It's like riding a bicycle, through the sky.
"Look! Dancy Pants Revolution! The game that tricks people into exercising!"
— Dipper Pines, Gravity Falls, "The Inconveniencing"
Simply put, a video game that encourages the player to actually exercise.
The goal isn't usually to complete the game so much as to get in shape.
Although the idea became successful with the Wii and its Wii Fit, it's been around longer than that. See this article
from The Other Wiki.
Compare Casual Video Game, Sports Game, Rhythm Game, Edutainment Game.
Examples:
- Adidas MiCoach has real athletes train you to achieve weight loss and strength goals to help better perform their respective sports whether it be running, soccer or basketball.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0.0 update includes daily stretches that can be performed with the Switch's Joy Con controllers.
- Beat Saber brings the genre into Virtual Reality, especially with the song "Fitbeat" which was allegedly designed for this trope.
- Burn Your Fat With Me, and it's spinoff, Burn Your Fat With Me For Girls, involves a pretty girl and pretty boy, respectively, acting as a training partner to count your reps for various exercises.
- Dance Aerobics for the NES is the Ur-Example. It made use of the Power Pad.
- Dance Central comes across as doing the moves of your music of choice with characters, but they provide quite the workout and include an exercise mode to gauge how many calories you burn.
- Although mostly incidental, DanceDanceRevolution is considered to give a very good workout. Some editions even have a calorie counter.
- Likewise, so does Pump It Up / Pump It Up Pro, In the Groove, and even StepMania if a dance mat is on hand.
- Some of the earlier Digimon Virtual Pet toys downplay this, as while they have an internal pedometer its main purpose is to progress the game for enemy encounters, and to charge up your Digimon's power in battles by physically shaking the device vigorously. The Virtual Pet line's revival nearly a decade later in 2021 comes in the form of the Vital Bracelet, which is essentially a fitness tracker watch that actually raises Digimon through heart pulses and the amount of footsteps produced from walking or exercising.
- EA Sports Active: A series of simple aerobic and strengthening games to motivate you to train.
- EyeToy: Kinetic were a series of Nike inspired gym games and Kinetic Combat taught Wu Shu kung fu, fairly standard when compared to the likes of Jillian Michaels but fondly remembered for their music.
- Fitness Boxing: The player will punch and weave to the rhythm of the workout routine. It is a combination exergame and rhythm game.
- Get Fit With Mel B. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Gold's Gym Cardio Workout and Gold's Gym Dance Workout
- Ingress is a GPS-based game in which you visit real-world locations to access portals. The intent is for players to walk to the portals, as the personal stats screen shows the amount of distance you have walked while playing, although some players play in a vehicle (preferably as a passenger, as driving and playing Ingress at the same time can be dangerous).
- Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum is kind of a Tomb Raider trainer where you follow Jillian done up like Lara Croft running through jungles, caves and...ah, tombs, doing some of the same moves from the game.
- Just Dance 2, 3, and 4 has a mode for this.
- Kinect Adventures! takes the player out into the open for a series of action sports in the outdoors.
- Kinect Sports is the XBOX version of Wii Sports below with simplified versions of soccer, golf, boxing, ect and the various sports being available as stand alone games on Live.
- Leela was designed by body-medicine doctor Deepak Chopra and has a focus on meditation.
- Michael Phelps Push The Limit has Olympian Michael Phelps as your trainer, where he gets you to, well, push the limit.
- Motionsports and Motionsports: Adrenaline are semi realistic takes on sports, some of them extreme like slalom skiing, mountain climbing and white water rafting.
- Nike + Kinect Training is a very hardcore trainer not unlike the Wii Fit below, except without the cutesy graphics.
- Any Nintendo 3DS game that allows you to exchange Play Coins for rewards has elements of this, since the only way to earn Play Coins is to go for a walk while carrying your system in sleep mode. You can shake the system to trick it into counting steps, but it's generally less stressful and tedious to just walk around your neighborhood, a park, or a shopping mall (assuming you live someplace safe, of course). However, the fact that you can't earn more than 10 coins a day (which is an equivalent of 1000 steps) downplays the exergaming element quite a bit, considering making 1000 steps a day isn't that much of an exercise.
- Personal Trainer: Walking (although less about direct exercise than getting in a walking rhythm).
- Pikmin Bloom encourages players to decorate the in-game map with flowers by walking in the real world. Pikmin themselves are also grown by the number of steps taken.
- Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver come with the Pokéwalker, a device that can hold a Pokémon and rewards you with experience points equal to the amount of steps you take. You can also catch wild Pokémon and find items after taking enough steps.
- Pokémon GO is built off of the same platform as Ingress, even sharing locations with in-game points of interest. In particular, hatching eggs involves walking anywhere from 2 to 10 kilometers (and it won't work if you're moving at vehicle speed).
- Prop Cycle, a 1996 arcade game from Namco has you riding a flying bicycle to pop balloons and ultimately save a village in the sky.
- Punch-Out!!: While the Arcade, NES, and SNES versions have you simply pressing buttons figuring out how to defeat your opponents, the Wii version with its quick-moving motion controls is sure to exhaust most non-athletic players.
- Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch is Nintendo's Spiritual Successor to Wii Fit, relying on a ring device and leg strap the Joy-Cons attach to instead of a Balance Board.
- Self Defense Training Camp goes in a slightly different direction in trying to teach self protection moves (as in, not using the killing blows of the SAS,) with the idea being that you go through them slowly to train then use them at full force should the need arise.
- Sports Champions is another collection of sports games, but based off of more obscure sports.
- The Biggest Loser has a Licensed Game, of course, about this.
- The Simpsons: Lisa buys a Funtendo Zii for the old folks' home so that they can get some exercise.
- The Thrill Of The Fight is a Virtual Reality boxing game made with emphasis on Reality. It has little to no limitations regarding what you can do and when you can do it, no energy meter, no Stamina, and no Puzzle Bosses with invincibility states, your only concern is not receiving punches while you are dishing 'em out. So you could, in theory, overwhelm your opponents with an endless flurry of punches for an "easy" win. The only thing stopping you would be your real life stamina.
- UFC Personal Trainer has the ring girls train and motivate you on the speed bag, heavy bag, and tire lift, or you can pull aside one of the actual UFC fighters to spar with.
- Virtua Tennis allows the use of Kinect to move about the court like Pat Cash or Anna Kornikova. You will need to.
- WarioWare: Smooth Moves has a rather tenuous workout mode where you burn "kelories".
- We Cheer has a workout mode.
- Wii Fit, the Trope Codifier, offers many activities to burn calories, such as yoga, strength training, aerobics, and more.
- Wii Sports and the sequel Wii Sports Resort serve to demonstrate the capabilities of motion controls, ending up the biggest sellers on the system. And they do so by applying motion controls to the concept of practicing sports.
- Yo-kai Watch World is an equivalent to Pokémon Go and features similar mechanics that involve exercise to befriend yo-kai.
- Yourself!Fitness for the Xbox, PS2 and PC platforms. Ubisoft later bought it to release on the Wii as My Fitness Coach, which received its own sequel by a different team.
- Ubisoft's Your Shape for the Wii and its sequel, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved for Kinect.
- Zombies, Run! and from the same creators, The Walk
- Zumba and its sequels are based on the idea of dancing to salsa and reggae music to help lose weight and build fitness.
