Today, an argument in three parts for why playing games is good for you.
Games are good, Exhibit A: ‘Exergames’ beat a treadmill
A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that some interactive video games are a good way for kids to burn calories. The study took 39 kids, average age 11, and put them in front of interactive video games to see how much energy they burned. But first, to establish an exercise baseline, they had the kids walk on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour to establish their metabolic equivalent (MET), an approximation of how much oxygen the body uses during an activity. The kids measured an average MET of 4.9 on that activity.
Here’s how the games compared (the higher the number, the better; for the sake of you adults, “light” gardening has an MET of 2, running an 8 mile-per-minute pace — that would be a roughly 24-minute 5K — pulls a 13.5):