Get off Your Ass and Play a Video Game!

You may not be aware of this but the evolution of gaming is on the verge of changing a 600-year trend. For the past six centuries, we have seen a trend, which took outdoor physical sports and gradually reduced them to games that only exercise the fingers and wrists. In the past few years, we have begun to see a reversal of this trend. It is possible that in the very near future the very technology, which brought this evolution to its apex, will become a greater source of physical fitness than the original outdoor games.

A Little History

Back in 1777, the brother of King Louis XIV threw a party in honor of the king and his wife at his home, Chateau D'Bagatelle. The highlight of the party was a new table game featuring the slender table and cue sticks, which players used to shoot ivory balls up an inclined playfield. The king’s brother named the game Bagatelle, after his home. The game was the culmination of a series of table games dating back to the fifteenth century, which brought together many of the elements of such outdoor sports as lawn bowling and croquette. Bagatelle soon became so popular with French soldiers, that many of them brought the game with them to the United States during the American Revolution. The popularity of this game continued to grow and years later, a political cartoon in 1863 showed President Lincoln playing the very same game.

Three years later, in 1869, a British inventor named Montague Redgrave settled in America and manufactured bagatelle tables out of his factory in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1871 the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Redgrave patent number 115,357 for his "Improvements in Bagatelle", which replaced the cue at the player’s end of the table with a coiled spring and a plunger. The player shot balls up the inclined playfield using this plunger, a device that remains in pinball to this day. This innovation made the game friendlier to players. The game also shrunk in size and began to fit on top of a bar or counter. The balls became marbles and the wickets became small "pins". Redgrave's innovations in game design marked the birth of pinball in its modern form. By the 1930’s, manufacturers were producing coin-operated versions of bagatelles, now known as "marble games" or "pin games". This quickly led to the modern day pinball machine which people around the world play to this day. While these games are hardly a sport, they do require a certain amount of arm, shoulder and even body movement. An expert pinball player will get somewhat of an aerobic work out while trying to improve his score.

Television became commercially available in the 1930’s and soon after, the concept of converting this medium to a gaming device began to take form. In 1948, the idea of a video game was conceived and patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. This was followed by William Higginbotham’s Tennis for Two in 1958 and Spacewar! in 1962. The first commercially sold, coin-operated video game console was Computer Space, in 1971. One year later, video games were delivered to the comfort of our living rooms in the form of the Magnavox Odyssey. Towards the end of the twentieth century, people often joked that the human hand would eventually evolve into just one thumb, capable of operating a joystick.

The Present

They could not have been more wrong. By the end of the 1990’s a number of video games requiring considerably more physical exertion started to appear in game rooms around the world. Probably the most popular of these and certainly the most physically challenging, was Dance, Dance Revolution, which was introduced in Japanese video arcades in 1998. Playing Dance, Dance Revolution can most definitely be considered as a form of aerobic exercise. While a number of home versions of this game exist, none of them has achieved the popularity of Guitar Hero, released in 2005. This game does not offer anywhere near the same level of physical exertion, but is crucial to the evolution we are looking at, in that it caused millions of players to get off their asses to play a video game.

The most recent and notable players involved in this turn about trend are Nintendo Wii and Virtual Sports. Nintendo currently has over 10 million Wii consoles in homes around the globe, gamers are swinging at balls, and wielding virtual cue sticks (the ones that were replaced by a handle in pinball games). Some physical therapists are currently using Nintendo Wii games like tennis as therapy for their patients and Nintendo will soon release a new product called Wii Fit. Here is what there early release has to say about the new product: "The active-play phenomenon started by Wii Sports now spreads to your whole body thanks to the pressure-sensitive Wii Balance Board (name not final), which comes packed with Wii Fit. The board is used for an extensive array of fun and dynamic activities, including aerobics, yoga, muscle stretches and games. Many of these activities focus towards providing a "core" workout, a popular exercise method that emphasizes slower, controlled motions. Family members will have fun staying active and talking about and comparing their results and progress on a new channel on the Wii Menu."

Virtual Sports, the other groundbreaker in the new video game fitness trend, has an incredible system for both home and commercial use. Their system features a giant impact resistant screen and a series of cameras, which track the movement of balls in play. This allows players to play a complete game of golf on a myriad of golf courses or shoot basketballs, hit baseballs, kick soccer balls or throw footballs, not with a joystick, but actually using all of the muscles that would be required in the real sports.

Fantasy Fitness has included a complete "Virtual Sports" Room in their proposal for their Fantasy Fitness and Entertainment center (a sports complex designed to revolutionize the way the public views fitness) and is currently working on bringing the people at "Virtual Sports" and the online gaming companies. This would allow people from many different nations to play a complete game of golf or other sport with people from other nations, in the comfort of their living room. The tide is quickly turning and we may soon think of video games as a tool for physical fitness, as opposed to the dire predictions of the 1990’s. If the last 600 years took us from the sports field to the passivity of a desk chair, it will be exciting to see what the next 600 years will bring us in the gaming world.

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MYTH: No pain, no gain

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