The Bulletin
July 24, 2008
Video games have been reviled as the enemy of exercise and a villain in the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic. But not at Dr. Lisa Uri’s house.
When her 5-year-old daughter, Rebecca, plays a boxing game on the Nintendo Wii, an interactive video game system, “she’s literally sweating,” Uri said. A family physician at High Lakes Health Care in Bend and mother of three daughters, Uri, though she limits the time her children spend playing games and does not use them as a substitute for exercise, says she likes the Wii because it is active.
“They are moving around and not just sitting,” she said.
She has more and more research to back her up. With the growing number of so-called exergames — video games that require players to move around — scientists are now looking at whether these games can offer a legitimate workout.
The games, too, feel like exercise. Anyone who’s been to an arcade recently may have seen a sweat-drenched adolescent jumping on top of “Dance Dance Revolution,” one of the most popular and active games in which players follow screen directions as they hop on directional arrows on a dance pad to the beat of popular music.
A study released last year by the American Council on Exercise found that in standard or difficult mode, the game provided a viable cardiac workout.
Another study, released this month by the same organization, found that the games on the Nintendo Wii did not provide as good a workout as doing the real sports, but that it burned more calories than playing sedentary games.