The sold-out Nex Playground made my kids laugh and cry

If you told me last year the Nex Playground would outsell Microsoft’s Xbox, even for two weeks, I would have laughed my way out of the room.

It’s a three-inch cube of a game console that’s likely less powerful than your phone, one which uses a single camera to track your body. It only plays curated, certified kid-safe games. Though frequently compared to the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, the Nex Playground is worse than either at tracking motion.

Nor is it cheap: $250 upfront plus $89-a-year or $49-a-quarter annual subscription to get more than a basic sampler. If you like a game, you can’t buy it separately. Many are little better than shovelware and most are graphically ugly; I haven’t tried a single game with the charm or polish of Nintendo or the best of Apple Arcade.

And yet, lying sick in bed with a 99-degree fever, my five-year-old begged me to let her play.

When we started a game of virtual bowling, even Grandpa wanted in. (Grandpa never wants in.)

“I want to try again!” said my nine-year-old, after she sent her low-rent airplane plummeting to its doom.

They didn’t care that the games were bad. They cared that they were dead simple to pick up and play, no controller and no experience necessary, on a big screen. They cared that the games made them dance and jump and swing their arms, and that their dad looked pretty funny doing the same.

I just wish the games didn’t make them cry, too.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Nintendo Wii put an infrared camera and an accelerometer in your hand to tell if you moved your arm fast, slow, closer or further, and track basic orientation. A few years later, Microsoft’s Kinect captured your whole body with no controller at all: it painted your room with a structured pattern of infrared light to estimate your skeletal position in 3D space.

The Playground is different: a single wide-angle camera up front and HDMI and USB-C power around back, nothing else to plug in. But it also doesn’t “see” 3D depth. It has to estimate your body pose from flat images.

Sometimes, it’s impressive: by identifying just six joints — shoulders, elbows, hands — you can throw a bowling ball straight down the lane or veer it left and right. But with no real depth perception, it can easily get confused: my nine-year-old couldn’t sit on the couch while my five-year-old was bowling several feet ahead, because the Playground assumed all their limbs belonged to the same person. My youngest cried for several minutes when the eldest raised a hand and accidentally stole her turn.

Soon it was the eldest’s turn to cry, too, when the Playground lost her hand mid-swing and sent her ball careening into the gutter. She got mad when it happened again.

There are so many things that can confuse single-camera tracking, and Nex knows it. Warnings include: Don’t wear clothing with repeating patterns. Don’t wear long sleeves. Play in a well-lit room, but not backlit. “Avoid non-players in the camera view.”

These all help a single camera tell people from their background — but parents know some are harder than they sound! Our kids get game time after their evening bath, which means PJs. Have you seen kids’ PJs? They have long sleeves and repeating patterns. Hearts. Stars. Smiley faces. Repeating cats and unicorns till the cows come home.

We had to roll up sleeves and rethink seating. Realistically, “Avoid non-players in the camera view” meant clearing the entire living room of anyone who wasn’t bowling, having them stand far off to the side, so that the camera didn’t suddenly snap to the wrong person mid-play. Sometimes we could sit on the couch with hands hidden behind blankets or laptops.

Even so, my kids frequently got too frustrated with the controls. “I can’t keep my hand steady! I just can’t keep it steady!” complained my five-year-old, trying to send her cute puppy for a spa treatment in Nex’s Nintendogs-like game. Many games don’t penalize kids for swinging their arms wildly, but some inexplicably require dragging a cursor to press virtual buttons.

It also feels like the Playground lags behind my movements, even plugged directly into a low-latency OLED TV with Game Mode turned on. In Nex’s kart racer game, I couldn’t turn the steering wheel as fast as I wanted in its fastest 150cc mode.

Again, the issues didn’t stop us from having fun, particularly when with games that don’t require precision. The kids had a blast with Mirrorama, which turns your TV into a giant mirror with magical camera filters that let kids shoot lightning bolts from their hands, stretch their face, blur like as speedy as Sonic the Hedgehog, dance with their own clone.

^{Mirrorama, above, made my kids laugh the most.}

They enjoyed Copy Cat, where they just had to strike a zany cartoon pose and let AI judge who did it better. Meanwhile, I found Brick Buster to be an excellent Breakout clone — you only need move your body left or right to move the paddle, which is forgivingly large, and thrilling multiball action makes it fun.

I can’t say we’d get our money’s worth, though, because so many games are simple and inanely repetitive, or — like Connect 4 Bounce, where my kid and I gave up trying to get balls to even go in — frustrating from the get-go. Many sports games are either laughably easy or have a large learning curve because the camera can’t see depth, so it can’t detect how you’re hitting a ball. With tennis, for example, you can’t aim with your arm: it only controls the timing of your swing. You have to move the rest of your body to aim left or right.

One of Nex’s biggest marketing points is that it’s already attracted huge kid brands to the platform: Bluey, Peppa Pig, Gabby’s Dollhouse, Sesame Street, How to Train Your Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But my kids weren’t necessarily sold.

^{Bluey, is one of the better licensed experiences — but my Bluey-loving kids weren’t that into it.}

They seemed entranced at first with Unicorn Academy, but quickly disappointed when they couldn’t ride the unicorn anywhere interesting. The TMNT game is a frustrating endless runner where you constantly have to hop into the air to clear obstacles, though I suppose it could help tire out my kids. And even though they love Bluey, my kids quickly asked me to quit its too-repetitive balloon-bouncing game.

There’s enough in the Playground’s library that I bet your kids will find something they enjoy. My eldest wants to go visit her puppy, and the other night at dinner, my youngest erupted into cheers of “Bowling!!! I love bowling!!!” when we said we might play it again. Despite countless tracking failures, they say that Nex’s Flappy Bird clone, where up to four people hop in the air to keep their dragons eating fruit instead of crashing into towers, is one of their favs.

I think the Playground is far too much money for not nearly enough game. But it goes to show fun isn’t all about quality of execution. Many classic arcade games are frustratingly unfair, even broken — but sometimes you just want another turn to beat the machine.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge