Designing games to motivate physical activity

Abstract

Engagement with computer games causes children and adolescent users to spend a substantial amount of time at sedentary game playing activity. We hypothesise that this engagement can be leveraged to motivate users to increase their amount of physical activity. In this paper, we present a novel approach for designing computer games, according to which the users' physical activity reinforces their game character. This way the users are seamlessly motivated to perform physical activity while maintaining their enjoyment of playing the game.