WRUP - What Are You Playing?: Mario Kart Wii

Now I'm sure you're wondering... Mario Kart? How can anyone be active playing Mario Kart? That's what ordinary people may think but my friends and I are no ordinary people.

My friend Jay is a physical education major at Brockport and we started talking about what we were doing in classes and then I started telling him about technology and we intergrade it into our major. He loved the idea! So all my friends are home now and we all got together at a friends house to play Mario Kart Wii. (It's a little tradition we have) So I started talking to my friend Jay as we were playing and I asked him "Jay, what could we do to make this game more active?" Immediately the ideas started pouring in from not only Jay and myself but all my friends. We decided on rules and wrote them down a piece of paper... we all agreed to follow these rules and we began to play! I'm always Bowser because he's big and bulky and when push comes to shove, he does both!

So we can up with a way to incorporate physical activity while playing Mario Kart. The rules we came up with were very simple.

Mario Kart Movement Rules:

-Game must be played on 150cc circuit

-Before the race the player must be doing push ups. When the light turns green the player may stop, grab his controller and start the race.

-While the kart is moving the player must be running in place until the race is over.

-If you were flattened any time during your race you had to sit in the squat position against a wall until you returned to normal size.

-If you spun out, you had to do 180 jump turns until you returned to normal.

-If you lost you had to 30 jumping jacks.

-If your performed a special jump, you had to perform a special jump in the air as well.

-If you were hit with a green shell, red shell or blue shell you had burpees until you returned to normal.

-If you fell off the track on Rainbow road you had squats until you returned back on the track.

-All players must cool down with a 50cc two race minimum.

So as you can tell this got pretty intense! We were all dead tired after the games but some of my friends said that it was the best workout they had in a while. You don't Wii Fit or any of the new dance games to get a sweat going, all you need are rules for the game, a goal you want to achieve while playing and little imagination. We took a well deserved rest after with some ice cold water and went back to playing again. Needless to say my Sunday night was a blast!