P.E. Classes Turn to Video Game That Works Legs

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

Bill Hines, a physical education teacher at the school for 27 years, shook his head a little, smiled and said, “I’ll tell you one thing: they don’t run in here like that for basketball.”

It is a scene being repeated across the country as schools deploy the blood-pumping video game Dance Dance Revolution as the latest weapon in the nation’s battle against the epidemic of childhood obesity. While traditional video games are often criticized for contributing to the expanding waistlines of the nation’s children, at least several hundred schools in at least 10 states are now using Dance Dance Revolution, or D.D.R., as a regular part of their physical education curriculum.

Based on current plans, more than 1,500 schools are expected to be using the game by the end of the decade. Born nine years ago in the arcades of Japan, D.D.R. has become a small craze among a generation of young Americans who appear less enamored of traditional team sports than their parents were and more amenable to the personal pursuits enabled by modern technology.

Incorporating D.D.R. into gym class is part of a general shift in physical education, with school districts de-emphasizing traditional sports in favor of less competitive activities.

“Traditionally, physical education was about team sports and was very skills oriented,” said Chad Fenwick, who oversees physical education for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where about 40 schools now use Dance Dance Revolution. “What you’re seeing is a move toward activities where you don’t need to be so great at catching and throwing and things like that, so we can appeal to a wider range of kids.”

A basic D.D.R. system, including a television and game console, can be had for less than $500, but most schools that use the game choose to spend from $70 to $800 each for more robust mats, rather than rip apart the relatively flimsy versions meant for home use.

In a study last year, researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that children playing Dance Dance Revolution expended significantly more energy than children watching television and playing traditional video games. West Virginia, which ranks among the nation’s leaders in obesity, diabetes and hypertension, has sponsored its own study and has taken the lead in deploying the game, which requires players to dance in ever more complicated and strenuous patterns in time with electronic dance music.

As a song plays, arrows pointing one of four directions — forward, back, left, right — scroll up the screen in various sequences and combinations, requiring the player to step on corresponding arrows on a mat on the floor. Players can dance by themselves, with a partner or in competition. (Though the game, which is made by Konami of Japan, began in arcades, it is now most commonly played on Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles.)

As a result of a partnership among West Virginia’s Department of Education, its Public Employees Insurance Agency and West Virginia University, the state has committed to installing the game in all 765 of its public schools by next year. Almost all of its 185 middle schools already use it.

The mastermind behind the project is Linda M. Carson, Ware distinguished professor at West Virginia University’s School of Physical Education and director of the state’s Motor Development Center.

“I was in a mall walking by the arcade and I saw these kids playing D.D.R., and I was just stunned,” she said. “There were all these kids dancing and sweating and actually standing in line and paying money to be physically active. And they were drinking water, not soda. It was a physical educator’s dream.”

In February, Ms. Carson and her main collaborator, Emily Murphy, a doctoral candidate at the university’s School of Medicine, announced results of a multiyear study. They found significant health benefits for overweight children who played the game regularly, including improved blood pressure, overall fitness scores and endothelial function, which reflects the arteries’ ability to deliver oxygen.

None of that would come as a surprise to Maureen Byrne, mother of two boys in Chesterfield, Mo., who introduced the game to her local school district after seeing its impact on one of her sons.

“My oldest son, Sean, used to have love handles; he was kind of pudgy, and I’ll be honest: we were worried about it,” she said. “We had heard of D.D.R., and I got it for him for his birthday. We put limits on the other video games he plays, but we told him he could play D.D.R. as much as he wanted. And now it’s like he’s a different kid. He’s playing sports and running, and we see D.D.R. as like his bridge to a more active lifestyle.”

Ms. Byrne and her family demonstrated the game for the local parent-teacher organization in the hope of convincing it to underwrite a test at school.

“I remember going to the P.T.O. meeting and getting in front of all of them without my shoes on and doing the moves, and that was kind of funny,” said Sean, now a 12-year-old sixth grader.

Today, eight schools in the Parkway School District, based in Chesterfield, have their own D.D.R. systems, and three other game systems circulate among various schools in the district, said Ron Ramspott, the district coordinator of health and physical education.

“Our teachers are really buying into D.D.R. as a way to promote both physical health and learning,” he said. “When you’re playing the game you really have to process the information and then also do the moves physically, so we think it can help with brain development as well.”

As Leighton Nakamoto, a physical education teacher at Kalama Intermediate School in Makawao, Hawaii, put it: “The new physical education is moving away from competitive team sports and is more about encouraging lifetime fitness, and D.D.R. is a part of that. They can do it on their own, and they don’t have to compete with anyone else.”

Mr. Nakamoto said that he had used the game in class for four years and that his school had also installed the game in its “Active Lifestyle” room, where students are allowed and encouraged to play in their free time.

Dave Randall, the educational specialist for coordinated school health for the Hawaii Department of Education, said Hawaii was trying to put together a program like West Virginia’s to get the game into all of the state’s 265 public schools over the next three years.

Back in West Virginia, Anna Potter, 12, and Mikayla Leombruno, 13, were not concerned about all of the academic theories as they shimmied and bounced to the beat in Mr. Hines’s gym class.

“I like that you get to listen to music and you don’t have to be on a team or go anywhere special to play,” Anna said after their song. “If you do baseball or basketball, people get really competitive about it.”

Mikayla chimed in, “And you don’t have to be good at it to get a good workout.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/health/30exer.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

We Don’t Play Games for Fun

By Susan Arendt January 16, 2007 | 1:58:44 PM

If you’ve ever been asked why you play video games so much, and you answered, “Because they’re fun,” it turns out that you are, in fact, a damn dirty liar. According to a study published in the January issue of Motivation and Emotion (sounds like a chick mag to me…all those feelings), video games can fulfill a number of psychological needs, opportunities for achievement, freedom and even a connection to other players. Surprisingly, “fun” was found to be a far less motivating factor.

“It’s our contention that the psychological ‘pull’ of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness,” said Richard Ryan, lead investigator for the study. Ryan also suggested that gaming can “[enhance] psychological wellness, at least short-term.” So next time your girlfriend accuses you of spending more time with the PlayStation than you do with her, just tell her it’s for health reasons.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/01/we_dont_play_ga.html

It seems for every Guitar Hero video posted by anyone, there will inevitably be comments like, “Go buy a real guitar!”, “What’s the point?”, “Get a life!”, and so on. I think people overestimate how much time it takes to learn how to play these games. If you play other music/rhythm games, the concept is similar and the learning curve is a lot lower. Even if you’re playing for the first time, it’s pretty simple.

Here is a list of reasons why people play Guitar Hero instead of the real thing:

1. Guitar Hero is tons of fun, right away.
2. There isn’t a huge learning curve, you can jump right in and “feel” like you’re playing guitar, even on Easy!
3. You get to play real songs, with a full (virtual) band, and not start out with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or other boring songs.
4. Some people just really like video games.
5. It’s cheaper than a real guitar.
6. You don’t have to tune it.
7. You don’t have to buy new strings.
8. You don’t have to learn to read music (you have to learn to read scrolling notes, sure, but come on, green = green, that’s not hard!).
9. Guitar Hero is tons of fun, even after you’ve beaten every song.
10. You can play with a group of friends, even if they’ve never played before.
11. It has a scoring system, which means you can compete against friends, and people all over the world by comparing scores online.
12. Guitar Hero is tons of fun, period.

I’m in no way suggesting that Guitar Hero is superior to real guitar, just giving reasons why many of us play it (I’ve never seen a GH player badmouth real guitar). You should really play it for yourself before you make a negative comment about it. Most people get hooked right away (unless they really hate all the songs, but if that’s the case, they probably wouldn’t want to play real guitar either). You’ll be able to see how and why people get good at it — not because they spend grueling hours practicing, but because they spend short periods of time having fun, always getting better naturally.

I’ll even admit that years ago while watching crazy Beatmania videos by dj LISU I wondered the same thing — why doesn’t he spend that time learning piano? Eventually I came to the same conclusions as above. (And it turns out he does play piano.)

Does anyone ever make the comment, “Why are you playing Madden when you could go outside and throw a real football?” A lot of similar reasons apply — in Madden you have a whole team (GH: band), you can be someone else (GH: a rocker), everything is authentic like team and player names (GH: real songs), etc. Hell, a real football is even cheaper than buying Madden! But that’s not the point, see? You probably feel more like a professional football player while playing Madden than you do in your backyard throwing a ball to your friend, just like playing Guitar Hero makes you feel more like a rock star than playing tabs does. It takes a lot more practice with a real guitar to feel like a rock star.

One last thing I should mention. Guitar Hero will not teach you how to play a real guitar, but it will teach you rhythm! It may even get formerly uninterested people to start learning real guitar (people have commented that they’re now learning guitar because of this game). Honestly, I was never interested in playing music, even though my mom’s a piano teacher. One day I started playing DDR, my rhythm improved, and I actually got interested in music. I went on to play many other music games, and am now obsessed with Drummania. In Drummania you are, essentially (on the harder levels), really playing the drums (but it is a little simplified). If I sit down in front of a real drum set, I can actually play stuff, all because of DM. Now I’m trying to teach myself to play the real drums, because I love it so much. So don’t be so quick to write it off. If you’re really so passionate* about guitar that you want others to do it, Guitar Hero may not be such a bad thing.

http://crackedrabbitgaming.com/2006/10/12/why-we-play-guitar-hero-instead-of-the-real-thing/