Jack Tigner

Professor Dave Leaton

Eng 190

1 October 2018

           A look into the effects of mobile games that encourage physical activity

    Everybody wants to be healthy. While some people take it more seriously than others, it is common knowledge that being healthy is better than not being healthy. However, we don’t always act on this knowledge, and as reported by Gabrielle Levy, a political reporter for US News, “Almost 4 in 10 American adults over the age of 20 – 39.6 percent – were considered obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase over the 33.7 percent who were obese in 2007 and 2008.” But if a popular activity that usually induces a sedentary lifestyle can actually do the opposite, then maybe this problem can go away.

    Pokemon Go is a mobile game that released on July 6, 2016. It is a mobile game that involves a gps and internet connection where the player walks around in real life to find virtual monsters in an Augmented Reality, or AR, format. This obviously encourages the player to walk around a lot, to find more and more monsters and complete objectives. There are also direct incentives to walk around. This is also the first Pokemon game of this nature to appear on something other than a Nintendo specific game console. One other major draw to the game is the social aspect of it. There are three different teams that players sign up to join when they reach a certain level. After they sign on, they are able to fight in gyms, where players put their best monsters to defend. One can fight the gyms of other teams, and put their own monsters in gyms that are controlled by their team of choice. Also, since monsters spawn in different locations of the map for only a limited amount of time, catching the rarest of the monsters can be aided if one has friends that are also on the hunt. Additionally, there is a trading system in the game, where one player can trade monsters with another player, using some resources and with some restrictions. Doing this, and giving gifts to each other, which you get by finding them throughout the world, will increase your friendship level with that other player. When certain milestones are hit in friendship level, there will be unique rewards, like requiring less resources to trade, and getting more chances to catch when successfully completing raids together. A raid is a limited time event taking place at gyms where up to twenty players work together to defeat a single, strong monster in battle. If successful, the players have some chances to catch the monster. The damage their team did to the monster compared to the other teams, plus the friendship bonus if applicable, determines how many chances the player gets to capture the monster. These factors, plus even more, led to “45 million daily users shortly after launch” (Turk).

    So, as no surprise to anyone, people were curious just how much this game actually increased the physical activity of players. So, Oriol Marquet, Claudia Alberico, and Aaron J. Hipp of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management and Center for Geospatial Analytics, North Carolina State University decided to do a study. They wanted to see just how much effect the game had, and they wanted to provide that information not only to the public, but to other researchers and other app developers. Eventually, in late December of 2017, they finalized and published the results.

    The study consisted of 74 US college students who were asked to fill out some pre and post tests regarding their physical activity. Additionally, they were asked to install two apps on their phone, an Ecological Momentary Assessment, or EMA, and a step counter to further help the collection and support the accuracy of the data that the researchers would use to analyze the effects of Pokemon Go. The step counter would, obviously, count the steps of the user, so the researchers could compare the numbers with the other participants. The EMA would prompt a small questionnaire at 3 different times per day (12pm, 7pm, and 10pm), and the answers to these questions would help to determine the physical activity of the participant. The data showed that people who play Pokemon Go had:

higher PA when playing occurred during weekdays and during daytime and also among

those who played while being active (i.e., walking). During weekends, this association

was only found in the morning or late in the evening (after 7pm). Accumulating three or

more active playing episodes per day was associated with an increase of 1526 daily steps. (Marquet, Oriol, et al. 1)

    So, it appears then that this means that physical activity really is increased by playing, right? Wrong. This only mentions “Higher PA when playing” and nothing else. In fact, the results section of the report states that there is actually a non-significant effect on physical activity based on playing Pokemon Go. The only correlation that could be found was between actual playtime and the number of steps taken. This of course only applies to people who play the game. Even when the results were controlled by phone operating system, ethnicity, and gender, the playing still had no significant effect. dhs fhs fhddh dhf dhdfh dhfhd dhfhd dhfh dh

    This study has many implications. One of which is the continuation of the notion that video games promote a sedentary lifestyle. Even when the game must be played by walking around, the overall physical activity of the players is still lower than that of non-players. This is disheartening, because if there could be a way for video games to effectively improve the physical activity done by players, then it could have a serious impact on the health of not only Americans, but people around the globe. Additionally, there were a few limitations with the study had. Firstly, the study only had a sample size of 74 students, a relatively small group out of the approximately 45 million players in total. Secondly, it is possible that college students are a demographic that either generally has lower levels of physical activity, or maybe they aren’t the target demographic for the game.

So, when a video game forces people to go out in the real world, walk around hunting virtual monsters, and interact with other real people, does that lead to a higher level of physical activity? While this one study may have found an answer to that question, others may take the methods, the flaws, and the findings of it to create a better study and find a completely different answer to this question. Maybe if the game were to continue to release new content and more incentives to play more often and in new ways, it could revolutionize not only the mobile gaming market, but the health of people all around the world.

 

                    Works Cited

Levy, Gabrielle. “Sharp Increase in Obesity Rates, Over Last Decade, Federal Data Show.” US

News, 26 Mar. 2018.

Marquet, Oriol, et al. “Pokémon GO and Physical Activity among College Students. A Study

Using Ecological Momentary Assessment.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 81, 2018, pp. 215–222., doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.028.

Turk, Victoria. “One Year on, Who Still Plays Pokémon Go?” WIRED, WIRED UK, 6 July

2017, www.wired.co.uk/article/pokemon-go-first-anniversary-who-still-plays.