Gamifying Fitness or Fitnessifying Games: a Comparative Study

Fitness- or exergames are ubiquitously available, but often lack the main ingredient of successfully gamified systems: fun. This can be attributed to the typical way of designing such games -- highly focusing on specific physical activities, thus, gamifying fitness. Instead, we propose a novel alternate approach to improve motivation for exergaming, which we call fitnessification: integrating physical exercise into very popular games that have been developed keeping fun in mind and frequently are played for long periods of time -- so-called AAA games. In order to evaluate this concept, we have conducted a comparative study examining voluntary participants' reactions to testing an ergometer controlled casual game as well as a modified AAA game. Results indicate strong tendencies of players preferring the newly introduced AAA approach over the casual fitness game.