Another main feature of Pergames and ACE conference is what I would like to call “participatory fitness”, that is technology-mediated sociable situations to exercise together.
The recent proliferation of “sociable fitness tools” is perhaps unrelated to the mild success of EyetoyTM: Kinetic, pseudo-game to exercise with your Playstation, and maybe is rather dependent from the latest fashion of motion detection devices.
Anyway, Pergames features a number of “networked exertion games”, like “Breakout for two”, cross between soccer and the computer game “Breakout”. Both players kick a ball against a physical wall, where is projected a lifesize videoconference image enabling the players to interact with each other (why should people play soccer indoors instead of simply meeting outside, I don’t get) - “Airhockey over a distance” repeats the same concept, of two players separated each with an airhockey table, and “PushN’Pull”, in which two remote players are basically pulling the same exercise bar in opposite directions (the two exercise bars remotely communicate data about strength and direction); “Table Tennis for Three” enhances the concept involving remote players, while “Jogging over a distance” offers social joggers a “jogging together experience” although geographically apart, via headphones and devices to track the joggers’ speed. “Fitness Adventure”, from another research group, tries and combine location based games with fitness, enhancing sociability and the opportunity for face to face interaction.

The common tract of this new generation training projects compared to the Playstation is SOCIABILITY; the main goal is to do something (in this case fitness) and do it together.
Some try to connect persons living in different places, as the web does, others try and organize LOCAL GROUPS, in the style of web 2.0, a virtual stratagem to create connections in real life.

As usual, new technologies supply to insufficiencies in (western) society to provide aggregation sites and motives - when will all these “sociable systems” be noticed by State organs, like for instance social security, and be employed for public use?
The social potential of pervasive, locative and mixed reality games is huge, I want to read more from the Convergence Consortium at MIT and see if Jenkins and the group actually talk about a “participatory revolution”, although the word “revolution” is not so hot anymore.

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