[Infowarrior] - WaPo on ""Gamercise"

Fri Apr 28 08:28:19 EDT 2006

Get a Move On
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR2006042700
723_pf.html
By Caroline Kettlewell
Friday, April 28, 2006; WE30

HELLO, my name is Caroline, and I'm addicted to "Dance Dance Revolution."

Six weeks ago, I'd never even heard of this game. Then one day the junior
member of the household began clamoring for it. A video game you play not
with the usual handheld controller but with a touch-sensitive mat on the
floor. A dance pattern scrolls on the screen, and you have to match it with
your feet on the mat.

If you don't count a brief and engrossing fascination with "Pong" around
Christmas 1975, my general interest in video games could safely be described
as nominal and my playing ability worse.

"Eh," I said dismissively to my 8-year-old. "It sounds like one of those
things you'll play with for a day and never touch again."

Then two weeks ago, I got my first try at "Dance Dance Revolution."

Two days later we had a PlayStation 2. The next day we added a second dance
mat. Now my feet are bruised, my shins ache, my child begs piteously for
dinner while I mutter, "Just once more, just once more," and I fear I may be
in the market for a couple of knee replacements.

But really, I can quit anytime.

"Dance Dance Revolution" (known by the less cumbersome "DDR"), introduced by
Konami Digital Entertainment as an arcade game in Japan in 1998 and two
years later in the United States, was released in a home version for
PlayStation in 2001, making "DDR," in the warp-speed world of electronic
entertainment, the ancient, if spry, ancestor of the new video-gaming trend
dubbed "exergaming."

Seeking to put the "active" in "interactive," exergaming -- anything from
inexpensive video games that get you off the couch to high-end exercise
equipment for the commercial fitness market -- premiered as a
self-identified category barely more than a year ago at the huge
International Consumer Electronics Show in January 2005. Though it's too
early to say whether it will be the hot new thing or a mere blip on the
radar, the success or failure of exergaming is likely to rest on two
essential questions: Is it fun, and is it exercise?
Pedal Power

My initiation into exergaming began with the Gamebike from Cateye Fitness. A
stationary bicycle with the game controller built into the handlebars, it
comes in two sizes (for kids and adults), connects to a PlayStation 2 (with
adaptors for other platforms) and works with video racing games. You pedal
to move your racer and steer with the handlebars.

A round of "ATV: Offroad Fury" led, unfortunately for my game character, to
a series of brutal onscreen accidents incompatible with a lengthy cyber life
span. I could see, however, that a person with better gaming skills than
mine (no big challenge there) could easily get lost in playing and hardly
notice the exercising; my kid, who hates sitting still, would probably love
the Gamebike and want one immediately, which is why (at $349 for the
consumer model) I didn't invite him to try it with me. And imagine an adult
Spinning class at your local fitness club (the Gamebike costs $1,169 for
upright and $1,600 for recumbent commercial versions) where you're matched
against several fellow riders in an onscreen race.

"You get so focused on the competition, 30 or 40 minutes will pass and you
won't even realize it," says Russell Triebert, who is Cateye Fitness's
regional sales manager for the Southeast.
'Screen Time'

Of course, the home market is the bread and butter of the video game
industry, and that industry has been taking plenty of hits lately from those
who blame it for helping turn a generation of children into doughy
sofa-sloths. What degree of blame they actually deserve for the runaway rise
in obesity rates and attendant health problems in this country is a matter
for the sociologists to debate. Nevertheless, as any parent of the under-20
set knows, onscreen games are a ubiquitous feature of the modern American
childhood.

So when I -- armed with a selection of exergames -- went in search of the
appropriate gaming platforms to try them on and a requisite selection of
test subjects -- that would be the under-20 set -- it didn't take me long to
find either.

"Four years ago, we didn't even own a TV," says Anne Westrick, a Hanover,
Va., mom whose oldest child of four is a college sophomore. Now, surveying a
den equipped with a large-screen TV, Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, two
well-worn "DDR" mats and a stack of games, she admits, "It's a slippery
slope. We got the TV so we could play 'Dance Dance.' I tell my kids they can
have an hour of 'screen time' a day, and they say, 'But, Mom, 'DDR' is
exercise, not screen time.' " Ted (14) and Sam (12) Westrick; their friends
Daniel Lehman (16) and Dane (12) and Ellen (10) Orie; and my son, who would
never have spoken another word to me in this or any future lifetimes if he
hadn't been included in this research project, crowded into the den, where
Ted and Sam were introducing us to "DDR" in a dizzying blur of synchronized
footwork. By the final beat they were flush-faced and panting from exertion.
Exercise? Check.

Conceptually simple, "DDR" is maddeningly, addictively, entertainingly
difficult in practice. The floor mat has four touch-sensitive arrows on it:
right, left, forward and back. Standing on the pad, you follow a scrolling
step pattern of arrows displayed onscreen and varyingly timed to the beat of
one of the game's selection of catchy dance hits. If your feet and your
timing are on target, you're rewarded with onscreen encouragement ("GREAT"
"PERFECT") and a higher score. But if you don't step on the correct spot on
the correct arrow at just the right time, you get a "BOO," miss multiple
steps and a chorus of boos follows your spiral into the depths. Short of a
perfect score, when the song comes to an end -- well, it takes a stronger
person than I to fight off the urge to say, "Just one more time." When I
tell you that my father-in-law, whose knees have not forgiven him those Army
parachuting days, tried soft-shoeing it to "Play That Funky Music," you get
the idea that Konami is definitely on to something.

Four levels of difficulty -- beginner, light, standard and heavy -- add
increasing speed and complexity to the steps. Each version of the game (I've
been playing "Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2" for PlayStation 2) has
brought new features and music; "DDR Extreme 2" includes a workout mode and
songs ranging from a relatively funereally paced cover of "Oops! . . . I Did
It Again" to the panic-speed "Butterfly (Upswing Mix)." Having been
thoroughly flummoxed in "light" mode, I reel at the prospect of a fast song
set on "heavy" -- surely pure Savion Glover.

At the Westricks', the boys obligingly slowed an already leisurely song to
nearly comatose speed (if you ask me how they did this, the answer is I have
no idea, but "DDR" comes with an instruction booklet) for my first turn on
the dance pad. It wasn't pretty, but it was enough. I was caught immediately
and inescapably in the grip of "DDR" madness.

Which I had to wrestle into temporary submission, because the kids were on
to the next thing, the Qmotions-Xboard.
Inter-Action

A new product from the company Qmotions, which also has interactive baseball
and golf systems on the market, the Xboard is a skateboard-size platform
balanced on a shorter and narrower block of slightly giving foam and
attached to a game controller. Using a snowboard, skateboard, surfing or
windsurfing game, you control the motion of your onscreen board by tilting
the angle of the board beneath your feet.

The Xboard we tried was a prototype. (Qmotions says the product will be
available sometime in May in PlayStation 2 and Xbox formats and will cost
about $100.) It came without instructions, not that your average
video-game-conversant kid bothers with those anyway. Before I could offer
more than an "Um, I think you're supposed to connect . . .," the boys had
the Xboard plugged in, the snowboarding game "SSX 3" powered up and Ted was
wobbling unsteadily on the board while the others offered suggestions and
critiques.

After cycling through several players and a steady procession of wipeouts
and off-course flounderings, it became clear that Xboarding called for a
certain degree of subtlety and finesse. It was not, you might say, child's
play.

"These products are not toys, they are simulators," says Amro Albanna,
founder and chief executive of California-based Qmotions. "We are making
video games a lot closer to the actual sport and giving video gamers a new
way to play the game."

It was more balance work than workout, but then again balance is an
important part of a well-rounded fitness regimen. And certainly it's a more
active and demanding way to play games that otherwise exercise nothing more
than your fingers. For the fun factor, I thought the Xboard added challenge
to the game and an enjoyable element of authenticity; although I doubt that
I represent the marketing demographic the Xboard is aiming for. If we had
one of these in our house, I might actually try playing those games that,
with a hand controller only, have never much piqued my interest.

Moving up the exertion scale, we next tried "EyeToy: Kinetic" from Sony
Computer Entertainment America. The EyeToy is a tiny camera that plugs into
the PlayStation 2. It sits on the TV and projects your image onto the
screen. Then, in rather a cool bit of technological whiz-bang, your
movements somehow interact with the onscreen video. You kick and punch and
duck and weave, and frankly, watching the off-screen EyeToy-player flailing
about as though plagued by a cloud of imaginary insects is pretty funny.

Sony has created a number of games to work with the EyeToy, most of which
appear to be aimed at the youth market. The 2005 game "Kinetic," however, is
more fitness-program-with-a-game-element than the other way around. Matt --
buff and vaguely multi-ethnic -- and British-accented fitness babe Anna are
our computer-animated onscreen hosts.

"Kinetic" includes combat, cardio, toning, and mind and body zones and
offers customizing features, such as a Personal Trainer mode that will build
you a 12-week training program. Of course, the kids went straight for the
combat zone and rapidly thereafter for pure goofiness, but later I put
"Kinetic" through its paces in more detail and certainly worked up a
reasonable if not exhausting sweat in the process. In cardio and combat
zones you try to hit, jab or touch certain moving objects onscreen while
avoiding others, and each session gets progressively more difficult.

The good and the bad of "Kinetic" is that I was concentrating more on taking
out the moving objects than on registering how hard I was exercising. If
you're looking simply for something that gets you up and moving, then you'll
find that in "Kinetic," but I decided that the game would take some getting
the hang of before I, at least, could pull off the smooth -- and more
exerting -- maneuvers demonstrated onscreen by a shadow-outline Matt or
Anna. I'm sure my neighbors, if they'd caught sight of me through the
window, would have had a good and hearty laugh. I advise drawing the blinds.
My Maya

Marrying interactive technology with more traditional fitness programming is
"Yourself!Fitness," which creator Phin Barnes dreamed up when he was
training for a triathlon and using a software program that came with his
heart-rate monitor. "After every workout I would download all the
information and see the graphs and so forth. It really helped me train," he
says.

Barnes's concept was "a fitness game that would bring health and fitness
guidance to the broadest segment of the population as possible -- the
video-game-console-equipped household."

Behold, then, Maya, your interactive personal "Yourself!Fitness" trainer for
Xbox, PC and PlayStation 2. Built by focus group and born of computer
animation, Maya gets your height, weight and age, then works you through
initial tests of strength and conditioning before offering suggested focus
areas such as cardio, upper- and lower-body strength, or flexibility. During
each workout, she -- okay, the program -- periodically asks you to assess
how hard you're working, then readjusts future sessions to increase or
decrease intensity accordingly.

"Yourself!Fitness" builds on a familiar range of Pilates, yoga and aerobics
routines, but thanks to the multiple, evolving levels of personalized
interactivity, it's about as close as you can get to having a 24-hour
on-call personal trainer without actually having one, and all for about $35
for PS2 and Xbox platforms.

" 'Yourself!Fitness' is 100 percent dependent on the profile you build as
you use the program," Barnes says. "It specifically targets your needs."

I'll admit it won me over. I've never had much enthusiasm for workout
videos, which quickly grow stale, and I'm averse to group fitness classes.
But "Yourself!Fitness" let me pick what I wanted (Maya suggested cardio, but
I flouted her advice and tried upper body and core first) and allowed me to
incorporate my hand weights and balance ball into the routines and increase
the intensity as I liked, until I was feeling the burn indeed. I'd
definitely use this program.

Assuming I could stop playing "DDR."

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION EXTREME 2 With dance pad for PS2, $59.99. Without
dance pad, $39.99. Other versions also available for Xbox and PS2.
http://www.konami.com.

QMOTIONS-XBOARD Available in May for PS2 and Xbox for about $100.
http://www.qmotions.com/xboard.html.

SONY EYETOY: KINETIC (With camera) for PS2, $49.99.
http://www.us.playstation.com/eyetoy.aspx.

YOURSELF!FITNESS $34.99 for PS2 and Xbox. $29.99 for PC.
http://www.yourselffitness.com.

CATEYE GAMEBIKE $349. Gamebike Pro, $1,169 upright and $1,600 recumbent, for
PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC. 972-644-8403. http://www.gamebike.com.

When she isn't playing "DDR," Caroline Kettlewell is a freelance writer and
regular contributor to Weekend and can be found online at
http://www.carolinekettlewell.com.