Persuasive Games: The Missing Social Rituals of Exergames - Ian Bogost
Interest in exergames has grown in recent years, largely on account of their potential to replace sedentary leisure activity with active leisure activity. Instead of sitting in front of the television idle, mouth agape as we ponder our love for Raymond or hatred for House, we might step-to with DDR or jump around with Eye Toy. Most of the games we celebrate for their exercise potential offer compelling entertainment experiences that also encourage (or better, demand) physical activity. And studies have coupled exergame play to measurable physical effects, from simple weight loss to cardiovascular health.1 But all of these games and the studies that laud them celebrate the exercise potential of games, divorced from any cultural context in which exercise might happen naturally. And this division poses a real danger for this emerging genre. If exergames don’t start wrapping physical activity in credible social experiences, they will become as miserable and forgettable as any session with the exercise bike or the treadmill. Exercise from Accident to Ritual to Chore There was a time when we didn’t have to think so much about exercise. We tilled our own fields and slaughtered our own pigs and chickens, and we churned our own butter and reaped our own squash or onions or potatoes. Getting through the winter offered physical challenge enough, and we worried more about disease than about fitness. Exercise was an accident of necessity. In developed societies, most individuals are freed from the daily imposition of finding enough sustenance for the next day or week. On the one hand we are able to reinvest that time in intellectual, spiritual, or material pursuits. But even early high-density societies preserved physical fitness as an important trait, more intertwined with daily life. Sport is one way organized societies developed their physical attributes, and sports in the ancient world were often tied to ritual and social values such as sacrifice, war, and individualism. Contests of physical skill like archery or footraces might just as easily have marked celebrations of mourning as they would contests of might. Exercise was still a byproduct of the limited automation of daily life, but it was also a ritual practice. In our contemporary society, when we think of sport we usually think of spectator sport, like football or boxing matches. These activities probably share more in common with arena fighting, like ancient Roman gladiatorial combat, and carnival contests, like medieval English Shrovetide football than they do with everyday ritual. Such sports were primarily intended for entertainment and spectacle, the roles they still serve today. Today, exercise is a major concern thanks to the so-called “diseases of affluence” like diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. We think of exercise as a way to compensate for increased use of cars, increased leisure, and greater inactivity at work. As such, exercise has become reparation. Morning jogging and afternoon trips to the gym compensate for days at the computer and evenings in front of the TV. These kinds of exercise are stripped of the ceremonial or cultural features that once defined sport. Like so many other aspects of industrial society, we have found ways to measure our exercise so as to maximize performance and minimize time. Perhaps some business colleagues still review the day’s business deals over a game of squash, but by and large, we spin our legs on our exercise bikes all alone, ears coupled to iPod buds, waiting for the timer to beep mercifully so we can stop. Exercise has become a chore that we somehow must squeeze into our busy routines. 1 For example, see Johanna Höysniemi Doctoral Thesis, “Design and Evaluation of Physically Interactive Games”, or Debra Lieberman’s ongoing work on the topic.
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