April 2007 — Features
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Gaming :: Eat Breakfast, Drink Milk, Play Xbox
The daily recipe for students’ health and fitness is taking on a new ingredient long thought to be a poison: video games.
Plagued by one of the most overweight populaces in the country, the state of West Virginia
was looking for a solution to its obesity problem that would appeal to the school-age
crowd. It turned to Linda Carson, a professor at West Virginia University’s School of
Physical Education. Carson recalled witnessing kids lining up in an arcade to play a fiercely
kinetic video game called Dance Dance Revolution, and she suggested it as a possible remedy.
So in the spring of 2004, the state partnered with the university on a research project to
measure the effectiveness of DDR on combating childhood obesity.
In most circles, academic or otherwise, this would have seemed a most illogical, even goofy notion. According to popular wisdom, looking to a video game to correct weight gain makes as much sense as eating licorice to protect against tooth decay.
But Dance Dance Revolution doesn’t jibe with popular wisdom. It isn’t the sedentary, brain cell-gobbling narcotic generally associated with computer games. Its touchstones are coordination, stamina, and balance. DDR, which comes in versions for Xbox and PlayStation (and soon for the Wii), features a video screen and dance mat with nine tiles that light up to a driving dance beat. The object is to step on the tiles as they light up, while watching for clues in the form of arrows that flash all over the screen.
“Dance Dance Revolution sustains the kids because of the nature of the game,” says Nidia Henderson, health promotions director of West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency. “It’s challenging, it’s high-tech, it’s easily accessible.” And, above all, it’s aerobic. Kids who would normally avoid regular exercise gravitate to DDR’s light and sound.
The state started with a clinical, at-home study of 50 children— all of whom had a body mass index above the 85th percentile, which is the threshold for being considered overweight. The initial results of the study were overwhelming. Pre- and post-testing showed, among other things, better arterial response to increased blood flow, an increase in aerobic capacity, and no weight gain. In addition, all the participants were more willing to try new activities and invite friends over to play, and were more confident in participating in physical education classes.
After seeing the data, West Virginia’s department of education got involved and decided to implement a pilot program on 20 middle school campuses in the fall of 2004 to gauge DDR’s acceptance within the general student population. The results of the pilot were similarly compelling.
