Virtual competition: video games, children and sport
Issue: Volume 28 Number 1
Kids are getting fatter and lazier. Why? They spend too much time in front of the television, playing video games. Solution? Turn off the television and send them outside to play.
It is a message drummed home to parents by doctors, politicians and sensational newspaper headlines. Easier said than done, parents might reply.
With good reason. An Australian Bureau of Statistics (2003) survey found that 81.8 per cent of children aged 5–14 years play video games for an average of eight hours over a school fortnight. Revenue from sales of video games in Australia is set to overtake box office sales in just two years’ time (Connors 2004). In short, however well meaning the message, video games are here to stay.
The prospect may alarm sports coaches, who effectively compete with video games for the time and attention of young Australians. So they will be relieved to know that the case against video games is not as closed as the newspaper headlines suggest.
There is surprisingly little research on the impact of sports simulations and other video games on sports participation. Researchers have so far focused on their influence on children’s weight and activity levels.
A 2004 United States study concluded that video-game use was related to children’s weight status (Vandewater, Shim and Caplovitz 2004). The locally publicised study found no similar link to television use, prompting The Advertiser newspaper to headline: ‘Video games not TV obesity trap’ (Anderson 2004). However, a local study published one year earlier drew the opposite conclusion from its survey sample (Wake, Hesketh and Waters 2003).
Recent research also undermines the assumption that physical activity and sedentary behaviour, including playing video games, share an inverse and causal relationship. For example, a 2002 cross-national study involving British and American children found that highly active boys were also heavy users of technology based entertainment while sedentary (Marshall, Biddle, Salis et al. 2002).
The idea that sport can be successfully combined with a range of other leisure pursuits gets further support in a report prepared in 2004 for the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) by the University of South Australia (ASC 2004 ). Based on responses from 4661 South Australian children aged 9–15 years, the report concluded that about one-third of boys fall into an activity cluster labelled ‘sporties’ or ‘techno-actives’. These boys combined high levels of sports participation with above-average levels of screen time (that is, television, video games, cinema and texting).
While these findings suggest that video games may not be the thieves of children’s time that coaches fear, among less active boys and girls they remain the overwhelming competitor for physical activity. The ASC report found that every extra hour of sport in the so-called ‘critical window’ for sports participation of between 3.30pm and 6.30pm on school days, led to a 32-minute reduction in screen time in boys, and a 24-minute reduction in girls.
These conflicting research findings reinforce that the key factor in the relationship between screen-based leisure activities and obesity is the frequency and duration of screen-based activities and whether the children are also participating in daily physical activity, that is, whether there is a balance between physical and sedentary activities.
This competition for children’s time raises another important issue for coaches. Given that most children, including active ones, will devote some of their ‘critical window’ to video games, do any of the skills developed in the course of using game controllers transfer to the real sporting field?
Around 10 per cent of video games sold in Australia are sports simulations. The best of these simulations, according to Brendan Geraghty, director of marketing in Australia for Electronic Arts (EA), a leading games producer, benefit from input from coaches and other sports practitioners. This input, combined with the visual improvement of games in recent years, has led to startling realism of the latest simulations on the market.
From a coaching viewpoint, realistic game play should help build awareness of the formal rules of individual sports at an earlier age. But it may also lead children who can’t replicate their virtual prowess in the real world to retreat permanently to the sofa. As EA’s Geraghty concedes: ‘For the amount of time I have spent on EA Sports Tiger Woods 2005, I can assure you that my golf game has not improved considerably!’
In fact, the golfing skill of putting is one of the few sporting skills to be shown to successfully transfer from screen to green. Significantly, a 2001 French study showed the transfer was greatest when the video game was played with the intention of improving the actual skill rather than for simple enjoyment (Fery and Ponserre 2001).
Commercial games producers are discovering that there is a market for video games that combine children’s fascination with electronic technologies with the enjoyment they get from being physically active with friends. Radica Games has released a series of sports games that use physical movement to control the action on the screen. The United States company’s SSX snowboarding simulation, for example, comes with a sturdy plastic board that users use to tap and transfer their weight on in order to perform tricks and change the direction of their virtual self.
The ASC report recognises that societal changes make it unrealistic to believe that screen-based activities can be removed totally from the daily lives of children.
Coaches of today need to be thinking about how to engage children in fun, safe and quality activities that are an attractive alternative to screen-based environments. At the same time, coaches need to acknowledge that such activities will never absolutely replace video games for today’s increasingly ‘tech-savvy’ youth.
Editor’s note
Healthy Weight 2008 (report of the National Obesity Taskforce [author: full bibliographic details required]) reports that excessive time spent with sedentary, screen-based activities can affect the health and wellbeing of Australian children.
Acknowledging that screen-based activities occupy a significant proportion of most children’s leisure time, health ministers across Australia have endorsed two recommendations in relation to physical activity levels of children aged 5–12 years; that they:
- participate in a minimum of one hour of moderate to vigorous-intensity physical activity per day
- spend no more than two hours at any time in a sedentary position in front of a screen (computer, television, gameboy, etc.).
References
Healthy Weight 2008 (report of the National Obesity Taskforce
Anderson, L 2004, ‘Challenge to popular perception on children’s health: Video games not TV obesity trap’, The Advertiser, 25 March.
Australian Bureau of Statistics 2003, Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities, ABS, Australia.
Australian Sports Commission 2004.
Connors, E 2004, ‘Now video games may kill the movie star’, Australian Financial Review, 13 November.
Fery, Y and Ponserre, S 2001, ‘Enhancing the control of force in putting by video game training’, Ergonomics, 44(12):1025–37.
Marshall, SJ, Biddle, SJH, Sallis, JF, McKenzie, TL and Conway, TL 2002, ‘Clustering of sedentary behaviors and physical activity among youth: a cross-national study’, Pediatric Exercise Science, 14(4):401–17.
Vandewater, EA, Shim, MS and Caplovitz, AG 2004, ‘Linking obesity and activity level with children’s television and video game use’, Journal of Adolescence, 27(1):71–85.
Wake, M, Hesketh, K and Waters, E 2003, ‘Television, computer use and body mass index in Australian primary school children’, Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 39(2):130–4.
