SweetieGames

Recently, I’ve been trying to work on my fitness. I have a desk job and live close by to anything I need, and I started to notice that my fitness level left a lot to be desired. I’ve tried out multiple workouts and routines, but nothing seemed to stick with me; especially as an autistic person, I need something to take my mind off the fact that I’m becoming overstimulated by body pain and sweat at a rapid rate.

This got me thinking about when I was younger, and my family had the infamous Wii Fit balance board and the Wii Fit Plus game. Everyone of a certain age has seen the memes of doing the steps game or the tightrope game because the sentient Wii board called your 8 year old self obese. Wii Fit became so famous that the Wii Fit Trainer was added as a fighter in Smash Bros.

As a child and teenager, I was unknowingly doing workouts with yoga and strength exercises for about an hour every day just by wanting to continue my log in streak on a video game. These days, exergaming (a word I didn’t even know existed until I was researching for this article; turns out it was added to the dictionary in 2007) is booming, especially in a world where you can connect virtual reality headsets to your consoles.

Exergaming dates back as far as the 1980s, where companies like Atari and Nintendo attempted to create home workout peripherals for their consoles. These were not a great success; the first successful exergaming title would be Dance Dance Revolution in the 90s. From there, the genre has skyrocketed in popularity in the early 2000s, 2010s and now in the 2020s, partially thanks to wireless controllers and motion detection in consoles like the Wii, Kinect, EyeToy, Switch and the previously mentioned VR.

As someone who loved Wii Fit and my knock-off Wii Dance Dance Revolution game as a kid, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. Most of my hobbies don’t involve moving much; I love to write, I love to play games, I love to read. It makes the most sense to involve one of those hobbies in my exercise regimen, right? As it turns out, this is why exergaming was invented in the first place. To challenge the stereotype that gaming doesn’t involve exercise, and to encourage people like me who don’t typically like exercise to get some movement in my day. And it works!

Gamifying something as mundane as movement and exercise is genius. When I played Wii Fit, of course I’d play the fun stepping game or the hula hoop game, but I’d also mix in some of the yoga exercises and workouts. I even beat the Wii Fit trainer at the jack knife challenge at age 10. Turns out it doesn’t truly take much to make me enjoy a workout! I just need to be fed exercise in a game format!

And there truly is a workout game for every type of person. If you want to do yoga, if you want to do strength exercises, if you want to do cardio, there’s an exergame for you. While researching for this article, it only hit me then that Beat Saber was an exercise game; they truly hide in plain sight! For me, I’m a long-time fan of vocaloid and there’s a Hatsune Miku Boxercise game. They really thought of everything, even an exercise game for weebs like me. I will be buying it once it goes on sale.

As someone who never enjoyed PE at school and someone who finds exercise a real struggle due to my disability, I think that exergaming is a real game-changer (literally). It’s been around for a good while and I can’t see it going anywhere any time soon; I think they’re a really unique way of utilising video game systems!