Exergaming is any activity that combines video game technology with exercise. Game developers integrated gaming and exercise into the Nintendo Switch, the Oculus Rift and Quest headsets, and the Playstation Move Controllers. You play a video game while enjoying the benefits of increased movement, heart rate, and perspiration. You can box, dance, and swing yourself into a more fit lifestyle.
Depending on your age, you may remember that the Nintendo Wii Sports and Dance Dance Revolution for some of the first games to incorporate physical activity as a means of winning the game. If you didn’t move, or move fast enough, game over.
Exergaming In Research
Exergaming is a fairly researched intervention (10,000+ results in Google Scholar on January 20th, 2021) in which researchers assess the effects of increased exercise and physical activity with children, individuals with cognitive delays, and the elderly. If you can make exercise fun, then maybe exergaming is a friendly way to get people moving.
Shayne et al. (2012) compared exergaming to a typical physical education (PE) classroom. They targeted PE class because they found that the majority of the spent was not in physical activity. Most time was spent with teaching the rules, modeling activities, and waiting for your turn.
By simply presenting alternatives (e.g., Nintendo Wii, Dance Dance Revolution) to typical PE class, most students engaged in more physical activity compared to ‘normal’ class.
Here is a prototypical outcome of student physical activity:
(image credit: Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis)
The (E) represents exergaming, (E-asterisk) represents a technical malfunction day, and (PE) represents normal gym class. The Y-axis measured the percentage of intervals when the student engaged in physical activity. There is noticeable difference between (E) and (PE). However, it is still concerning that the students are engaging in physical activity <50% of the time….during GYM CLASS!
Exergaming In Practice
Before our work together, one client of mine exergame-d for some time. She owns the Nintendo Switch and used one game, Nintendo Ring Fit Adventure, as an exergame to work on her weekly exercise minutes. Early on, she wanted to start playing again as a form of exercise. As any good behavior analyst would do, we analyzed the effect of Nintendo Ring Fit Adventure on her exercise minutes. At first, the game did not produce many exercise minutes (red line):
Because the Ring Fit Adventure produced so few exercise minutes, we rapidly changed the exercise activity to walking and HIIT workouts (green and blue lines). Walking and HIIT workouts produced far more exercise minutes than the Nintendo Ring Fit Adventure game. I’m glad that we switched so soon.
She recently worked out again with the Nintendo and produced much higher exercise minutes (single gray dot in Jan. 2021). There can be multiple explanations for this: she either chose a harder level, workout out longer, or — just possibly — she learned to increase her intensity from between episodes of exergaming. That is, she and I worked on various goals for 5 months, and those learning trials, put her in a better position to work hard the next time she picked up the Nintendo Switch controllers.
References
Fogel, V. A., Miltenberger, R. G., Graves, R., & Koehler, S. (2010). The effects of exergaming on physical activity among inactive children in a physical education classroom. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 43(4), 591-600.
Shayne, R. K., Fogel, V. A., Miltenberger, R. G., & Koehler, S. (2012). The effects of exergaming on physical activity in a third‐grade physical education class. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 45(1), 211-215.
