# The Videoification of Games > [!abstract] What this note is > An argument: **video games, even with machines strapped to the body, cannot replace physical sport.** They can train for it, rehearse it, and broadcast it. They cannot be it, because the part of the brain that keeps a body upright refuses to be talked out of its job. Sources checked 24 September 2026; where the research is thin or contested, this note says so. A companion to [[Hypermedia and the Line]], which makes the same shape of argument about text. ## The claim that is being made Videoification runs in both directions. Sport has been turning into video for a generation: refereed by replay, coached from telemetry, and in motor racing, rehearsed on simulators so faithful that a Formula 1 team's driver-in-the-loop rig is part of the car's development [1]. Meanwhile games have been asking to be counted as sport. The International Olympic Committee ran an Olympic Esports Week in Singapore in June 2023, announced Olympic Esports Games for Riyadh in 2025, moved them to 2027, and in October 2025 ended the partnership that was to host them; as of September 2026 the Games have no host and no date [2]. Put the two trends together and you get the strong claim: that the screen is where sport is going, and that with enough machine assistance — a headset, a harness, a treadmill, resistance you can feel — the body can come along or be left behind. This note is about why the body has opinions. ## Why the body objects The oldest and still dominant account of motion sickness is **sensory rearrangement**, from Reason and Brand in 1975: sickness follows when the motion reported by the eyes, the inner ear and the body's own position sense disagree with one another *and with what experience has taught the brain to expect* [3]. A rival account, Riccio and Stoffregen's postural instability theory of 1991, says the trigger is not the mismatch itself but the loss of a working strategy for staying upright [4]. The two theories argue about mechanism. They agree on the symptom, and on the fact that virtual motion produces it. In a headset the eyes report motion and the inner ear reports none. The research literature calls the resulting sense of self-movement **vection**, and visually induced motion sickness is its cost [5]. The numbers are not small. A 2020 systematic review of 55 studies and 3,016 participants found a mean dropout rate of **15.6%** from VR sickness, and the highest symptom scores of any content type for **gaming**, with its constant virtual movement [6]. Modern headsets are better than the early ones, and a 2021 review still found sensory mismatch and perceived motion the leading cause [7]. Machine assistance does not obviously help. The one published trial of a body-suspension "flying" rig, at the German Sport University Cologne, saw 8 of 33 young men stop within two five-minute flights for nausea, with heart rates that never exceeded 110 [8]. A 2023 study found that an omnidirectional treadmill made first-time headset users *more* sick than a plain one [9]. No study could be found on resistance- or weight-assisted VR and sickness at all. Jeff, whose site this is, put it this way on 24 September 2026, after trying a weight-assisted rig: *"it's disorienting, perhaps rightly so, the motion part of my brain fights it."* **"Perhaps rightly so" is the whole argument.** Under the mismatch theory, sickness is not a malfunction. It is the balance system reporting that the world is not behaving the way a lifetime of standing up has taught it to expect, and declining to trust the newer, flatter source. A vestibular system that let a screen overrule it would be a dangerous one to own. > [!warning] What this argument must not claim > The evidence cuts against several tidy versions of it. **Games can deliver real exercise.** Active video games raise heart rate and oxygen use to light-to-moderate intensity in a 2011 meta-analysis [10], and calorimetry on VR titles has measured vigorous intensity — one boxing game at 9.3 METs [11], a rhythm-fitness app at vigorous in both its modes [12]. **Older adults are less cybersick, not more**, across the head-mounted literature [6][13]. **The sex difference is modest** and much of it traces to headsets that fit women's eyes badly [14]. **People habituate**: three days in one game reduced sickness in a different game on the fourth [15]. And the widely repeated headset-abandonment statistics could not be traced to any study, so this note uses none of them. ## The counter-evidence, stated fairly The strongest case against this argument is **transfer**: the virtual training for the real, and working. Jann Mardenborough won Nissan's GT Academy in 2011 from more than 90,000 entrants with no racing background, and by 2013 finished third in class at Le Mans; he drove Super Formula in 2017 and was still racing professionally in 2025 [16]. In 2017 a controlled trial gave high-school batters six weeks of adaptive virtual-reality practice; they improved on every measure, out-hit the control group the following season, and eight of twenty went on to play at a higher level, against one of twenty in the control group [17]. Surgical residents trained to criterion on a laparoscopy simulator were 29% faster in a real operation and made a sixth as many errors [18]. A 2025 Cochrane review of 190 trials found virtual reality slightly better than conventional therapy for arm function after stroke, and probably helpful when added to usual care [19]. Two details in that record matter for this essay. In the batting study, the *non-adaptive* virtual practice did no better than nothing; the gain came from adaptive scheduling, not from being virtual [17]. And a 1992 meta-analysis of flight-simulator training found that adding motion cueing to the simulator added little to the transfer [20]. The mind learns the task without the body being fooled. **Every one of these successes ends with a body in the world**: on a track, at a plate, in an operating room, on a ward learning to walk. The screen was the rehearsal. It was never the performance. The exertion case is also weaker than the marketing. The much-quoted claim that competitive gamers reach the heart rates and cortisol of racing drivers comes from a 2016 conference talk and press interviews, not a peer-reviewed study [21]. Peer-reviewed measurements find amateur players burning about two kilocalories a minute with heart rate falling during play [22], and elite players showing meaningful but modest cardiovascular strain and an inconsistent cortisol response [23][24]. The German Olympic Sports Confederation looked at all this in 2018 and concluded that competitive gaming, as a whole, did not meet its criteria for sport, while allowing that virtual versions of existing sports might sit inside their federations [25]. And yet exertion is not what makes something a sport. The IOC recognised chess in 1999 [26]. The line between game and sport was never drawn at the heart rate. ## What sport does that a screen cannot Beyond the measurements, three plain reasons. These are argument, not findings. **Load.** The World Health Organization's guidance is not only 150 to 300 minutes of moderate movement a week but muscle-strengthening on two or more days [27]. Bone and muscle respond to force. The rigs that add force to virtual play are the ones the research finds sickening, and the games that avoid sickness do so by asking the body to move less. **Ground.** Sport happens on a surface that pushes back, in weather, against gravity that does not pause. The balance system was built for that and is calibrated by it daily. That is the system the headset asks to switch off. **Other bodies, and consequence.** A tackle, a handshake, a fall. The reason sport teaches anything is that its outcomes are real at the moment they happen. A game's outcomes are real too, but they are real to the score, not to the knee. ## The split The same split as [[Hypermedia and the Line]]. As **infrastructure** — for rehearsal, for coaching, for broadcasting, for rehabilitation, for getting a shy beginner moving in a living room — the screen has won, and deserves to. As a **replacement** for physical sport it loses, and it loses on the body's terms, not the critic's. Videoification turns out to run one way: sport absorbs video and gets better at being sport. Video does not absorb sport. It absorbs the picture of it. Jeff again, the same day, reaching for a word and not quite finding it: *"The world is both a playground and a... well, not safe place."* That is what sport is for. It is how a body practices being in an unsafe world, at a dose it chose. The disorientation in the headset is not the technology failing. It is the older system refusing to hand over the keys. ## Sources 1. [How does F1 simulation work? — Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team](https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/news/how-does-f1-simulation-work) — primary 2. [IOC statement on the Olympic Esports Games, 30 Oct 2025](https://www.olympics.com/ioc/news/ioc-statement-on-the-olympic-esports-games) · [Olympic Esports Week 2023](https://www.olympics.com/en/esports/olympic-esports-week/) · [Games moved to 2027, 11 Feb 2025](https://www.olympics.com/ioc/news/inaugural-olympic-esports-games-to-be-held-in-riyadh-in-2027-road-to-the-games-to-start-this-year) — primary; the 2026 status is from trade reporting 3. Reason, J. T. & Brand, J. J., *Motion Sickness*, Academic Press, 1975 · [Reason, "Motion sickness adaptation: a neural mismatch model," *J R Soc Med* 71, 1978](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014107687807101109) — primary 4. [Riccio & Stoffregen, "An ecological theory of motion sickness and postural instability," *Ecological Psychology* 3(3), 1991](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326969eco0303_2) — primary 5. [Keshavarz, Riecke, Hettinger & Campos, "Vection and visually induced motion sickness: how are they related?" *Frontiers in Psychology* 6, 2015](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00472/full) — primary 6. [Saredakis et al., "Factors associated with virtual reality sickness in head-mounted displays: a systematic review and meta-analysis," *Frontiers in Human Neuroscience* 14, 2020](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00096/full) — primary 7. Caserman et al., "Cybersickness in current-generation virtual reality head-mounted displays: systematic review and outlook," *Virtual Reality*, 2021, doi 10.1007/s10055-021-00513-6 — primary 8. [Flying fitness: ICAROS study — German Sport University Cologne, via EurekAlert, 7 Oct 2019](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/817869) — reputable secondary (a university release) 9. Bashir, De Regt & Jones, *International Journal of Human-Computer Studies*, 2023, doi 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103101 — primary; effect sizes not confirmed 10. [Peng, Lin & Crouse, "Is playing exergames really exercising? A meta-analysis," *Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking* 14(11), 2011](https://doi.org/10.1089/CYBER.2010.0578) — primary 11. Gomez, Bagley, Bolter, Kern & Lee, "Metabolic cost and exercise intensity during active virtual reality gaming," *Games for Health Journal* 7(5), 2018, doi 10.1089/g4h.2018.0012 — primary 12. [Energy expenditure during a VR fitness app — *JMIR Serious Games*, 2024](https://games.jmir.org/2024/1/e53999/) — primary 13. [Keshavarz, Andrievskaia & Berti, *Journal of Vestibular Research*, 2025](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13216572/) — primary 14. Stanney, Fidopiastis & Foster, "Virtual Reality Is Sexist: But It Does Not Have to Be," *Frontiers in Robotics and AI*, 2020, doi 10.3389/frobt.2020.00004 — primary 15. Kelly, Doty, Dorneich & Gilbert, *IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics* 32(4), 2026, doi 10.1109/TVCG.2026.3659810 — primary 16. [Jann Mardenborough — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jann_Mardenborough) · [GT Academy — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT_Academy) — reputable secondary 17. [Gray, "Transfer of training from virtual to real baseball batting," *Frontiers in Psychology* 8, 2017](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02183/full) — primary 18. [Seymour et al., "Virtual reality training improves operating room performance," *Annals of Surgery* 236(4), 2002](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12368674/) — primary 19. [Laver et al., "Virtual reality for stroke rehabilitation," *Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews*, 2025](https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD008349.pub5) — primary 20. [Hays, Jacobs, Prince & Salas, "Flight simulator training effectiveness: a meta-analysis," *Military Psychology* 4(2), 1992](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327876mp0402_1) — primary 21. [Science shows that esports professionals are real athletes — German Sport University Cologne](https://www.dshs-koeln.de/english/news/news-details/meldung/science-shows-that-esports-professionals-are-real-athletes/) — a press release; the figures trace to a 2016 conference talk 22. Zimmer et al., *Frontiers in Sports and Active Living*, 2022 — primary 23. Ketelhut & Nigg, *Frontiers in Sports and Active Living*, 2024 — primary 24. Schmidt et al., *BioMed Research International*, 2020, doi 10.1155/2020/9651245 — primary 25. [DOSB position on eSport, 16 Sept 2019](https://cdn.dosb.de/user_upload/www.dosb.de/uber_uns/UEber_uns/eSport/Stellungnahme-zum-eSport.pdf) — primary; the 2018 vote via [GamesWirtschaft](https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/sport/dosb-mitgliederversammlung-2018-esport/) 26. [IOC recognition of FIDE, 15 June 1999 — FIDE Museum](https://museum.fide.com/exhibits/certificate-of-recognition-of-fide-by-ioc) — primary 27. [WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour, 2020](https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/faa83413-d89e-4be9-bb01-b24671aef7ca/content) — primary ## Related - [[Hypermedia and the Line]] — the same argument about text: won as infrastructure, lost as replacement - [[When You Need a Human]] — the body in the room, from the other side --- *Drafted with AI assistance from single-pass research; sources were cited by the tool and not opened by a person. Errors: see [[Corrections]].*