Well, I feel that gaming - even hardcore, statporn heavy dungeon trawlers - could always benefit from some physical aspects.
I'm afraid I don't share your point of view here, as some games are simply designed around comfort, when I'm playing a game heavily focused on stats and role-playing I'd prefer to do it lounging on my leather sofa staring at my 40 inch Samsung TV than I would through the Oculus Rift whilst running a on a treadmill. I'll admit that the prospect of having games becoming healthy for you is certainly an enticing one, but it is not something that can currently be done in a way that would satisfy the majority of the world's gamers, at least to the extent of them swapping out the couch-potato mentality for a more acrobatic experience.
The older I get, the more guilty I feel for playing games - i spend my working hours in front of a computer; i need excercise.
Though that might be the case, there's nothing that prevents you from going outside for a run, buying a treadmill if you'd rather stay indoors or getting a gym membership if you're worried about your health, we're not yet in an age that playing games using the tools currently available to us that could help us be more active would be anymore beneficial than not really bothering with it at all. The issue here is not that games should become more interactive (at least in the sense that we'd need to use some form of motion control to play them), it's that you want games to be a babysitter of sorts, where you know that even if you're spending five hours a day playing Minecraft, you're still at the very least getting some exercise actually using your arms and legs rather than your fingers and thumbs.
There are ways around this, exercise and gaming may not currently merge together perfectly, but there are many other alternatives that'd leave you feeling quite fulfilled health-wise.
So, while it's all well and good to say that 'gaming is about comfort' - it's a position of stubbornness that irks the living f*ck out of me.
Aren't you in some sense being equally as stubborn though? Wanting gaming to take care of your health instead of organizing a timetable/structure that would generally make you feel better about yourself? In gaming the technology simply isn't there yet (well, at least not available to your average Joe) to make getting fit by playing videogames feasible, whereas there are numerous activities that you could easily partake in at anytime you so wish that would do you a thousand times more good than simply sitting their at your desk, scowling because you wish gaming was at a point where it could equal those activities in terms of the health benefits it'd provide you with.
I think this is a case of the Kettle calling the Pot black.
Imagine one day literally being able to run around in an arena and make the sort of physically demanding moves that we see our avatars do in games today. That sh*t is fascinating and I feel like dismissing it because the stepping stones along the way are cumbersome is more than a little sighted.
Us dismissing it won't make it go away, technology doesn't just cease to develop because we as consumers don't pay attention to it anymore, it'll change and evolve until it finally reaches the point that you describe, the issue being that what we have right now are just stepping stones. You think if the average person paid attention to every single stepping stone on the way to molecular fusion it would get us any closer to solving the energy crisis? No, it wouldn't because a stepping stone is just that, and if we don't shrug them off until they're at a standard where we're ready to become complaisant with them then there's no point in even bothering with the stepping stone analogy at all.
