Playing Exergames for Health and Enjoyment: Do Gamers Need Exercise Affordance and Game Challenge? (Preprint)

Abstract

Exergame users can enjoy health benefits from exergaming, but the required effort (to do the exercises) may hinder users from continued use. Users’ continued use despite the effort required can be explained by the paradox of enjoyment, which explains how negative but meaningful experiences can increase enjoyment. However, the paradox of enjoyment has neither separated the negative from the meaningful experiences, nor examined the possibility that negative experiences can be either cognitive or physical, or both, indicating two research gaps.

Hence, our study addresses these gaps by investigating how to design exergames to escalate users’ exergame enjoyment and their continuance.

We asked 583 participants to play exergames for 30 consecutive minutes, and collected their physical indices and psychological responses.

We found: (1) meaningful experience enablement (i.e., the exercise affordance of exergames) had the largest positive contribution to enjoyment, followed by cognitive effort (i.e., exergame challenge); (2) both meaningful experience and cognitive effort can fuel enjoyment and therefore result in continued use of exergames; and (3) physical effort (i.e., exergame similarity with exercise) may not alter the level of enjoyment.

Our study extends the paradox of enjoyment to explain more system-related enjoyment. Our findings inform exergame providers that they can increase exergame challenges and the exercise affordance of exergames, rather than increasing exergame similarity with exercise.