Unless boulders have replaced condos as places of residence in the housing market, it is my belief that everyone is aware of the restrictions that have been placed on us due to Covid. Lock your doors! Batten down the hatches! Board up your windows! Order food on DoorDash! It gets exhausting, constantly having to hear what we shouldn’t do, and the repercussions of doing so. Granted, the restrictions have been lifted greatly, but with this new Covid Three: Tokyo drift, one could expect the government to put the nation in time out once more.

But that’s in the future, now’s the present! Now, public restrictions are as un-restricted as they can be, so we as a community should revel in it. Even some game companies agree, as there are a few games that encourage us to open the door and breathe that fresh, open air. The idea, of which, is the topic of this article: video games and mobile apps that require you to move in real life in order to progress in-game.

The first item on this list is a bit of an oldie, but deserves recognition nonetheless, Pokémon Go. Everyone who has touched a phone within the last 5 years may recognize his app that took the world by storm in 2016. The app, which is a collaborative effort between popular game company Nintendo and software developer company Niantic, allows you to catch and train Pokémon on your phone with the use of virtual reality. The catch? You must go out and find them. Just by walking out and about, you’ll find Pokémon, and using an AR (Augmented Reality) feature and your camera, you have the ability to catch these Pokémon! Though it has widely lost traction and popularity within the past few years, Pokémon Go still remains a fun way to play games and get your steps in at the same time.

The second item on this list is also a collaboration between Nintendo and Niantic: Pikmin Bloom. Taking much inspiration from Pokémon Go, except this time paying homage to Pikmin, another Nintendo series, this game encourages just one thing: walking. Walking does everything in this game, from finding fruits to blooming flowers, but the most crucial objective that can only be achieved by walking: finding tiny little plant creatures called Pikmin. These adorable radish-looking aliens are the name of the game, and once you aren’t outside walking, you can send Pikmin on expeditions you found while you were outside, a process that is fully automatic. However, the best part of this game is the message and the goal: to plant flowers all around the globe and make the world beautiful. By pressing just one button before going on a daily commute, you will be granted the ability to plant flowers behind you when you walk, and when others open the app, they’ll be able to see the beautiful flowers you planted!

The last game I want to cover isn’t a mobile game and actually requires you to pay for it. The game in question is Ring Fit Adventure, yet another video game created by Nintendo (they seem to do this a LOT). This one deviates from the other two in the fact that you do not need to go outside in order to play this. The main focus of the game is to do at-home exercises with video game controllers in order to defeat monsters, use items, and traverse the in-game world, the controller being the Nintendo Ring-con, like the Joy-con, but this time it’s a ring! The game goes into an in-depth explanation on how certain attacks work, squeezing the ring in certain positions targets certain muscle groups, i.e., the legs, arms, stomach, or chest, and each muscle group is identified by a different color in-game (Legs = orange, arms = blue, etc.). By the time you’ve reached the end goal and defeated the final boss, you’ll have a better understanding and better experience with at-home exercise!

Regardless of if you experience the world with screens or eyes, everyone has got to go outside at some point in the day. How lucky we are then to be in a world with all sorts of different animals, all kinds of different flowers, and miles upon miles of land to bask in. Massive props to the videogames that manage to get the majority of us gamers off the couch, that takes some real willpower. To sum up: videogames are awesome, but health and exercise should be a priority in everyone’s lives.