TORONTO - Animated adventure seeker SpongeBob SquarePants and digitized dancing queens Lady and Emi can help children more than double the amount of energy they burn while playing video games, a study has found.
The calorie-burn rate among 25 boys and girls playing activity-required titles, in which they were made to throw virtual bowling balls or dance, proved so dramatic that Mayo Clinic researchers concluded the games "might be considered for obesity prevention and treatment" programs.
"I would love to see kids going outside and playing ... but I don't think that they're suddenly just going to abandon video games and go back to that kind of active play," said Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, Mayo obesity researcher and study leader.
"I think it's clear that children can benefit, health-wise, from playing these more activity promoting games."
With the so-called global obesity epidemic and the popularity of youth gaming as their backdrop, researchers at the Minnesota-based clinic took 12 boys and 13 girls between the ages of eight and 12 and put them to the virtual test.
The results - showing that children burn more energy while playing activity-required video games than traditional, sedentary ones - may seem "pretty obvious," conceded Lanningham-Foster.
"We entered into the study assuming that the kids would burn more energy, more calories," she said. "We just didn't know to what extent. No one has really asked that question before."
The study, published in the latest issue of the medical journal Pediatrics, found when the children played a sedentary game they burned the same amount of calories as they would while sitting and watching TV.
The activity-required games - "Nicktoon's Movin"' for PlayStation 2 featuring SpongeBob and "Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2" for Xbox - saw the children expend more than twice that amount of energy. Some who played the dancing game almost tripled their calorie burn.
Although the research is based on titles that have been on the market for some time, last November's release of Nintendo's Wii system, which has a motion-sensing controller specifically for activity-required games, bodes well for young gamers, said Lanningham-Foster.
"I'm glad to see that there's more of these types of games on the market," she said.
Toronto-based advocacy group Active Healthy Kids Canada also welcomes the rise of energy-expending gaming, but warns that parents shouldn't view it as a replacement for old-fashioned exercise.
"When you think about video games, they're developing virtual skills but not real skills - touching a virtual ball is not the same thing as catching a real ball," said Jennifer Cowie Bonne, the group's director of development.
"You need those types of (real life) fundamental skills to build a foundation for a lifelong involvement in other types of physical activity."
Encouraging kids to be active for the sake of being active is a responsibility that falls squarely on the shoulders of parents, added Cowie Bonne.
"If you simply use this (activity-required gaming) the same way that some people have used the television, as a babysitter for their kids and maybe a better one because they're doing something rather than just sitting there, I think it's missing the mark," she said.
