Last minute preparations are for the festive season are frantically being made and Santa Claus is loading his sleigh high with presents. There is a fair chance that at least some of them will contain an ExerGame or two. There have been a lot of ExerGaming products recently launched on the market and they have prompted a spate of letter writing to Mr Claus c/o North Pole.
Overwhelmed by the number of letters that they have received, Santa’s little helpers have turned to the folks from The ExerGaming Network (TEN) for some advice on the various types of ExerGaming currently available. According to these knowledgeable folks there are 5 different types of ExerGames and therefore plenty to keep you going for a long time to come. Santa’s reindeer team have great fun running around from roof to roof and helping him deliver all his presents. It is the same with ExerGaming – it is so engaging and such fun that you hardly noticing you are exercising!
Going for the prize of most cryptic post title ever. Give you a clue, “EX” as in EXercise. If you are reading this blog, and looking for, or into, ways to make exercise a fun and engaging experience then you might just have done some UXD! Still confused? Well the inspiration for this post was a profile of a really cool sounding job – wait for it – a “User eXperience researcher/Designer”. At last there are people out there whose job it is to make technology fit round people and not the other away around!!!
So, if you are interested in or in the business of helping people have a really great experience when they are physically active, then whether you realized it or not, looks like you too have been doing some EX-UX Design. Which now leads me nicely onto ExerGaming. It got me thinking as to whether or not “good” ExerGames are EX-UXD’d? Is ExerGaming about designing exercise to fit around people rather than try to get people to do things that don’t appeal to them and are just not a good experience.
No, this post is not about the wish for a bigger, brighter, sharper flat screen TV. Nor is it about longing for a mobile phone that is yet to come, one that my current model is not worthy to call. Rather it is about a manifestation of what I consider to be the reality of 21st century living where many people exist both in the physical world and in one or more digital worlds.
Last night I had an experience of a “digital dream” in which I was a fugitive being pursued through a digital landscape. The best way I can describe it is something like Logan’s Run meets Second Life. I managed to dodge my pursuers across a bizarre digital landscape with several narrow escapes. Finally I made a bid for freedom by clambering aboard the last train to leave the digital world. I was awoken from my slumber just as the train pulled into my stop. It was a great feeling to be back in the real world. But I wonder, what would have happened if I had missed my stop?
Whilst I am not going to attempt to attribute any meaning to the dream, I would consider to have significance as a sign of the blurring of the boundary between physical and digital worlds. Why does any of this matter? Well, if you are trying to understand human behavior and only pay attention to the influences present in the physical world and neglect to consider the influences that arise in digital worlds, then you are not going to get the complete picture.
Part of the Quest of writing this blog has involved me “getting in touch” with my creative side. I have ventured into a range of varied experiences with a variety of new forms of art, media and technology. Often these have been a catalyst for novel ideas for ways to tackle some of the social and health problems of society in the 21st century. If you were to ask me what my guiding design principle was it would be:
Make if Fun and Make it Easy
So I have to hand to these guys in managing to successfully make taking the stairs fun.
If you go down to the shopping mall today you might be in for a big surprise! How about a few steps of Machine Dance (Dance Dance Revolution) between purchases? Well coming to a shopping centre near you (in Scotland) is a roadshow for the latest health promotion campaign being run by the Scottish health promotion agency.
A sustainable business model for ExerGaming is a hot topic at the moment. It has been occupying my thoughts for some time and I had a particularly insightful conversation around this topic today. However, I must first point out in choosing a title for this post, it is not my intention to belittle or trivialize campaigns to combat poverty in the world which are just as much my problem as anybody else’s. Rather, it is the focus of this blog is on ExerGaming and seeking to maximize the potential health benefits. Second, the calculations that the title is based on a very rough and in order to maximize the impact, a dollar rather than a pound (sterling) was adopted as a currency that is easy to relate to.
Okay, first the competition. A round figure for a cost of a video game is $30 and on average will hold interest for 30 days. So you can have an engaging interactive experience for $1 per day.
In terms of promoting a physically active lifestyle, the current target is one hour per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year. Do some rough calculations, it seems that a Dollar a Day for every man, women and child might just be enough to provide enough facilities and opportunities for the whole population to be physically active. A dollar a day doesn’t seem much and would be small price to pay in terms of the savings on future health care costs.
The problem comes when you start to multiply up the number. For a school say of 500 pupils, over a school year of 200 days that amounts to $100,000 per school. Now some of that money will already be invested in physical infrastructure and facilities, but where is the rest of the money going to come from? Our own pockets? One less soda?
Thursday evening is the local late night shopping night. After picking up a couple of small items it was time to head to the grocery supermarket. There was a particularly groovy compilation of music playing and my toes where soon tapping away as I weaved my trolley up and down the aisles. I was so inspired that I even engaged in some impromptu performance art as a swung my trolley round in graceful arcs and pulled 270 and 540 degree turns.
I began to tire and switched to playing “Guess the Trolley Owner”. In this game, whenever you spot trolley coming round a corner or one that has been temporarily abandoned, you a have a split second to guess the appearance of the owner. This is not as difficult as it may seem as the relative amounts and composition of “healthy” and “unhealthy” foodstuffs can be quite revealing. We are after all to a large extent what we eat.
At the checkout the music was interrupted by an advert for a new ExerGame that will give you a high quality work out and have you looking great in now time. Nothing wrong with that, but I couldn’t help but wondering if the problem was a little closer to home. What if the store turned shopping into an ExerGame by mixing up all the items so that you had to wander round the store and hunt them down? But maybe then by spending more time in the store, people would buy more stuff and negate the increased calorie burn. But hold on, don’t supermarkets do that anyway?
The count-down to the start of term has been occupying a lot of my time recently. However, in preparing my presentation for the Interactive Fitness and ExerGame Network seminar at Leisure Industry Week 2009 in Birmingham, UK, I realized that there were less than 100 days to go till the year 2010! I then began to reflect on how far things had progressed in the first decade of the 21st century.
Many things that last century were science fiction had now become reality. Yet, perhaps more compelling was the view that most of our thinking on health, exercise, physical activity and sport was still rooted in the last century. I chose for the title of my presentation “Gaming4 Life: Eat Longer, Move Well & Live More” as a play on words of the recent health promotion campaign in the UK called “Change for Life“.
The presentation takes a critical look at the context of physical activity in sport in the digital games eras and develops a new way of thinking about the role of games and game play in promoting well-being and health.
I had scanned the program for the Edinburgh Festival back at the beginning of August and payed particular attention to the Physical Theatre section to see if there was anything creative to inspire me. A show called ManoLibera presented by ScarlattineTeatro of Italy caught my attention as it invited you to:
Enter the world of the comic book where the actors interact with the characters and become part of the story. Share the joy and fascination of letting your imagination go in this funny, original and highly visual show.
I finally managed to find time to take in the show a couple of days ago due to its afternoon time slot. It was a very enjoyable and immersive experience in a surprisingly low tech (analogue) way comprising little more than an over-head project (OHP), some pre-prepared cartoon scenes and pre-recorded sounds. These were supplemented by skillful life cartoon sketching and some wonderfully evocative sounds being spurted into a microphone. The projected images then provided the cartoon world for the on-stage actors to move and interact in and allow the show to unfold in a most entertaining and visually comical way.
To me the cartoon action resembled Belleville Rendez-vous, the music was distinctly Hot House Jazz and the visual humor very much in the spirit of Jacques Tati. The limited dialogue was in english when it was central to the understanding of the plot. Otherwise it was a lyrical mix of french and italian which I just about managed to keep up however this was not vital as the animated speech tones conveyed as much meaning as the words themselves.
Fortunately I do not have to struggle much more to try and explain this wonderful hour of analogue interactivity, as thanks to the wonders of digital technology, you see a brief clip for yourself. However I would add to this the creative use of colored sheets of plastic, coffee grinds, a few physical props and even a split-screen at one point.
Now that everything is digital, over-head projectors (OHPs) have to me become a relic of 20th century (analogue) education. However whilst ManoLibera took a tiny step back in terms of the technology the show utilizes, it was two giant steps forward for immersive interactivity. I for one am looking forward to the day when such a sublime experience can be created and extended in the digital realm.
So to sum it up it was an highly entertaining and engaging experience which literally unfolded in front of the audience and drew you into the cartoon world that the actors were playing in. It was a magical experience that people of all ages would enjoy. Bella! Bella! C’est magnifique!
There is currently a debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic as to the future provision of healthcare treatment and whether or not it should be public or private or some combination of the two. By in large the debate is in fact about “sick service” i.e. a service for when you are sick and what is missing is any consideration of a genuine “health service” that has prevention (rather than cure) as its primary aim.
With regard to a treatment (cure) service I am still waiting for a national debate to take place here in the UK as to what treatments (say treatments A,B&C) are part of the system and guaranteed to everybody no matter where you live, thereby ending the current post-code lottery. Those treatments (say treatments X,Y&Z) which are deemed/agreed to be unaffordable by the system will require alternative arrangements if you wish to access them.
All this however is going to become somewhat academic if current trends in the prevalence of so called “lifestyle” diseases as they will ultimately overwhelm the current “sick service” in whatever form it takes. Clearly there is a need for the right form of long-term incentives for both the public and health care providers to invest in preventative measures.
It was somewhat ironic that in the Sunday Times last week not only was there coverage of the debate entitled “USA versus the NHS” but on the previous page there was an article lambasting local government councils for failing to support businesses through the recession and instead spending money on “Nanny State Jobs“.
When you get in to the body of the piece you see that the examples given of these so called “nanny state jobs” are all in one way or other connected with trying to get people to become physically active and to eat more healthily. You can’t have it both ways. People have to wake up and take responsibility and realize that good health is going to cost money for prevention and/or cure. Whilst prevention requires significant upfront investment, it is going to be cheaper and more importantly sustainable in the long-term.
