Physical activity motivating games: you can play, mate!

Contemporary lifestyle is becoming increasingly more sedentary: a little physical activity and much sedentary activity. The nature of sedentary activity is self-reinforcing, such that increasing physical and decreasing sedentary activity is difficult. Rather than trying to motivate users to reduce the time spent on sedentary activity, we focus on integrating physical activity into the sedentary activity of computer games playing through a novel game design. Our design leverages engagement with games in order to motivate users to perform physical activity, as part of the sedentary playing, by offering game rewards in return for physical activity performed. In this work we report on an initial user study of our game design applied to the open source Neverball game. We motivated users (in this case children) to perform physical activity by reducing the time allocated to perform tasks and captured their activity through accelerometers configured to recognise jumping movements. Findings showed that users performed more physical activity and decreased the amount of sedentary time when playing the active version of Neverball, while not reporting a decrease in perceived enjoyment of playing.