Blending Immersive Gameplay with Intense Exercise Using Asynchronous Exergaming

Exergames are video games that encourage players to do physical exercises (e.g. yoga, aerobics). While exergames provide some motivational and fitness benefits, they are limited by shallow gameplay and low-intensity exercise. This occurs because, in most existing exergames (e.g. Wii Fit), the user plays the game and exercises simultaneously. By developing exergames where gameplay and exercise occur at separate times, we can motivate high-intensity exercise with high-immersion gameplay. We therefore developed such an asynchronous exergaming by modifying the popular game Skyrim to use exercise data from the fitness tracking website Exercise.com. This paper describes the design and implementation of the Skyrim exergaming mod.