Some parents bemoan the fact that their kids play too many video games, but researchers from the University of Tennessee say one growing gaming genre might be good for health. They measured children’s energy output playing outside compared to playing “active video games.”
More than a decade and a half ago, Dance Dance Revolution became one of the first successful video games to incorporate a player’s movement. In UT’s new study, kids played the Xbox Kinect River Rush, where players stand on a virtual raft and collect adventure pins. The game requires full-body movement, says UT kinesiology professor Dawn Coe, one of the study’s co-authors.
“They had to run and jump and move their body from side to side, and they were moving the entire time,” she says.
The same children would later play on a playground outside, where they’d choose what they wanted to do. Researchers hooked them up to accelerometers and found that they actually had more vigorous activity playing Xbox Kinect than hanging out on a playground.
“We’re not saying that everyone should go out and buy these active video systems,” Coe says. But “you know, the games are out there. Parents are going to buy them, children want to play them. So if we can potentially see a positive in video gaming, it’s that the act of video gaming has the potential to facilitate some moderate to vigorous physical activity.”
This study isn’t conclusively saying active video games are beneficial: It only studied 16 kids, ages 5 to 8 —which is a pretty small sample size. And, Coe notes, they only played for 20 minutes.
“It would be interesting to do some further research and see how long they can keep with the demand of the activity in the game,” she says. If they couldn’t keep up much longer, then it wouldn’t be very beneficial.
So Coe doesn’t recommend replacing outdoor play with these kinds of video games, but she says it’s a good alternative on a rainy day.
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