GeekDad questions the need for active gaming (Wired UK)

While watching BBC2's The Men Who Made Us Fat the other night, trying not to dwell on the outsized portion of crisps I was eating slouched in front of the TV, I heard an interesting statistic.

They referenced a study that had used a belt attached accelerometer, not unlike the Wii Remote, to measure activity in children. The study concluded that "Children are no less active today than 30 years ago", eloquently elucidated by the narrator.

While the point the programme was making was about the relationship between eating and obesity -- that it wasn't because of inactivity but over-eating that our population has a growing weight problem -- it to be the opposite to what I had heard in relation to video games.

Wasn't all the increased screen time from TV, DVD's and video games supposed to be greating a nation of inactive youngsters who needed to be persuaded to get off the couch at every opportunity? Could it be that all those active video games are not actually unneeded? Do we need to stop worrying about our children turning into couch potatoes?

My instinct is that there must be some truth in the health benefits of active gaming, but I had assumed that kids were become steadily more inactive. The quoted study said the exact opposite.

The issue for our family is more about a balanced life than health. We limit screen-time on video games and TV because it forces us to do other things. Perhaps the issue with games isn't that they make us too sedentary but make us too boring.

I think it's a strange time to be a parent as these different technologies battle for our time, money and attention. Variety seems to be the order of the day here, which causes more than a few arguments in our household from time to time -- various offspring refusing to join in the family activity. My hope is that all this hard work will be worth it and they'll look back and thank us once they are interesting, well rounded adults.

Fingers crossed.

Andy Robertson is Wired.co.uk's resident GeekDad, he also likes to write about Skylanders Giants Swarm.

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/23/geekdad-questions-whether-we-need-active-videogames

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