One of the most important parts of any successful fitness or exercise routine is the joy it brings. If you are not enjoying your regimen, it becomes so much harder to keep at it.

There are a lot of ways to make exercising enjoyable, from workout playlists, group exercises and finding the right balance between what you need to do and what you want to do, but an increasingly popular way to make exercise more fun and more rewarding is gamification.

Most people have experienced gamification in their fitness routines in one way or another. It can be as simple as setting yourself a target and pushing yourself to reach it. A lot of fitness apps and smart trackers incorporate gamification elements, which is why you will often get achievements for reaching certain targets.

However, some home gym equipment takes it one step further and combines interactive entertainment with exercise in a more direct way to help you achieve your goals. 

Here is how exergaming works and why most people have tried it at least once.

What Is Exergaming?

Active video gaming, or exergaming, is any combination of fitness activities and computer games, typically involving the use of body movements to control in-game actions or the incorporation of exercise equipment as a controller.

This would include games such as Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure, Wii Sports and Wii Fit series, as well as the similar Kinect Sports series of games by Microsoft, all of which require additional game controllers or hardware to use.

Drawing the line can be difficult as exergaming is an exceptionally broad term. Games such as Pokémon Go and Ingress, which use a mobile phone’s GPS technology to encourage people to walk around, count as exergames, whilst dancing games such as Pump It Up or Dancing Stage are not, despite often helping people to build up a sweat.

Most are designed for a living room or games room in order to provide a type of rudimentary home gym environment that enables light exercise. On the other hand, there are also some variations of this which use full-size exercise equipment to play bespoke versions of certain games.

Who Invented Exergaming?

The first example of an exergame that was attempted was Puffer, a series of games made for the Atari 5200 console that would use an exercise bike fitted with buttons that would clip to the handlebars and a magnet that would connect to the wheel.

The idea was that the pedalling motion would register as movement, with the rest of the controls mounted to button inputs that would allow games such as Ms Pac-Man and Pole Position to be played via pedalling.

Another, similar product was the Joyboard, a balance board where players controlled games by tilting their bodies in certain directions.

The concepts were rudimentary and not entirely new, but Atari thought there was a market in fitness gaming. They were right, but unfortunately did not survive long enough to see it.

Instead, following the North American Video Game Crash of 1983, which led to the sale of Atari in pieces, the company that benefited from the fitness boom most would be Nintendo, a company that would thrive as a result of fitness gaming in the 1980s, 2000s and early 2020s.

How Effective Is Exergaming For Fitness?

There has been a lot of debate about the benefits of exergaming for fitness, although most of them are loaded with preconceived notions about computer games in general, and many of the studies on active video gaming focus on areas such as light exercise, injury rehabilitation and weight management.

In those spaces, exergaming has been a significant success, to the point that Wii Rehab has become frequently used to help people regain their range of motion, balance and coordination following injuries or debilitating diseases.

In more recent years, there have been claims that VR games such as Beat Saber could potentially act as an upper body exercise routine as long as they reach a high enough level of skill at the game to exert themselves.

However, the implementation of gaming into more dedicated fitness environments, such as gyms and high-level home gyms, has been somewhat limited in its success.

Following Nintendo’s Power Pad in 1986, their next major attempt at a fitness gaming peripheral was the Life Fitness Exertainment System, a Lifecycle stationary bike with a television and Super Nintendo built into it and features controllers mounted to the handlebars.

It was not a success, in no small part due to the fact that it cost £3000 and failed to either target gyms or home fitness adequately.

However, the idea of pushing yourself towards a goal using entertainment or gaming has worked for many people, although it may take some experimentation to find a game and routine that works for you.