This special Ring Fit Adventure exercise mat will go on sale in Japan on 2nd July this year and is priced at ¥6,470 (around $57/£41), according to an Amazon listing. In Ring Fit Adventure, you team up with a magical pilates ring to track down and defeat an evil bodybuilding dragon named Dragaux, who is spreading a dark influence across the land.
Sam Peter Kirk is a PhD candidate and associate lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at Leeds Beckett University. This story originally featured onThe Conversation.
The social distancing measures and self-isolation initiated by the coronavirus pandemic has left people looking for new ways to exercise at home. Could active video games (AVGs) such as Pokemon Go and the recent hit Ring Fit Adventure be the answer?
AVGs are played by moving your whole body instead of just tapping buttons or a screen. They are marketed as a way for people to take part in physical activity through video games, and studies have shown that they can indeed be effective at increasing physical activity levels and helping people lose weight.
The most recent popular development is Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure game for its Switch console, which involves cardiovascular and muscle-strengthening exercises in an interval structure, on top of more traditional game storytelling and animation. The game sold more than two million copies in the three months after it was released in October 2019. But looking more widely at commercial statistics from the past 10 years, the number of successful AVG titles is sparse, with at most two titles in the annual top 100 global games—and more frequently zero.
So if AVGs really can benefit your fitness, why aren’t more people buying them? My recent research suggests that most of these games are simply not of a high enough quality and don’t provide enough of a workout to satisfy players. This suggests the industry needs to up its game if it wants to make AVGs a success.
To start, let’s look at the fitness data. The UK government advises that people should undertake at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, as well as at least two sessions of muscle-strengthening exercises. While we know that AVGs can increase physical activity levels slightly, they don’t provide a way to carry out sustained periods of moderate activity or any vigorous activity or muscle-strengthening activities.
The one exception is Ring Fit Adventure, which can offer these things, but even that is dependent on your current fitness level. Frequent gym goers are unlikely to find the game provides the challenge they need so it wouldn’t be much of a replacement while stuck in the house.
All this suggests that most of the current crop of AVGs don’t do enough to improve people’s physical fitness to make that a real selling point of the games.
The other issue is whether AVGs are simply enjoyable enough as games. Our attention and time are finite, even when we can’t leave the house, so AVGs are in direct competition with more traditional video games (as well as other hobbies).
This battle for attention ultimately boils down to a subjective decision about quality and enjoyability: What game do you like playing the most? But there are ways we can try to break down our view of different games into multiple categories to highlight why we might think a specific title is good or bad.
One method used by market research firm Quantic Foundry is the “Gamer Motivation Model,” which tries to show why people choose to play games.
As an enthusiastic gamer as well as professional game researcher, I can name several traditional games that outperform any AVG in each aspect of the model. For example, I can think of no AVG that offers more of an immersive experience with better storytelling and imaginative fantasy than games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn, SpiderMan, God of War, or Final Fantasy. Even smaller budget indie titles such as Child of Light, Ori, and Hollow Knight, still immerse me in a way that AVGs cannot yet achieve.
There are exceptions we can learn from. For example, Pokemon Go has an excellent social element that encourages people to play together. But overall, AVGs appear to have a significant lack of quality and variety.
Hardware also presents AVGs with a challenging issue in practical terms and the ability to cheat. While games companies have created some innovative technology to play AVGs with, you can still sit on the couch and bounce your knee to trick many of them into thinking you’re exercising. And that might be necessary if you don’t have the space to play them fully in the first place.
The challenge for the video game industry is to make AVGs as effective as sport, exercise, or other physical activity, but also so engaging, accessible, and varied that people choose to play them over traditional video games. If AVGs tick both these boxes, we might just have the future of exercise right in our front rooms or on our mobile devices. Without this, even an enforced period of quarantine is unlikely to make most people AVG enthusiasts.
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As everyone locks their doors and gets ready for an extended period of time in their homes social distancing and self quarantining, a common question is being posed on social media everywhere: what’s the best way to get a good workout in at home?
There are a lot of ways to avoid the gym and get an in-home workout in thanks to YouTube guides and videos of yoga and other body weight training, but one video game-aided workout will be unavailable unless you already own it. Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch is the best exercise video game ever made, and it’s abruptly sold out in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The game, which is an adventure title that makes you work out with a squeezable ring and a Switch JoyCon attached to your thigh, has you complete workout tasks to run through courses. It immediately caught the attention of the video game world by storm when it was released in late 2019. People were speedrunning it. Everybody wants it right now, because it’s something you can do at home during a time where we’re being told to stay home. But it’s become impossible to find right now for a good price.
As Polygon reported, Nintendo says the game is sold out everywhere. This game shortage is not just coronavirus panic-related, as it’s been close to impossible to find at a decent price for more than a month, with prices on Ebay ranging well over $100 and sometimes into the $200 range for a new or even used copy. But with people officially indoors for the time being, there’s simply no copies of the game anywhere to be found now. The Polygon story tells a sad tale of when they thought they had a copy only to have it dashed.
Nintendo confirmed the shortages in a statement to Polygon on Thursday, acknowledging that “the Ring Fit Adventure game is selling out at various retail locations in the Americas.” The company added, “We are working to provide more units as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
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I’ve been trying to buy Ring Fit Adventure myself for a month now, going back weeks before COVID-19 became a nationwide crisis in the U.S.; I just wanted it for personal fitness reasons. In mid-February, I thought I’d successfully placed an in-store pickup order at a Best Buy in the Bronx. But I was forced to cancel it shortly afterward when the electronics retailer notified me that the game wasn’t actually available at that store, or at any Best Buy within 250 miles of New York City. At the moment, no GameStop locations within 100 miles of the 10 most-populated U.S. cities — New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Houston; Phoenix; Philadelphia; San Antonio; San Diego; Dallas; and San Jose, California — have Ring Fit Adventure in stock, according to the retailer’s website.
To Nintendo’s credit, they warned fans that there was an expected delay on products with the COVID-19 outbreak worldwide. This is a serious issue and we can’t just demand that Nintendo meet our needs while they themselves deal with this outbreak home in Japan. Demand is high right now due to the climate, but it’s also a problem that consistently happens with Nintendo.
Ring Fit Adventure Xbox
When the Wii was at its peak it was impossible to find as well. The Nintendo Switch had similar early console release issues. The NES Mini was extremely difficult to get for its entire lifespan and the Super Nintendo Mini took months to become widely available. This is a consistent problem that Nintendo has had throughout the last decade. When a product has high demand they can’t seem to match it, let alone amid a shut-in rush.
Let’s give them benefit of the doubt here and assume they didn’t expect Ring Fit to sell the way it has. But it did sell well and the COVID-19 outbreak happens and all of a sudden everyone in the U.S. wants one as well as all the people in Japan, where it was already sold out. Now they have to mass produce new items in the middle of a health crisis. All of this could be absolutely true, but at the end of the day it’s a missed opportunity for a company that has a chance to benefit.
Ring Fit Adventure Gamestop Coupon
Ring Fit Adventure Game
Unfortunately this means anyone who wants a Nintendo-aided workout needs to hook up their Wii U or original Wii to get a quick tennis match or home run derby in to get a good sweat on while they’re stuck indoors. Still good options, but not the best one that was once on the market.
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