Well, of course they are. I can’t actually believe that they did a study on this, is anyone else looking confused and saying “well..duh?”
Any parent who has played Dance Dance Revolution knows that this game kicks your cardiovascular butt. That is, of course, if you don’t lose your balance and tumble on the floor in an embarrassing heap while trying to do dance moves that you never really ever had the skills for in the first place. You just thought you did.
But honestly, even I have thought about how our Wii games that require standing and movement are so much better than a sedentary game where you click little buttons on a remote. Did they really need to spend tax dollars in a study?
“If kids play them as designed and stay engaged, they can burn several calories per hour above their sedentary level. We view any increase in energy expenditure (calories burned) as a good thing, especially in our overly-sedentary society,” project director Dr. Kevin Short explained.
Well, here’s me scratching my head and wondering why a Doctor had to explain that to us. Didn’t we know that if you move, you burn more calories than if you don’t?
I am just a little befuddled, I actually found a bunch of news sites reporting this, which seems like common sense, not newsworthy. If your kids are going to play games, then active is better. That’s the main reason we bought our Wii, because not only can our whole family of 4 play together and have fun as a family (like one big board game on TV) but most games we buy for our console we have to stand, move around, or dance. Sometimes embarrassingly so.
It is annoying, however, to see the headlines declaring ” Let your kids play video games, they are burning calories”. That doesn’t mean that we should stop limiting the time, or that all of a sudden video games are “good” for our kids, it just means that we can feel slightly less guilty when we let them indulge in the more active games.