have to be boring”, and that “you don't have to drastically change your lifestyle to be healthy”. Those are both easy messages to get behind, especially because the people this app is made for generally prefer not to drastically change anything about themselves in the first place.

Using Nexercise, you earn experience points (XP) and rewards for completing challenges or obtaining achievements for milestones such as exercising for more than 30 minutes or working out on a holiday. You can share such personal victories and other trivia about your now-booming fitness levels with your friends via social media, but please don't. Nobody wants you to do that.

To its credit, it is surprisingly diverse – you can choose from activities based in aerobics, cycling, running, walking, yoga, weightlifting and more – but, basically, it's a gold-star machine (albeit it a slick-looking and user-friendly one), handing out pats on the back for doing things that any pre-20th-century human being would have done twelve times before breakfast. They give you a medal for, like, exercising on consecutive Mondays – although, that kind of positive reinforcement unquestionably feels pretty good. And if you're content to spend hours at the computer in pursuit of XP to level up a virtual character, then there's no reason that mentality can't transfer to a more physically mobile setting, right? Just think of it as a real-life boss fight, only the loot when you succeed is not dying of a heart attack at 35.

Of course, if you're less a fan of being Pavlov's dogged and more a fan of drama, tension, the undead and having your heart torn from your chest, then Zombies, Run! (iOS, $4.49)  (or the recently released Zombies, Run! 2) could be up your alley. The Kickstarter-funded brainchild of British app developers Six To Start and Orange Award-winning author Naomi Alderman, Zombies, Run! casts you as Runner 5, one of a small number of human survivors after the inevitable awakening and encroachment of the living dead. Each run is treated as a “mission”, in which you journey out into the big, bad, zombie-filled world for supplies or to find people – that sort of thing – with each being woven together through an evolving episodic storyline that's been so well received it even has its own fan fiction. Between the engaging narrative, the pulse-raising missions, the gripping cliffhangers and the ever-present shuffling masses, it's like taking part in a real-life episode of The Walking Dead, but with fewer insane ex-cops.

As though being chased by zombies through the streets (okay, so minimal imagination is required, but the gradual crescendo of undead moans certainly helps in making the whole thing genuinely unnerving) isn't fun enough, there is also a huge gameplay component to the app: runners can use the supplies they've gathered on their missions (the amount of which will vary dependant on the distance covered) to custom-build and upgrade a virtual representation of Abel Township, the struggling human settlement from which you launch your runs. Users can compare and contrast their settlements via ZombieLink, the app's online service, through which mission stats, run maps and personal improvements and progress can also be viewed. It's a video game meets a TV show meets a fitness app that doesn't just say getting fit shouldn't be boring – it actively goes out of its way to make sure that it damn well isn't.

So, are we getting fit yet? Well, Nexercise comes off as a mobile version of the Wii Fit mentality, being so encouraging that you feel accomplished simply for breathing: “You moved today. Good job, buddy.” But that's actually not as motivational as its ultra-optimistic creators seem to think. Or maybe it is to some people. Not the sort of people you want to know, though.

But Zombies, Run!? There's real potential there to be absorbing and intelligent enough that the motivation to get up and get moving is so subtle that you don't even realise you're being prodded into action. You feel good not because you exercised, but because you helped save the people of Abel Township from certain doom, and that's worth getting off the couch for.