Physical activity motivating games: virtual rewards for real activity

Contemporary lifestyle has become increasingly sedentary: little physical (sports, exercises) and much sedentary (TV, computers) activity. The nature of sedentary activity is selfreinforcing, such that increasing physical and decreasing sedentary activity is difficult. We present a novel approach aimed at combating this problem in the context of computer games. Rather than explicitly changing the amount of physical and sedentary activity a person sets out to perform, we propose a new game design that leverages user engagement to generate out of game motivation to perform physical activity while playing. In our design, players gain virtual game rewards in return for real physical activity performed. Here we present and evaluate an application of our design to the game Neverball. We adapted Neverball by reducing the time allocated to accomplish the game tasks and motivated players to perform physical activity by offering time based rewards. An empirical evaluation involving 180 particip...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Shlomo Berkovsky, Mac Coombe, Jill Freyne, Dipak Bhandari, Nilufar Baghaei
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Human Computer Interaction, Physical Activity, Real Physical Activity, Sedentary Activity