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Player blasts free from overweight gamer stereotype
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Teeth-gritting stereotypes aside, the intersection of fitness and gaming is something we've covered a fair amount here at WoW Insider. There's the player who set up a system of "leveling down" as he lost weight, although a visit to his blog these days doesn't turn up much action. There's the player who lost 100 pounds on a treadmill while he played WoW, before such exercise setups were relatively common. We even ran an entire series last year on shaping up, Buffing for BlizzCon. What we haven't run yet is a story on a gamer who's taken the weight off and kept it off while not only piling on new interests and active pursuits but also maintaining his love of WoW and gaming. A WoW player since the days of the original beta, Jonathan (aka Thundertotem) was a finalist in Subway Canada's Commit to Fit Ambassador search. While he wasn't ultimately chosen as the Subway representative and spokesperson, he says he remains a hardcore gamer even with his weight loss and fitness success.
Obesity experts frown on Wii Fit's fatty-labeling, Nintendo apologizes
Video games can occasionally be the source of some pretty disheartening self-realizations -- like the time Rock Band revealed that you've been lied to your entire life about your angelic singing voice, or when Vampire Rain made you realize that you have incredibly poor taste in video games. However, something tells us these revelations are a bit less heartbreaking than those about to be unleashed by Nintendo's latest best-seller, Wii Fit -- especially when the heart in question is the fragile, butter-soaked heart of an overweight child.Or an average-weighted child, for that matter. You see, Wii Fit measures the user's Body Mass Index (BMI), a weight/height ratio commonly calculated by physicians, though the use of BMI measurements in children is criticized by many dietitians for its frequent inaccuracy. Nintendo recently issued an apology following an incident involving the hurtful labeling of a "solidly built" 10-year-old girl. So, it's like an electronic, $90 version of our fifth-grade gym teacher? We're sold!
UK Government targets gaming industry for anti-obesity program
No, ever-vigilant commenters, this is not a double post -- just further proof that the rest of the civilized world thinks that gamers are a bunch of Cheeto dust-coated fatties. As part of the UK Department of Health's £372 million action plan to reduce obesity, the UK government will work with the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association to make sure that game companies continue to create parental controls on how much time their offspring can spend playing video games, watching TV, or surfing The Innernette.We're sure this will be very effective in lowering your nation's total weight -- if not, you could always invent some sort of national monthly sandwich allotment to try to curb overeating; or maybe require all comfortable armchairs to deliver powerful electrical jolts into anyone who has been sitting for longer than twenty minutes. Yeah, that sounds great.
Mayo Clinic prescribes active games
The Wii has been getting a lot of attention lately, mainly because of its different control mechanism. However, movement in gaming isn't a new concept, which hearkens to days such as the NES Power Pad. Now, exergaming is getting a supporter. The Mayo Clinic has released a report on the results of an exergaming study. Using a sedentary base, games that use a camera (such as EyeToy) and using a treadmill while gaming burned triple the amount of calories as sitting (five times over for more obese children); dance games registered the greatest calorie burn at six times the sitting rate. With this new study, Nintendo is likely to jump on and further promote the health benefits of playing the Wii. Pulling children away from video games is a difficult task these days. While the Wii will unlikely burn the fat like Dance Dance Revolution would, they can add a bit to the marketing pamphlet to say the Wii requires exercise (if used right) for something their kid would otherwise be vegetating to do. As if we needed any more reasons to buy a Wii. [Thanks, Ben]
"Smart plate" chides dieters who lack willpower
Buffet lines can be tricky business, if for no other reason that you have to fight a constant battle between your eyes and your stomach. Well, all of that may soon be over thanks to a Ukrainian inventor, Dr. Hryhory Chausovsky, who has just come up with a dinner plate that will chastise you if you overload it with chow. According to loL, a South African news site, the weight sensor-equipped plate barks such catchphrases as "Stop right there! And what about excess weight?" and "Where's your willpower?" Dr. Chausovsky apparently also has created another version that has a contact sensor on the plate, which will play music faster and more aggressively if the diner eats quickly (as measured by the number of times the fork hits the plate), and more calmly if the meal is consumed slowly. We've got no idea if any of these inventions will hit the global markets, nor for how much, but no matter what the price ends up being, we're still waiting for Dr. Chausovsky's keyboard that'll tell us when we can stop blogging. We'd pay top dollar for that.[Via Shiny Shiny]
Overtime Fitness gym for teens includes video games
One day in the future, we're sure that everyone will be strong, good-looking and above-average. But today, given that 16 percent of American children aged 12-19 are overweight according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have to be ways to get kids into more healthful habits. As we all know, everyone's supposed to be exercising regularly in order to stay well and fit -- thankfully, kids have a new type of fitness center in Mountain View, California (home of Google!) which aims to appeal to the children of Silicon Valley reared on a steady diet of gadgets. Overtime Fitness, which opens tomorrow (and restricts membership to kids 13-18) includes a regular workout equipment area, a "study center" with PCs, Macs and free WiFi (for the Linux laptop-toting set?), a DDR-clone called "In The Groove 2" and the Cybex Trazer, a virtual reality-type game that maps physical movements to the on-screen action. If all that gear wasn't enough, there's always the Xbox hooked up to something called a Kilowatt Sport, which includes a "resistance rod" to merge the real world with the virtual, or as Ars Technica puts it: "if you're playing Madden '06 and want to run a fullback dive, you're going to have to lean hard against the resistance rod to break through the defensive line." Our only question is this: exactly how are parents going to react when they find out that the $60 monthly fee is being spent so that their kids can play even more video games?[Via Ars Technica]
