FitBit Versa Turned My Life Into a Video Game

I love video games. If I'm not playing them I'm most likely thinking about them in some form or fashion. My young son and I get to bond while playing games. They're an enormous part of my life. But it's a sedentary hobby. There are active games out there that get the player to dance around like the Just Dance series. Games like Pokemon GO! encourage the player to go outside and move in order to succeed. When I was playing Pokemon GO! daily I would take walks around the neighborhood. But for the most part I play games on the couch in a darkened room.

For Christmas my wife gave me a FitBit Versa so I could track my activity, or lack of activity. When I first began wearing it, I notice that I started checking my numbers every morning and what I saw did not shock me but it did intrigue me.

I play a lot of RPGs, or role-playing games. And in that genre the player has a lot of control in how to play as their character. There are games like the Fallout series where the player can fully customize how their characters look, what skills they have, who they want to be friends with, and whether or not they want to play as the biggest jerk in the universe.

In those games I'm constantly trying to find the best gear and items in RPGs but now I can do something very similar to that with my FitBit. I can track my stats which range from daily steps, heart rate, and how much sleep I get every night.

This wearable is not unlike the multiple menus in an RPG. It helps you keep track of the following:

• Steps: this is pedometer function of the wearable. If you view every step as an experience point, you can level up even quicker. Cheese the boss in a completely different way!
• Notifications: the Versa is basically my HUD, or heads-up display. My wrist vibrates to tell me if I received a text, email, or that I've hit a FitBit related goal. It's my real-life, miniature PipBoy!
• Calorie intake: how many cheese wheels have you consumed for health today?
• Calories burned: what's your damage per second? This is measured through your heart rate and while it's not a precise way to track your caloric burn, it's definitely better than nothing.
• Water intake: stay hydrated and keep your mana in the positive. You also get extra steps every day from walking to the bathroom.
• Weight Log: FitBit makes a scale that will connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth and logs your weight every time you step on it. It's a wild feature and makes that one part of trying to get fit a little easier.
• Sleep tracker: The sleep tracker function is my not-so secret favorite feature. I almost obsessively check it every morning to see if I slept better or worse than the night before. In Fallout 4 there are power armor suits that run on fusion cells, and those are a finite energy source that needs constant monitoring and replenishment. If you run out of those buggers, your character can't run and most of the time I would just abandon the power armor in the middle of the wasteland.

There are many non-video game features that I'm a big fan of:

• I can check the weather for the week
• There's an alarm feature that will vibrate until you tap the screen. It's a great backup when my phone decides to betray me and not try to wake me up in the morning.
• If you have a Bluetooth speaker or headphones, you can sync them to your Versa watch and listen to music.
• You can change what the watch face looks like.
• It fully recharges in about 2 hours.

There are only a few features that I don't like or are lacking in my opinion. The Versa will alert you if you have an incoming phone call, and you can ignore the call from the watch. You just can't answer the phone through the watch because it doesn't have that feature. It makes zero sound, no music can be played from it, weird as that may be.

I highly recommend this wearable to everyone. All the pros of this gadget overwhelmingly outweigh the cons. It makes me feel like the protagonist of an RPG for a decent price and it looks fashionable too. Go to your local merchant and equip this gear and earn extra XP every day.