Exergaming?

So what is Exergaming? We’ve assembled the content below to give an overview of the extremely varied influences that make  Exergaming such a unique fitness and health solution.

Essentially Exergaming blends state of the art video games with physical movement. High quality Exergames, such as iDANCE2, allow low to very vigorous levels of physical interaction, so you can get VERY fit, lose weight, improve your coordination and challenge your cognitive processes (Brain Games) all at the same time! Quite remarkable.

Domestic, off-the-shelf Exergames from companies such as Nintendo, vary dramatically in quality and effectiveness. At Exergaming Australia we ONLY support quality commerical Exergames that deliver a ‘healthy’ experience that are both fun and effective – Healthy Exergaming.

The genre of Exergaming began in 1982. The modern era of Exergaming owes much of it’s development due to benevolent foundations such as the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation in the US. Exergaming is seen by many as a powerful catalyst for positive change in our health behaviours and a tremendous amount of ongoing research continues in this fast growing genre. Exergaming has just recently received endorsement from the highest levels of the US government in a bid to counteract the distressing levels of childhood obesity in the US.

A more detailed description below:

In essence, the modern incarnation of Exergaming has been guided into existence as a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Serious Games Initiative. This initiative has done well to bring Exergaming’s benefits to the attention of researchers, clinicians and fitness and health practitioners, but the reality is that Exergaming is a burgeoning health and fitness solution and not well understood by the wider public. In essence, Exergaming is an innovative combination of the following technologies and methods:

• Entertainment video gaming (Casual and Mainstream Video Games Industries)
• Educational and instructive video gaming (Serious Games)
• Health and rehabilitation (Games for Health and Games for Rehabilitation)
• Conventional fitness (Cardio and Strength Equipment and methods)
• Contemporary and adapted fitness (Specialised Athletic methods, Modern PE, Kids Gyms and Seniors Fitness)

The Serious Games Initiative is a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars project that applies cutting edge games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership, and management issues. Part of the overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy – The Serious Games Initiative is often abbreviated to Serious Games, either version, like Exergaming Australia, is quite descriptive of its intentions.

The Games for Health Project was produced and supported by The Serious Games Initiative and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy. The Initiative is working to catalog use of games in health care, to assist current development, collect best practices, share research results, and explore ideas that might improve health care administration and policy.

 

The goal of Games For Health is to help foster and support a community of researchers, developers, and users of applications that use game, game technologies, and game development talent to create entire new ways of improving the management, quality, and provision of health-care worldwide. As part of that goal Games For Health also plays a greater role in helping to organize and accelerate the adoption of computer games for a variety of challenges facing the world today.

The modern ‘serious’ incarnation of Exergaming owes much of its development to the Games for Health project, as a result of the Serious Games Initiative and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Exergaming was groomed from an early stage to be a perfect fit to target endemic health issues, such as childhood obesity.

Exergaming, as an entity in itself, received ‘serious’ attention at the second annual Games for Health Conference in 2005 in regard to rehabilitation, what was then called ‘Rehabitainment’. Exergaming’s successful development in this area has created a new genre of e-Health or Health e-Games, with the formation of open forums such as Games for Rehabilitation and The Exergame Network (TEN). The RWJF has allocated over $8million since 2007 to further research into Exergaming’s potential in the Games for Health arena.

Exergaming itself, pre-dates all the above in being an original concept by Amiga almost 30 years ago with it’s revolutionary Puffer in 1982, the fusion of a video game and an exercise bike, effectively the first ‘potential’ exercycle – Amiga declared bankruptcy during the project. The evolution of Exergaming since 1982 is a fascinating story of innovation, failure and success. Exergaming went through a resurgence during the late 1990′s with Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) becoming the Exergame of choice in arcades around the world. More recently, in 2006 to be exact, Nintendo released the Wii gaming console and wireless remotes. The extraordinary success, over 68 million units world wide to date,  of this domestic ‘physical gaming’ platform has reignited the pre-existing Exergaming genre. The combination of Nintendo’s success and the work being done by many similarly outstanding but lesser know companies and individuals has created a thriving Exergaming sector which now offers a range of suitably mature products and  wide ranging fitness and health solutions.

Significant real world implementations and innovations have developed in parallel within research institutions and clinical studies, particularly when these developments have been collaborative initiatives between key universities, manufacturers and distributors. The result of these collaborative projects (experiments) has resulted in a number of community-centric Exergaming centres. These centres are often early adopters of cutting edge Exergaming solutions. The data and feedback accumulated from these centres has further refined product and service solutions which are again tested in partnering centres.

In essence, Exergaming has become a recognized, proven and highly effective solution across many fitness and health sectors. Exergaming Australia, through its partnerships with key manufacturers and distributors, is one of the world leaders in Exergaming consultancy, product options, innovation and support.

In this incredibly fast evolving industry, our key directors have been there from the beginning and more than that, we are one of the true pioneers in Exergaming’s development in Europe and world wide through our active participation in Serious Games, Games for Health and Exergaming networks.

Exergaming Australia and its ‘fitness-centric’ customer solutions subsidiary, Exergame Fitness Oz, now offer our expertise and ‘real world’ solutions throughout Australasia.