Can Tech Finally Make Me Healthy?
James O’malley on the benefits of turning exercise into a video game
Back in January, like everyone else in Britain, my partner and I resolved to get fit and take exercise seriously. Again. The problem is that to actually do this, instead of just posting our good intentions on Facebook, we actually needed to put the effort in. This would mean spending hours every week grunting, stretching and sweating our way to better health, which is something that is particularly difficult when you glance at the weather outside and see ominous clouds on the horizon.
“Looks like it is about to rain, I guess I’ll go for a run tomorrow instead,” I would lie to myself. But then just as we were on the verge of giving up again, we discovered a brilliant new way to make exercise better: by turning it into a video-game.
Zwift is essentially a cycling game that you control by pedalling your real bike, mounted into a device called a turbo-trainer. This replaces the rear wheel and makes it stationary, like an exercise bike. As you pedal, the trainer sends signals back to your computer, tablet or Apple TV box, to control the character on screen. And smartly, the game sends back instructions to the trainer to apply different levels of resistance, so that as you’re cycling up a hill in the game, you can actually feel it on the bike.
So one small garage renovation later and after signing up for a £12/ month subscription, we had our TV, bike and all-important cooling fan ready to go.
Once you’re set up, you can participate in virtual cycle rides in 3D-recreations of real places, like London and New York, or in fantastical fictional locations invented by the game designers. And importantly, you’re not alone. As you cycle along The Mall towards Buckingham Palace, or pedal around the perimeter of Central Park, other real human cyclists appear alongside you, sharing the journey.
And the strange thing is, though it is obviously only a game, just seeing the character move is surprisingly motivating, even if in reality, you’re not trekking through the wilderness, and are actually just surrounded by old paint cans and your lawnmower.
I think the genius is that it has
used lots of the tricks of traditional video-games to keep pushing you that little bit further and harder: go a little faster, and you’ll be rewarded with a little achievement marker, and if you pedal harder, you might win a race against another real player. It’s essentially triggering the same sort of dopamine hits as reaching the next level or unlocking a new item in a regular video game, that grimly grinding along on a traditional exercise bike simply can’t match.
I’m not the only person who has noticed this—the rest of the tech industry has too. Today there are many other companies chasing the same audience, and they all offer their own unique twists on the formula. ■