Video games have become the easy scapegoat for just about every problem in the world, it seems. School shootings? Blame the video games. Bad parenting? Video games! And of course, all obesity that exists, especially in children, is the fault of video games and the lazy people who play them. Give me a break!

Thankfully, not all non-gamers in the world are this ignorant. Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, Ph. D., of the Mayo Clinic, recently conducted a study to see how many calories were burned by playing video games, as compared to actually exercising or just watching television.

Twenty-five children were studied in the accurately-conducted survey, 15 in the normal weight range, 10 that were considered mildly obese. The results? As expected, watching television and playing standard video games used the same amount of energy. However, the interesting part is that when compared to walking on a treadmill, playing an activity-based video game actually burned more calories.



The study raised an intriguing question: if people are going to spend so much time playing video games, why not make them action-based so that burning calories and using energy is part of a fun and addictive process? Clearly, this isn’t the first time this study has been raised, with games like Wii Sports and Dance Dance Revolution used to burn calories in the past, and Wii Fit on the way.

I know that being healthy and losing weight is not the easiest of tasks for many people, but personally, I am on board with the idea of attempting to burn calories through game playing. Anything that makes exercise less boring is fine by me, and you can believe I’ll be picking up Wii Fit when it comes out in May. It’s good to know that there are more options than taking endless steps on a treadmill when it comes to burning away the calories.

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