The G4H 2010 Boston conference is over and has already been hailed a tremendous success. This is the 6th G4H conference,  with this year’s event being split across two main venue areas.

The outside area encompassed the specialised “Exergaming Zone” created by our US partner Exegame Fitness USA. The Exergame Zone was incredibly popular plus being integral to demonstrating the physical ‘real world’ incarnations of Exergaming.

A contest, ‘One Million Steps’ was instituted to raise money for charity and to energize participants at the conference. The entire event was a showcase for the wonderful potential of Games for Health and Exergaming. Kudos to the organisers and attendees for their professionalism, enthusiasm and passion. G4H opitmises our Exergaming Australia motto of,  Serious Fun.

So, in the context of play we ‘exercise’. Adults go the gym and ‘lift’ weights, ‘do’ aerobics classes, ‘have’ a fitness boxing sessions or ‘get’ yelled at in boot camp or personal training sessions. But wait you say, adults do ‘play sport’, they ‘play cards’ they ‘play with their kids’ and yes you’re right, in the context of an associated activity we play, as that makes playing legitimate and gives the activity credence and acceptability…but,  I would argue that adults do not simply play. Or do we? There is one obvious activity where adults are allowed to play and that’s with PC, video or board games so we do ‘play games’. FYI: The average age of a gamer in Australia is 30! Not 3, 12 or 18 but 30…well and truly adult status. So adults can play games, interesting.

Well now, a breakthrough. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could re-engineer those games to maintain the fun and entertainment aspects AND make them as energetic as real play. Wouldn’t it be great if there were adult technology games that we play, that make us fitter and healthier? Well, we do and would you believe that this genre has been developing since 1982! It began with an Amiga game that used a peripheral amazingly similar to the Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board. This new entertainment fitness game genre was called Exergaming, and boy has it come on leaps and strides since 1982.

It’s perhaps only over the last decade that the technology for exergaming has become truly feasible. Many of the technological advances in miniaturization, reduction in manufacturing costs, lightweight materials etc, has made domestic exergaming products affordable and family friendly. I suppose this is most readily demonstrated by the wireless motion-sensing platform of the Nintendo Wii. So exergaming has truly come of age, and this is just the beginning!

To borrow a line from Ironman 2, “..technology will make anything possible..”, that is certainly debatable, but it is true that it has made exergaming possible and lately, highly effective. PLAY on the other hand costs nothing, requires nothing except imagination, perhaps a stick, and a rock. PLAY is the polar opposite of technology, so you would think mixing the two would produce nothing but a malfunctioning malady, in reality it has produced a past time that makes it okay for adults to play, it makes play credible and still fun. At Exergaming Australia, we use the essence of this morphing of technology and play in our motto – ‘Serious Fun’.

So, what’s wrong with fitness today. Well for a start, it certainly isn’t play. It’s a ‘serious’ minded activity. Fitness and exercise have become billion dollar industries where ‘fun’ and ‘Play’ have no role to play, so to speak. Fitness has become very serious business, very complicated and very expensive with a lot of companies and individuals becoming celebrities simply because they yell louder and have considerably larger biceps than we mere mortals have. But I wonder how many people think this kind of combative fitness is actually fun?  We’ve become accustomed to militant combat or mixed martial arts classes or fitness boxing, and there is certainly no doubting the effectiveness of these methods, they work very well, but they are not for everyone, around 85% of us in fact! Perhaps we should all join the armed forces and be forced to get fit, at least then we could get paid to improve our fitness, as it stands now WE are paying the armed forces to get us fit!

My point is, fitness and exercise, constructed around activities that supposably motivate us due to yelling and screaming ex-military personnel, is not play it’s not entertainment and it’s certainly not fun. It is effective however, no denying that, but it is NOT fun!

Think about when we were kids, when we simply played because it was fun. We never thought about the fitness benefits as we bounded about playgrounds or slogged cricket balls over the back fence. We had boundless energy because we were kids, we were having fun and we did it day after day as a result. Our parents would have been grateful to see us playing as we were entertaining ourselves and out from under their feet, but I bet they never thought, “great, Brett is really improving his aerobic fitness with those short burst between the wickets in cricket”. Nevertheless, play is just for children isn’t it? Adults must do adult things like workout and workup a sweat and just work. Well, I beg to differ!

Again, Exergaming turns modern concepts of exercise on its head. We return to the notion of Play and Fun. If we are truly enjoying what we are doing, we’ll keep doing it willingly, will-power won’t enter into it, we will no longer have to gee ourselves up, torment ourselves with guilt so as to motivate ourselves back to the gym. Exergaming is intrinsically self-motivating as it is entertaining, fun AND physically beneficial – win, win and win. So what is it about exergaming that separates it from normal fitness and exercise activites?

1. I know I’ve mentioned it ‘several’ times already, but I must emphasize the fun factor. Exergaming takes the best entertainment technologies available (in games, movies, music and software) and then makes those activities physically challenging. It also requires that the best exergames are fun first and fitness second. That certainly doesn’t mean fitness is ‘secondary’, quite the opposite, it actually means fitness can be inherently fun, thus sustainable like when we played as kids, day after day, year after year.

2. Exergaming is born from computer & console gaming it therefore inherits some of the most powerful and engaging aspects of gaming, namely:

a. Mutliplayer – you can play cooperatively or competitively with your friends, family and mates.
b. Online Multiplayer – as above but you can do so against or with people all round the world 24/7.

3. Results ‘NOW’ – Fitness activities, especially those requiring us to lose weight or simply get fitter can make progress seem excruciatingly slow and tedious, which makes it extremely difficult to stay motivated. Exergaming often has very detailed feedback data, which is tremendously valuable in tracking your progress instantly. Exergaming can tell you your game score, the accuracy of your movements, the power of your blows, the timing of your steps, the speed of your punches, the quality of your cognition and much much more. This gives you direct and immediate feedback on your progress and is tremendously motivating. You use that recorded data as a motivation to improve your previous scores, or to beat a family members score or perhaps even someone who has left their score on a social network site that you visit. Trying to improve your results requires you to be fitter, stronger, more agile more focused more rhythmical and be better at playing the game.

4. Exergaming is geared up for Social Networking. Exergaming is a natural fit for sharing your results, swapping stories and sharing strategies online and in group forums and chat applications like Facebook. Gamers have been sharing statistics online since the internet began and have created vast online communities who support their past times actively and vigorously.

Thanks to Gamercize for the use of the playful picture

5. Exergaming is incredibly accessible – The best Exergames allow people of any physical ability and age to participate together, in the same class at the same time and even compete against each other equally! This flexibility is intrinsic in Exergaming and allows people of any generation to share an activity in synchronicity.

This makes Exergaming wonderfully accessible to everyone, everywhere and again enhances the socializing affects of adult playtime, what normal fitness methods would call a ‘workout’, kinda’ dull in comparison.

Take your pick, would you prefer to have fun first and get a fantastic fitness benefit from your playtime or make that concerted effort to motivate yourself to the gym and the cardio machine factory that waits in steely silence? My choice is clear: Playtime – GAME ON!

Controlled burning is a method of reducing the impact of fires and their devastation. Reducing the fuel which fires need to spread just makes sense, essentially, fighting fire with fire. At first glance and to anyone unfamiliar with the practice, it would seem lunacy to willingly burn away areas of the countryside, but these ‘controlled’ burn-offs work to reduce the risk of damage when faced with an ‘uncontrolled’ forest fire.

The strategy is certainly effective but requires skill, the right tools and continued maintenance to work effectively. So fighting fire with fire does work, quite literally. Not surprisingly, this old adage and has been applied to a countless number of endeavours as a means to solve a problem head on.

In that regard, we’ve employed its use, at least in kind, as one of our key strategies. Our Fighting Fire with Fire strategy fights an even more destruction condition that is having a terrible effect on our nation’s health – Childhood and Adult obesity. We are not alone in that respect, a woeful number of first world countries are in similarly dire health conditions which has given rise to a phrase used more commonly everyday – ‘Globesity’.

This catastrophe, and I don’t use the word lightly, is fuelled by many factors: overindulgence in fast foods,  little to no food education in our homes or schools, inadequate and inconsistent schools PE curriculum, poor  meal and food selections, gigantic meal portion sizes, misleading food product labelling (low fat often equals high sugar), an  increase in sedentary screen time in front of the TV, PC and games console and disenchantment with existing traditional exercise and sports habits and options – there are many more contributors. That is a depressing list but it serves to highlight some of the reasons behind this epidemic.

I truly wish I was exaggerating, I certainly don’t wish  to sensationalise the situation anymore than countless media reports have already done so. Let’s be brutally honest, we’ve all heard and read these statistics ourselves, we know the situation is critical yet people seem powerless to do anything about it. As a result I believe many of us have become desensitised to the problem, it just seems too overwhelming. Fortunately, we don’t feel that way, far from being overwhelmed, we’ve decided to act and do something about the situation now! The contents of this website and the people that make up Exergaming Australia, our partners and our networks, will explain exactly how we plan to go about becoming part of the solution.

A key component in that solution is in applying our own version of Fighting Fire with Fire. Our strategy is applied directly toward the physical activity and exercise casualties in the obesity crisis, and we are not alone in doing so. A global network of researchers, clinicians, innovators, developers from the private and public sectors are equally passionate about finding solutions which utilize some of the ingredients that fuel this fire, and we applaud them for being so bold. We will continue to work with them daily to become more relevant and to bring these bold solutions to the wider public asap.

So how does our strategy work? Part 2 will explain all

The Forum has a wide range of panels and workshops arranged from utilizing virtual 3D environments in Secondlife to Accessibility (Dr. Belinda Lange), Video games for fall risk reduction in Seniors (Dr. Stuart Smith who is also the Chair of the Forum) and of course implementations of the Wii for neurological and stroke patients rehabilitation – http://www.gameconnectap.com and http://www.gameconnectap.com/pdf/GCAP_2009_Games4Health.pdf for a look at the G4H program.

As the Exergaming advocates at the Forum, we will be following closely how Australia is interpreting and innovating implementations of games/exergaming/virtual technologies in the Health-Rehab field.

Above all, it is truly exciting to see G4H represented in Australia and certainly wish all the speakers, the organisers, attendees and Dr. Stuart Smith all the best for this forum and future Forums/Conferences in Australia.