Stopping Sedentary Gaming

For years now, primarily with the release of home console gaming systems and personal computers, video games have primarily involved sitting down for a length of time without getting much exercise at all, other than maybe from your fingers. Even though I was born well after the era of the arcades, I still go to them sometimes, and love to play pinball there. The mechanical pinball machines can give a person quite a bit of a workout, from mashing the buttons for the flippers to jostling the entire machine to try to shift the ball away from a course straight down the middle or away from the side gutters that bypass the flippers. By comparison, modern gaming with a keyboard and mouse or an analog controller really only requires the most subtle of finger and wrist movements, and are rarely physically demanding.

There are of course several exceptions to this. DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) has been around for quite a while, and RPI even has a club for it if I remember correctly. There are some individuals that have lost dozens of pounds by playing it, and there was a USA Today article about it a few years ago (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-05-23-video-health_x.htm). The Nintendo Wii has made an appearance as well in this area of exergaming. For years I had talked with friends about the idea of having a video game that required corresponding physical body movement of the player in order to perform what the character did in the game. The Nintendo Wii is really the first major system to do this with a controller. While it is awfully early to see what the impact of the Nintendo Wii will be on gaming, from my personal experience the games are quite fun and can really give a person a workout. Like many consoles though, I had the most fun playing the games with other friends or family on the multiplayer mode.

Creating a motivation for people to exercise through the fun of a game is really quite an innovation. Of course, if a person wants to lose the most weight, build the most muscle mass, or get the most toned body, the best way to go about it would be with exercises devoted to that, not necessarily a video game that gets people some exercise through gameplay. For those with motivational issues though, especially people that find going to the gym to be boring so they don't go at all, exergames like DDR and the Nintendo Wii games (especially Wii Fit) are a good way to get exercise while still having a lot of fun.

It is probably too soon to know with any certainty, but perhaps someday video games will become less sedentary and more based on the models of the exergames already on the market.

For more information about Wii Fit, you can go to http://www.nintendo.com/wiifit/
If you have any questions about DDR, you can visit http://www.ddrfreak.com/