Harnessing the Health Powers of Gaming

conq writes "BusinessWeek.com has a piece on how some new videogames are being designed with health-related applications in mind. From the article: 'A stopwatch and a tub of frigid ice water are the standard tools medical researchers use to test pain tolerance. How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game called Free Dive. The researchers found that their subjects — 60 children, ranging in age from 5 to 12 — were able to keep an arm submerged for about 19 seconds on average. If, however, they simultaneously played Free Dive on a PC with their dry hand, the kids could tolerate an average of 86 seconds in the icy liquid — an increase of more than 400%.'" Juan Rey also writes to mention a report from financial news group Bloomberg, saying that Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Training' has done with DS.

Health benefits?

[nosredna]

It seems to me that subjecting yourself to dangerous or painful situations for longer periods of time is exactly the opposite of a health benefit.

Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.

This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.

This tolerance test is just silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a similar contest as a teenager in the Boy Scouts, we discovered that after a couple of practice runs...

We could keep our arms submerged until they died. The pain slowly climbed and then hit a plateau and then fell off as the receptors in the limb shut down.
So after a minute or two of having my arm underwater, we all decided that the contest had now become pointless. I waited to get some level of motor coordination back and went about my business.

What the hell kind of pansies do they do this research on?