Exercising with video games: How gender and a controller can affect how intense your workout isAdam Agresta, EXS 111

AbstractChildhood Obesity in the U.S. has become a dangerous epidemic, one that is claiming more victims as the hours in front of a screen go by. At this rate, America is putting itself into a deep hole that may be impossible to get out of. Children continue to spend less and less time each day outside, and this is not helped by the increased awareness of dropping test score within schools, decreasing the funds for recess and physical education programs. To slow this trend, something must be done, and it may not even involve kids leaving the comfort of their own home. With the use of dance genre video games that require movement interaction instead of button mashing, this epidemic can be turned around. The question now is, what will be most effective, and will something like this even be popular? To test this, we look at two different dance games that use technology to track movement, with the games being on different consoles, as we track different factors about the games and the experience.

ResultsThis experiment produced several different interesting results, first with the gender differences. Out of all girls surveyed, Just Dance was significantly more popular than its competitor, while guys were much closer of a separation, they also preferred the Wii console game. This proved my hypothesis wrong, as the game with the Wii remote had a higher enjoyment level, as well as a higher difficulty level overall. On average, both boys and girl’s heart rates were higher playing Just Dance as well.

TSince dance genre games are looked at as being predominately feminine, I predicted that girls would have a higher level of enjoyment recorded than guys would. I also predicted that since there is a controller used to play Just Dance for the Wii, this would not be as popular as the Dance Central game, which is played on the Xbox 360, because the 360 uses a camera based device called the Kinect that just uses body tracking instead of controller tracking. This allows for more creative dance moves and game scoring.

ConclusionMy hypothesis was not accurate in the form of preference to non control games, but this may be due to Just Dance being the more established game in the genre. Former players, especially girls, seemed to have a loyalty towards the franchise. Surprisingly, boys rated the Dance Central game for the Xbox 360 higher on the scale than girls did, as seen in the graph to the right. Heart rates were also raised rather quickly playing Just Dance, compared to Dance Central. In a future experiment, I would want to isolate each game and see whether variety of songs affects how hard someone plays each respective game. This is key, as Just Dance has mostly pop hits compared to Dance Central, which focused more on classic “throwback” hits. Overall, this experiment puts forward the principle that, even in their own living room, children can be active, and fight the never ending epidemic that is obesity.

Hypothesis