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Defining Exergames & Exergaming Yoonsin Oh Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Wisconsin-Madison Stephen Yang Department of Physical Education SUNY Cortland Abstract With growing interest in exergames research, various terms and definition have intro-duced to describe exergames. The authors reviewed current literature to understand the inconsis-tencies and gaps between fields. We found patterns between health-related researchers and non-health related researcher’s terms and definitions. Exergame was the most frequently used term, but the combination of exercise and videogames could cause confusion since the term exercise is limited to a particular condition. The authors propose to redefine exergames as a combination of exertion and video games including strength training, balance, and flexibility activities. Exer-gaming is playing exergames or any other video games to promote physical activity. Introduction Many researchers have recommended reducing sedentary activities, such as watching television and playing videogames, to prevent obesity among children and adolescents (Epstein et al., 1995; Robinson, 1999; Rosenberg, Bull, Marshall, Sallis, & Bauman, 2008). For example, Robinson’s (1999) physical activity intervention research showed that children who were asked to reduce sedentary behaviors lowered the percent of members overweight and their percent body fat more than another group with children who were asked to do more exercise and a final group who were asked to both reduce sedentary behaviors and increase exercise. Although the authors did not include behaviors like doing homework, reading for school or pleasure, and listening to mu-sic for target sedentary activities in their analysis, they considered playing video games a seden-tary activity. This ignores the many video games that require players to be physically active, such as the 1988 title World Class Track Meet (WCTM) for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Bogost, 2007). Playing WCTM requires players to move their feet similar to walking, running,

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or jumping on a power pad, a foot pad that has circles each with a sensor that recognizes the player’s movement, in order to play it (Bogost, 2007). Even though WCTM was released in 1988 (Bogost, 2007) and numerous similar games have been released since then, some recent re-searchers still consider playing video games a sedentary behavior (e.g. Rosenberg et al., 2008). The inconsistent use of terminology and definitions There are some researchers in the health-related fields that acknowledge that playing video games is not always sedentary and may indeed be a way to accumulate more physical activity. In simple terms, exergames are any number of types of video games / multimedia interactions that require the game player to physically move in order to play. Exergaming or exer-gaming (a portmanteau of "exercise" and "gaming") is a term used for video games that are also a form of exercise. (Wikipedia, 2010) Because this area of study is still in “its infancy” (Yang, Smith, & Graham, 2008), researchers have used various terms to describe these kinds of video game play (see Table 1) and as compo-nents of these descriptions (see Table 2). Out of 23 articles, 10 first authors chose “exergame”, which is the most frequent term in the literature (see Table 1). The other authors used the terms exertainment, dance simulation video game, interactive video game, activity promoting video game, active video game, physical gaming, (kin)aesthetic video game, and physical activity-change game. There is a pattern apparent after dividing the first authors by whether they are in health-related areas like kinesiology, nutrition science and medical science or not. We reviewed the articles based on where they were published and the authors’ affiliation to decide whether authors were health-related researchers or not. As you can see from Table 1, health-related researchers showed an inconsistent use in terminology compared to those who are not in health-related fields. Only two health-related re-searchers used the term exergame (Maddison, 2007; Yang, 2008). First-authors who are not in health-related areas all used the term exergame (Adams et al., 2009; Behrenshausen, 2007; Bo-gost, 2005; Bogost, 2007; Klein & Simmers, 2009; Sall & Grinter, 2007; Sinclair, Hingston, & Masek, 2007 ; Sinclair, Hingston, Masek, & Nosaka, 2009; Suhonen, Väätäjä, Virtanen, & Raisamo, 2008; Wylie & Coulton, 2008).